How UAVs Will Change Aviation
Are airplane pilots destined for the same fate as flight navigators and engineers? Will they be replaced by lines of code, electrons and data-linked commands from faceless controllers beyond the horizon?
However unlikely that scenario, the trend is worth noting. As is being demonstrated daily in thousands of operations around the world, the black boxes on a growing number of aircraft are so "smart," they obviate the need to have a human operator on board to complete a given mission.
Pointing to the hundreds of automated takeoffs and landings performed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) every day, David Vos, senior director, unmanned aerial systems at Rockwell Collins, declared, "It doesn't matter whether a pilot is on board. Think about that. What does it enable?"
What does it "enable" to have human ability, judgment and experience on board the aircraft anyway? In the age when experience — "best practices," if you will — can be distilled into software and sensor accuracy can exceed human situational awareness, what need, then, is there for the steady human hand at the helm? When the effect of the experienced hand can be duplicated and the database of experience constantly (and wirelessly) added to?
No One Aboard — Get Used to It
You see where this is leading, right? Because before we yield the cockpit to software and circuitry, we have to yield airspace to the unmanned and autonomously piloted vehicle. This is coming sooner than we want to accept — UAVs operating routinely in civil airspace, at our flight level, and on computer-generated NextGen 4-D ballistic flight plans. And in large numbers.
The U.S. military alone operates thousands of them — and the militaries from France, Israel, England, Russia and elsewhere are also operating UAVs in ever-growing numbers. From the individual 10-person squad up through theater level, every command seems to be cultivating its own UAV for the invaluable "look over the hill" (or hemisphere) it provides.
These unmanned aerial systems (UAS, a more inclusive nomenclature) embrace a mind-boggling diversity of vehicle types and a size spectrum ranging from insect (micro) dimension to something with far more gravitas — indeed, the RQ-4B Global Hawk, Northrop Grumman's long-range reconnaissance platform, has a span of 130 feet, or about the same as that of a Boeing 757.
Both the U.S. Air Force and Navy now operate intercontinental variants of the Global Hawk that has flown unrefueled from the U.S. West Coast to Australia. And both services are pursuing visions of very-high-performance, unmanned combat aircraft (UCAV), Boeing's Phantom Ray for the Air Force and the X-47B offered to the Navy by Northrop Grumman (and in preparation for carrier trials in 2011) that are formidable in their lethality and potential.
Since systems to support a human operator — pressurization, environmental, cockpit instrumentation, ejection seat, windows, armor, etc. — are unnecessary in an unmanned aircraft, the vehicle's overall size and weight can be reduced by a third below those of comparable world-class piloted fighters. Other yields would include commensurate reductions in overall systems complexity, manufacturing difficulty, maintenance and operating costs. And, of course, the benefit to ground-based operators of these remotely piloted weapons performing dangerous missions deep in harm's way without endangering their own lives, is incalculable.
Hardly a week goes by without a news report of claimed deaths of insurgent targets from Hellfire missiles launched from General Atomics Predator UAVs operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of less dramatic but more practical interest to people who operate aircraft while seated in therein is what will happen when the unpleasantness ends for the United States in the Middle East, and the units deploying UAVs by the thousands across the region bring them home. New UAV pilot/operators will need to be trained, and everybody needs to practice, and there will be tremendous pressure to allow UAVs of all sizes into the NAS since there's only so much domestic airspace to go around.
Graham Warwick, senior editor, technology, at Aviation Week & Space Technology, a sister publication, observed, "The military will have to find a way to train when they get back. The Army alone has 4,000 UAVs! There are thousands of them coming back, and you can't put them all in the Nevada desert, as they need dozens of training areas. Then, too, they have to transit from where they're based to the ranges — there is a lot of need for secure airspace corridors. Testing UAVs requires access to airspace, as well."
And those demands are likely to increase in parallel with the military's growing reliance on these vehicles. Indicative of that commitment is the fact that this year for the first time, the U.S. Air Force's allocation for UAV operators equaled that for onboard pilots (approximately 286). The common wisdom among many military planners is that the much-troubled Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II will be the last new tactical manned aircraft. The U.S. Air Force reserves its UAV operator positions for airplane pilots; the U.S. Army does not, relying instead on a so-called "mouse-click" philosophy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy's recent buy of Global Hawks is on line to replace half of that service's Lockheed P3A anti-submarine patrol fleet, which handles the bulk of the oceanic surveillance mission. For the foreseeable future, however, the armed response to any threat will remain with the manned Orion component.
