Slashdot Mirror
FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation
coondoggie writes "Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu (an independent subsidiary of Boeing) and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction, and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft."
Only now they're not quite so goddamn funny.
Dog is my co-pilot.
UPS and FedEx and other air cargo type things I could see as a huge advantage.
Eventually refining the confidence and quality of the AI to the point where it could haul actual passengers. I'd bet that they mean time between failures of machines could out pace that of human error fairly quickly so it'd actually be safer.
Remember the Elevator had the same type of history. There was a time when an attendant was there to push the button for you as a way to reassure everyone that it was safe. Eventually people learned they could push the button on their own.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
This isn't the FAA building and deploying UAV's on any kind of scale. This is the FAA trying to figure out how to safely integrate UAV's into the national aerospace system (NAS). Personally, as a pilot, while I distrust the FAA to some extent, as the agency charged with ensuring safety of all operators in the NAS, they are the right agency to be performing this study.
When some other agency says they're going to start launching UAV's in the NAS, the FAA needs to have ammunition to enforce safety measures to ensure that the UAV's not pose an undue hazard to other aircraft and that the UAV operators respond accordingly to instructions from air traffic control.
Merde, il pleut encore!
Comment removed based on user account deletion