On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:53:16 GMT, "Thomas J. Paladino Jr."
wrote in Message-Id:
:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5025745/

Hmmm....

I don't know about this. Probably no big deal, but still.



“The fundamental underpinnings of this program are, how can we safely
introduce this class into the national airspace system?” said Jeff
Bauer, manager of the $360 million NASA program.


http://www.uavnas.aero/index.html
Welcome to Access 5 ()

Opening the Nation's Airspace Safely to Remotely Operated Aircraft
for Important New Applications in Transportation, Commerce,
Science and Secruity.


http://www.uavnas.aero/ace/news/civi...ace_apr04.html
Civil Airspace Article from Union-Tribune ("Increasing use in
civilian airspace raises safety issues").


December 2003


a collaborative NASA,
FAA, DoD, industry effort sponsored the forum. Access
Five is focused on safely introducing high altitude,
long endurance remotely operated aircraft, into the
National Airspace System within 5 years. Access Five
calls the range of applications for the new aircraft "Dull
and Dangerous Missions." Possibilities include
pipeline, power-line and critical infrastructure
monitoring, cargo delivery, fire and flood
management, hurricane tracking, telecommunication
platform provision, search and rescue assistance, crop
harvesting, and marine fisheries monitoring.
involved.

The event closed with a roundtable
discussion of members from NASA, DOD,
Northrop Grumman, the Boeing Company, and FAA.
Quentin Smith, AVR-4, moderated the forum. Smith
said, "Our goal is to enable FAA and other government
employees to experience first hand a revolutionary
technology program that will be in the vanguard of
change, affecting future development of aerospace in
the U.S."
"Envisioning the Future of Aviation"
Dres Zellweger and Andy Lacher (MITRE) participated
in the AIAA's 3rd Aviation Technology, Integration, and
Operations Technical Forum held in Denver, CO
November 17-19, 2003. Andy was the moderator and
leadoff speaker in a session entitled "Envisioning the
Future of Aviation". Andy's presentation focused on air
transportation trends. Dres gave a talk at the same
session on the JPO. Other presentations were by John
Cavolowsky (NASA Ames) on the role of research and
importance of modeling and simulation and by J.P.
Clarke (MIT) on "wild new ideas". The panel of
speakers and the 40 session participants engaged in a
lively discussion after the presentations. Several
people talked about airports as the real bottleneck for
achieving a three-fold increase in capacity; there was
agreement that one cannot accurately predict 20 years
into the future and that it was therefore important not
to work toward a point solution for air transportation
in 2025; and finally, it was pointed out that a strategy
of waiting to implement new technology until new
concepts are well defined was a poor strategy - rather
one should postulate and implement the most likely
air and ground technology infrastructure to meet the
range of possible future concepts early and use this as
a basis for steps in the transformation to future
concepts.

Joint Planning Office
801 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Suite 100
Washington, DC 20004
Joint Planning Office
Next Generation System

The FAA auditorium was filled last week with NASA,
DoD, and industry participants for the first in a series of
town hall technology forums initiated by the JPO.
Thursday's topic was Remotely Operated Aircraft,
commonly known as UAV's. The JPO, in cooperation
with the Access Five program, a collaborative NASA,...

The FAA reauthorization language calls for a Joint Planning Office, with
the authority to coordinate the goals and priorities across the
agencies while "creating and carrying out" a National Plan for
the Next Generation Air Transportation System. There was a
great turn out for the inaugural Town Hall Meeting on
transforming ideas, "Unmanned vehicles in the NAS". Our pace
will continue to pick up as we reach more constituencies. Karl
Grundmann and Charlie Heuttner will be reaching out to more
than 100 organizations and individuals to get their thoughts
on what the National Plan should be, and how industry can be
involved. Stay tuned!


http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=2282185
....
Today, at least 32 countries are developing a total of more than 250
models of UAV, and 41 countries already operate 80 types. Most of
these are reconnaissance craft, but pilotless aircraft will also be
the combat vehicles of the future. As the leading frontier in aviation
research, the military's ideas and development on UAVs will be
influential in the rest of aviation.

As UAVs have proved themselves in various theatres of war, military
interest has blossomed. In the past two years, American spending on
them has gone from $300m-400m a year to over $1 billion, according to
Laurence Newcome, who runs the website “UAV Forum”. America's
Department of Defence expects to spend $16 billion on UAVs between
2002 and 2010. According to a UAV road map from America's Department
of Defence, by 2012 UAVs the size of F-16 fighter aircraft are likely
to exist. These will be capable of many combat and support missions,
including the suppression of enemy air defences and electronic attacks
on enemy sensors. The ultimate goal is to enable America to project
its power on to the far side of the globe with no need for nearby air
bases, or risk to the lives of pilots.