In two years, the U.S. military UAV population has burgeoned from a few hundred to more than 6,000. In the civil sphere, the FAA had received 178 applications for UAV Certificates of Authorization as of Nov. 1, 2009; four months later, that number had risen to 222, with 166 COAs approved. In FY09, there were about 20,000 UAV flights in U.S. civilian airspace totaling more than 2,500 hours aloft. Meanwhile, in academia, major aeronautics programs have responded to the increased interest in UAVs by offering degrees in UAV design, operation, maintenance and management.
Broadening Fleet Through Miniaturization
Miniaturization through microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology has reduced remote control systems hardware to a 15-pound package adaptable to almost any aircraft type.
MEMS provide "a level of performance and reliability unthinkable five years ago," said Rockwell's Vos, a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has helped lead the unmanned systems industry from its inception. "We are fielding a triplex system right now in the UAS business, and it comes in under 15 pounds. We are also active in developing light aircraft that are 'optionally piloted' and capable of full performance. We can do that because of the MEMS technology that enables fully autonomous capability. So whether the pilot is on board or not does not matter."
"We do automatic takeoffs and landings all over the world every day," he continued, noting that the Predator family of aircraft have accumulated one million flight hours in combat "and the Army will announce the same thing for its UAVs any day now."
The point is that unmanned flight hours are racking up really fast and with them, systems' refinement and operational expertise across airframes.
"We can take the off-the-shelf avionic solution and put it into a production airframe and make it an unmanned aircraft. Any [FAR] Part 23 airframe will do," Vos said. "Several companies out there are doing this now, like Aurora Flight Sciences [with a Cessna 337 or O-2], Diamond Aircraft [with a DA-42] and Proxy Aviation Systems [the SkyRaider, a canard-configured light plane]. Seven years ago this was not possible."
Pilots 'Unnecessary to Performance of the Mission'
"We now have the capability with our prepackaged avionics to allow the manufacturers to marry them with their airframes to make fully autonomous aircraft," Vos claimed.
As an example, Kaman is operating an unmanned K-Max external lift helicopter in a U.S. Marine Corps competition against Boeing's A160, a rotary lifter that was unmanned from inception. Moreover, the U.S. Army's recently released UAV roadmap focuses extensively on optionally piloted aircraft.
"Through many demonstrations, we can say that we no longer have to care whether the aircraft is manned to perform a certain mission."
There is an argument "sweeping over all of industry," Vos said, that unmanned machines can handle dull, dirty and dangerous duty, the so-called "Four Ds," better than humans. "At the Quad-A [Army Aviation Association of America] meeting [in mid-April] in Texas, Sikorsky announced a '2-1-0' pilot concept, where you could have a choice of two, one or no pilots aboard their helicopters," he said. That "public statement" is validating what many UAV insiders have known for some time, "that optionally piloted aircraft can fulfill these functions."
Going from there, it is not a stretch from an economic point of view to assume, then, that "given the autonomy and infrastructure, you could really exploit civil UAVs from an economic benefit," Vos segued, cutting to the chase. "I am confident that we will not take any shortcuts and do it right so that the systems will be reliable and safe, and having that is tremendous from an economic standpoint."
For example, Vos suggested, air taxi operators could potentially replace a copilot with automation and gain an extra fare seat — "a significant gain, a 33-percent seat-mile improvement in that you would go from three to four passengers in a five-seat airplane. In simplistic terms, you have within a domain of interest the ability to know every other airplane and what it is doing, and together with the proactive ATM and reactive anti-collision technology, it becomes safe to operate with automation."
We'll get to the ATC question in a bit, but in the meantime, another sign of the coming incursion of unmanned aircraft into the NAS on a large scale is the strength of the infrastructure growing up around the nascent industry.
Academic Response to UAVs
Kansas State University at Salina is in the third year of operating its UAV studies program within the College of Technology and Aviation. The University of North Dakota Department of Aviation and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida are also offering UAV courses and degrees with UAV majors.
KSU got into the field as a result of the total destruction of the town of Greensburg, Kan., by a tornado in 2007. Responders wanted aerial views of the destruction, but most National Guard helicopters were deployed in Iraq. Recognizing the need for an efficient and cost-effective medium that could perform aerial surveillance over future disaster sites, the governor and adjutant general subsequently directed that a research program be instituted to investigate the use of small UAVs for the purpose. Shortly thereafter, KSU got the assignment to conduct research and establish a UAV training program within the school of aviation.
