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#11
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"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
... The military is having enough difficulty staffing its UAV operations as it is. Adding the "equitable" headset you suggest, while adding more realism to UAV operations, may further reduce pilot interest in them. Is that not a good thing? If these "pilots" aren't prepared to take personal responsibility for their own actions, then they have no business being "in the sky" with those of us who do. But it's all about money, as usual. It seems the UAV manufacturers and NASA feel that UAVs offer something piloted aircraft don't. I can't see how civil UAV operations with a ground based crew of 7 can possibly provide a financial incentive for their operators. And one mishap will put the final stake in civil UAV operation's heart as far as the flying public is concerned. What am I missing? I can see UAVs being useful to the military. I can see UAVs in civilian trial uses being of interest to the military. Regardless of the eventual financial benefits of civilian use (presumably there might be some), adoption of this technology in the NAS is at variance with existing rules for pilot certification, and the reasons why these rules came about. It'll be very interesting to see how these differing concepts of what constitutes a "pilot" get reconciled. |
#12
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UAVs to share civil airpace by 2008?
FIVE AIRCRAFT, ONE PILOT The British military is testing a system that would, essentially, allow a pilot to command his own pilotless wingmates. The system, developed by QinetiQ* with funding from the British Ministry of Defense, enables the pilot of a fighter jet to simultaneously control up to four unmanned companion aerial vehicles. According to Technology News (http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/6566), it was tested for the first time last week with the pilot of a Tornado fighter also influencing the movements of a BAC 111, filling in for a UAV, and three simulated UAVs. Despite the absence of actual UAVs in the test, the government called the test a success and said the Tornado pilot was able to lead his simulated backup on a simulated ground attack. http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#194888 * http://www.qinetiq.com/home/newsroom/events/auvsi.html On Sat, 22 May 2004 03:34:49 GMT, Larry Dighera wrote in : 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, |
#13
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UAVs to share civil airpace by 2008?
What's the big deal?
Dale Brown has written about this in his last three novels. |
#14
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UAVs to share civil airpace by 2008?
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:07:30 -0400, john smith wrote
in : What's the big deal? I can't imagine how a single F-16 pilot can fly his aircraft and be expected to adequately control five other aircraft simultaneously. Dale Brown has written about this in his last three novels. Has he mentioned what happens to the pilotless aircraft if the pilot controlling them becomes incapacitated? |
#15
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UAVs to share civil airpace by 2008?
Larry Dighera wrote:
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:07:30 -0400, john smith wrote in : What's the big deal? I can't imagine how a single F-16 pilot can fly his aircraft and be expected to adequately control five other aircraft simultaneously. Dale Brown has written about this in his last three novels. Has he mentioned what happens to the pilotless aircraft if the pilot controlling them becomes incapacitated? Dale's pilots are commanding from a B1. And if something happens to the command ship the UAVs can work on there own and head for the house or destroy themselves. |
#16
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UAVs to share civil airpace by 2008?
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:41:10 -0500, "Gig 601XL Builder"
wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in : Larry Dighera wrote: On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:07:30 -0400, john smith wrote in : What's the big deal? I can't imagine how a single F-16 pilot can fly his aircraft and be expected to adequately control five other aircraft simultaneously. Dale Brown has written about this in his last three novels. Has he mentioned what happens to the pilotless aircraft if the pilot controlling them becomes incapacitated? Dale's pilots are commanding from a B1. How many crew a B1? How many crew an F-16? And if something happens to the command ship the UAVs can work on there own and head for the house or destroy themselves. I can see this possibly working in a war theater. My fear is that it will be done in the NAS among civilian flights. |
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