Initially, pilots and a lot of equipment will be needed back at base
to control these remote UAVs. To start with, such bases will look like
glorified video-game arcades. Later, pilots may control their craft
via suits linked to their neuro-muscular systems. The pilot would
sense what the UAV was seeing through sensors on a head-mounted visor.
But by 2015-2020, as onboard processing power begins to take off, UAVs
are expected to start thinking for themselves. This could lead
ultimately to completely autonomous UAVs and swarms of UAVs that talk
to one another and operate as a single unit. Research is already under
way on the technologies to command thousands of airborne drones.

By 2020, the Pentagon estimates that one-third of America's combat
planes will be robotic. UAVs certainly look as though they will be
commanding a large share of future military spending (see chart). And
the Joint Strike Fighter being built by Lockheed Martin looks as
though it will be the last new manned American fighter for decades. By
2100, human military pilots will be a quaint oddity. Why? Even if
pilots could be beefed up with an exoskeleton that would allow their
bodies to turn under a force 20 times that of the Earth's gravity,
they think and react more slowly than computers.

By 2030, it is even possible that UAVs ...

Manufacturers of civilian aircraft are treading warily on the issue of
removing the pilot. The aircraft they are now designing for operation
into the 2040s use computers to pick up, and correct, pilot error. But
the practicality, and safety, of doing away with the pilot altogether
could eventually become obvious to all as, in 20 or 30 years, the
military begins to use pilotless vehicles to airlift soldiers, and
UAVs start moving cargo routinely around the world. And small UAVs,
some say, might one day buzz around cities in place of the Fedex
delivery van. ...

find early applications in a wide array of commercial and
transnational uses—from fire fighting to geological and environmental
surveys, border patrol, film production, research, rescue and even
agriculture. These could emerge before the end of the decade if UAVs
can obtain swift regulatory approval. And UAVs will not merely replace
existing, piloted applications. They will also create new markets. One
of their most valuable uses could be as “pseudosatellites”, hovering
over cities, providing broadband-communication platforms at a fraction
of the cost of the geostationary satellites that currently do that
job.

The biggest breakthrough in civil aviation, though, would be the
invention of the aerial equivalent of the motor car. The era of the
personal “air car” has been predicted since the 1930s. And although
much progress is being made, it is still not likely to happen in the
foreseeable future. There are some big obstacles.

What is well under way, though, is a new breed of piloted light jet or
micro-jet that is designed to operate halfway between public and
private transport—a form of air taxi. One such craft is the Eclipse
500. Designed for six people, it is a cheap jet, selling for under
$1m. Its creators, Eclipse Aviation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, claim
it is cheaper to operate than any jet in existence, and that it has
several thousand orders already. Many rival micro-jets are also on the
way, including one made by Adam Aircraft Industries of Englewood,
Colorado. It is more expensive than the Eclipse 500 but could arrive
as soon as the end of next year.

To exploit the availability of such smaller aircraft, the entire
air-transport system will have to be overhauled. The number of
domestic air travellers in America, for example, is expected to triple
within 20 years according to an aeronautics blueprint by America's
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But if this is
to happen, many more of America's 5,000 regional airports will have to
be used. Currently, only 64 airports carry 85% of the country's civil
air traffic. Yet in the past decade, only one large hub airport and
seven new runways have been opened. Given the constraints, few new big
hub airports are likely to be built.

True personal air transport, however, will require vertical take-off
and landing, not just better access to regional airports. For safety,
it may well be necessary to have them operate using the technology for
pilotless vehicles. They will also require far more sophisticated
air-traffic control systems than exist today.

It is true that air-traffic control is close to making a big leap,
though probably to a kind of halfway house toward pilotless flight
rather than all the way to what would be required for the creation of
widespread personal aviation. Air traffic management is moving
increasingly to digital data communications between the ground
controller and the cockpit. The next step will be using
computer-network technology to allow pilots to fly freely where they
want, instead of taking instructions from the ground. The controller
will simply be monitoring what is going on. Planes will need
fool-proof collision-avoidance systems to tell them how close they are
to each other. But once this technology is in place, it could be
applied to computers driving planes without human intervention.

....


--

Irrational beliefs ultimately lead to irrational acts.
-- Larry Dighera,