"Our program is not focused on Predators, but the small UAVs, 55 pounds and less, which we believe will really proliferate," said Kurt Barnhard, Ph.D., director of the College of Technology and Aviation. "Our goal was to make these small UAVs ready to fly in the NAS and do something worthwhile with them. These systems will be priced in the $50,000 range, versus 10 times that for a helicopter. This [size] is where we see the market exploding. As soon as the FAA opens up the airspace, the small ones will begin to proliferate. There is no way around it."
KSU claims to be one of the few institutions that is focused on training UAV operators. "The UAV industry is dominated by engineering right now, and that has outstripped operational enablement," Barnhard said. "The engineers can design stuff that can do things that the airspace system is not ready for, so you need some aviation discipline that we have here because we operate Part 141 flight and Part 147 maintenance schools. We train people to operate in the NAS, and that discipline was and still is lacking in this [UAV] industry."
Ranging Restrictions
The problem is, the industry wants to "take off and fly everywhere," Barnhard observed, "and we are saying, 'You have to do that safely.' It has to be run in a structured way to be safe, and we're here with training and licenses." Minimum entrance requirement for KSU's UAV operator program is a Private Pilot certificate, preferably with an Instrument rating. "Everybody we've hired has FAA certificates — pilots and mechanics," Barnhard said. "We have set that forth as a benchmark. You have to pass muster, and that means knowing how to fly or maintain."
The FAA agrees with this since current regulations require a Private Pilot certificate as a minimum to operate a civilian UAV in the national airspace.
While the smaller vehicles upon which KSU is focusing are fully automated with an integrated autopilot system, they, like most autonomous UAVs, can be redirected by an operator.
One such aircraft is the Aerosonde, which is made by AAI, a Textron company. Weighing just 38 pounds and powered by a low-turning, two-stroke piston engine, it can fly long missions — in fact, it transited the Atlantic Ocean west to east burning less than two gallons of fuel. When going long, it has to be monitored and linked through an Iridium satellite connection. The operator follows the vehicle's progress and can upload new waypoints.
However, under current FAA rules, UAV operators must maintain line-of-sight connectivity with their aircraft. "The FAA has been very strict about line of site," Barnhard said. Consequently, "we use chase planes even when the vehicle is operating autonomously." He added, "There is a lot of pressure to get rid of that requirement."
All UAVs, including the Aerosonde, are equipped with a lost-link capability in case communication is lost, whereupon the aircraft is programmed to fly to a certain location and orbit until comm is reestablished — unless it is a helicopter, in which case it will hover until comm is reestablished. "These procedures are specified in the certification," Barnhard said. "They all are required to have a lost-link capability."
For the Aerosonde, KSU is limited by its FAA Certificate of Authorization to 2,500 feet maximum altitude and operation within a three-square-mile area adjacent to a U.S Air Force range, "all very protected and low impact," Barnhard claimed. "The idea is for us to prove the track record over this airspace. When a disaster occurs, then we will request an emergency COA allowing us to fly in the disaster area with cameras and/or sensors aboard. Then we work with the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] or National Guard — anyone who needs actionable intelligence. You can apply an aerial assist for extremely low cost and keep it up there for a long time. The advantages far outweigh the risks of these things."
When the subject of "routine seamless integration with manned aircraft in the NAS" comes up, Barnhard quickly responds that "there are standards in the FARs that the operator must abide by to fly from point A to B. The airspace will be gradually opened and the COAs expanded. They talk about when NextGen is in place by 2013 we'll have a regulation that we can go by and do routine operations with the big ones [UAVs]. I would expect it within five years."
Regarding safety concerns arising from the mixing of conventional and unmanned traffic, Barnhard said, "There are more people involved with a typical unmanned flight than for a manned flight with a typically sized aircraft. Even the smaller ones require a team of two or three. We hope that will ease public acceptance and speed them along."
Beyond that, the UAV industry has to find a way to meet the FAA's requirement for an equivalent level of safety to manned aircraft. "Just like conventional piloted aircraft, UAVs have to see and avoid other traffic," noted AW&ST's Warwick. "They must meet that requirement in order to be allowed into civil airspace. How do you get to that level?" The consensus, he says, is that won't be achieved for at least another decade.
Key to safe separation — the see-and-avoid enabler, as it were — is the FAA's NextGen and Europe's SESAR, the modernized and automated ATC systems. While the necessity to accommodate unmanned aircraft was not among the original design goals of these advanced air traffic management systems during their definition periods 20 years ago, the unique features of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), the backbone of the systems, not only do that, but facilitate mixing UAVs with piloted aircraft.
