New Aircraft Is Pilot Optional

Zothecula writes "Although the use of unmanned aerial vehicles such as Global Hawk and Raven for military information gathering has increased sharply in the last decade due to the maturation and miniaturization of enabling technologies, conventional piloted aircraft can still be a better option depending on the mission at hand. Northrop Grumman has unveiled a new intelligence gathering aircraft called the Firebird that falls into the category of an Optionally Piloted Vehicle with its ability to be flown robotically or with a human pilot on board."

Comments

How about cargo UAVs?

[jcr]

Seems to me that there must be a market in Canada and Alaska for aerial supply where you can fly in weather that's too dangerous to risk a pilot.

-jcr

Re:How about cargo UAVs?

[man_of_mr_e]

Interesting, about 15 years ago I wrote a short story in which commercial airline pilots were "figureheads". Most had lost what pilot training they had from years of atrophy. The pilot was only there to reassure the passengers that someone could fly the thing if the computers failed, but because the systems were designed for computer control and reflexes, it was pretty much impossible for a human to pilot them anyways.

The aircraft companies were able to take lots of shortcuts in the design of the planes because they could count on computer control to compensate before stress became too great for the airframe to handle, using minute adjustments billions of times a second to keep the planes infrastructure as free of stress as possible.

Ahh.. mid-90's.. when Popular Mechanics was a great source of fiction inspiration.

Re:How about cargo UAVs?

[dargaud]

"In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog's job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him." — Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame).

People are just clueless about UAVs

[lsdi]

I've been piloting for more than 10 years and I'm a UAV enthusiast but, I'm sorry: Globalhawk is piloted by humans, it has the same autopilot that any good airplane has, including a (similar) ILS-CAT-III and inertial system. (in fact, they use EXACTLY the same honeywell/rockwell autopilot than most modern planes) Yes, it can land and take-off on it's own (in specific circumstances), just like ANY Airbus and Boeing NG does. Autopilots do not fly airplanes, they just move control surfaces based on angles and speeds, it's just a script/formula. It does not learn how to react to unexpected situations, and it does not accumulates experience: required to "override" information read by instruments. Making a car that follows marks on ground is not driving. It took decades to make cars actually drive them by themselves, yet, they cheat by using radars.

Re:Pilots are optional on commercial airliners ...

[pushing-robot]

Well, someone has to operate the Manual Inflation Nozzle from time to time.