ATC's Accommodating Automation
"NextGen and SESAR were not set up around UAVs, but around the need to reinvent the ATC system to accommodate larger volumes of traffic," Vos, of Collins, observed. "But it just so happens that the infrastructure is tremendously enabling for UAVs as well."
"From the point of view of a tracking infrastructure like ADS-B, multilateralism, existing ground-based radar, and command and control digital data links," he said, "these are all parts of NextGen and SESAR and will make the mix of manned and unmanned aircraft possible."
So, the UAV integration essentially involves three elements: reliable systems; tracking; and a rapid command response capability with the aircraft's operator or ATC.
"If you think about it then," Vos said, "it is not terribly different from what is in the cockpit now. NextGen is looking longer term at data links as opposed to analog voice comm, and if you look at the original theme of NextGen and then plug in the unmanned airplane and assume it meets the same safety and reliability requirements at all levels as an equivalent manned airplane, then why shouldn't we operate those vehicles in the same airspace?"
Indeed. The technology has been proven through more than two million hours of military operations. Control algorithms have been refined to support high levels of precision and repeatability. And emergency subroutines have been embedded in memory software. As for the platforms, they're essentially basic airplanes or light helicopters powered by simple engines with decades of service.
Economic Appeal
History shows that favorable economics can force outcomes that at first glance seemed unlikely or even impossible. And so it could be for unmanned aircraft ultimately supplanting some now with humans aboard and in control.
One economic argument for employing UAVs is to reduce or eliminate flight crew costs, though as already noted, unmanned aircraft are attended by ground operators who represent costs as well.
How and when this might occur is a matter of pure speculation, of course, but any such change would likely happen slowly, possibly beginning, as Vos suggests, with automation assuming copilot duties. And then . . .
In researching this report, we heard of studies by major cargo airlines involving optionally piloted freighters, supposedly crewed on transoceanic flights by a single pilot, or none at all.
We queried Federal Express on the subject and received a friendly but dismissive response from corporate spokesman Jim McCluskey, who said, "I'm in touch with our research people all the time, and I've never heard anything like that." Nevertheless, he said, he'd run it up the executive chain of command to see what came back. In a follow-up conversation a few days later, his tone had changed somewhat. "I have an official statement from the company concerning alleged studies of minimally piloted or pilotless air freighters," he said. "'FedEx is always interested in new technology that will help us improve service to our customers, but we do not disclose the nature of our research.'"
As with their military counterparts, other potential civilian jobs for UAVs might focus on the dull, dirty and dangerous such as power-line and pipeline patrol, ag applications and firefighting.
'Equivalent Levels of Safety . . .'
The FAA's position on integrating UAVs into the NAS thus far has been cautious but attentive. The aviation agency recognizes the demand from the UAV industry and the military for greater access to civil airspace and, accordingly, has formed the Unmanned Aircraft Program Office (UAPO). However, the agency has made clear that system safety is its paramount concern.
In a speech delivered to an aviation trade association in November 2009, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt stated flatly that "unmanned aircraft systems are not ready for seamless or routine use yet in civilian airspace." Claiming he believes that UAVs represent the wave of the future, Babbitt nevertheless cautioned that "where we are on various fronts, they're not ready for open access to the NAS, and we can't give you the thumbs up." The "level of technical maturity" of UAV operations is not where it needs to be for full operation in the NAS, Babbitt said, and a fundamental deficiency on the part of UAVs is see-and-avoid capability. End of debate for the administrator: If you can't see me, I don't want you in my airspace.
Apparently, the FAA agrees with KSU's Barnhard's prediction that when UAVs do enter civil airspace in large numbers, the under 55-pound craft will be the most popular, and the agency aims to address those first in an NPRM. According to Babbitt, "it will define standards for routine commercial operations to meet the needs of a large portion of the UAS community." The administration is also working with the Defense Department to revise a Memorandum of Agreement that addresses critical access needs.
Meanwhile, the UAV industry is optimistic that its vehicles will gain full NAS access in well less than the decade Warwick predicted. Many proponents believe the biggest challenge to UAV acceptance by the public is not technological. "From here on, what happens will be an economic decision, whether it is cost effective to have a pilot on board or a fully autonomous automated aircraft," Vos said. "That argument will drive whether it is two, one or zero [pilots]."
Vos shared a personal dream: "As soon as we have full autonomy with VLJs, I will buy one, since some days I just want to push a button to go somewhere and sit back and read the newspaper or work on my laptop. That technology is not far away; we have some work to do to improve safety and reliability. But the really exciting time in the history of aviation will occur in the next couple of decades." BCA
- David Esler
http://news.combataircraft.com/readnews.aspx?i=1314
