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This article originally appeared in The Technology Issue of APEX Experience.
Commercial aviation is in a period of rapid change. New aircraft offer significant reductions in fuel burn and environmental footprint. In-flight connectivity and entertainment systems provide increased passenger enjoyment. New technologies are emerging in materials, engines, communications and control systems. There is also a surge in interest for the type of aircraft often called drones.
How will these drones and manned aircraft sense and avoid each other?
The Drone Society
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), are being used for aerial photography, agricultural surveys, disaster response, law enforcement, search and rescue, structure inspections and even package delivery. In some regions, drones are being flown with the approval of the regulatory agency. In other places, commercial use of drones is prohibited until regulations are established, but unmanned aircraft are operated nevertheless.
Before civil drones can safely fly in the National Airspace System, a number of questions have to be answered, including: How will these drones and manned aircraft sense and avoid each other? How do we ensure that civil drone pilots are sufficiently proficient? How should personal drones be certified as flightworthy? The FAA has been authorizing law enforcement and military drones since 1990, but with the rise of personal and civil drones, new regulations are needed to answer these questions.
FAA’s Airspace Plan
Under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, the FAA is directed to integrate civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System. The Act requires the FAA to deliver a plan no later than September 30, 2015, that includes rulemaking, enabling technologies, certification, flight standards, and even incorporation of the plan into the NextGen air traffic control system.
In response, the FAA created a five-year UAS Roadmap in 2013 “to outline, within a broad timeline, the tasks and considerations needed to enable UAS integration into the National Airspace System for the planning purposes of the broader UAS community.”
The FAA then chose six UAS test-site operators to research system safety, aircraft certification, command and control links, control station layout and certification, ground and airborne sense-and-avoid, and environmental impacts. These sites are to develop technologies and generate the hard data needed to create regulations.
In particular, autonomous “sense and avoid” technology is a key enabler for safely integrating UAS into the NAS. Manned aircraft have procedures and systems onboard, on the ground and in orbit that allow aircraft to know where other aircraft are located. Most drones have no such capability, and many are too small to carry the same systems used by manned aircraft.
License and Registration
In manned aviation, pilots are licensed to operate certain aircraft after receiving the requisite training, meeting testing requirements and obtaining a medical certificate. Regulations for drone-pilot proficiency do not yet exist in the US or many other places and agencies like the FAA have yet to establish license requirements for commercial drone pilots.
For the recreational drone pilot, the Academy of Model Aeronautics has a safety code that provides sufficient guidance. Drone pilot proficiency becomes critical when the aircraft is larger, flown at greater altitudes beyond line-of-sight, or deployed for commercial purposes.
The reliability of drone hardware and software has safety implications as well. Manned commercial and general aviation aircraft are issued airworthiness certificates by the regulatory agency; even experimental aircraft (including “homebuilt” aircraft in the US) receive airworthiness certificates.
Clearly, unmanned aircraft above the “toy” level need a certification process to ensure they are airworthy and do not represent a hazard to other aircraft in the air or people on the ground. Drones that are not autonomous need reliable communications and a safe response to a dropped control or navigation link.
The FAA had intended to issue proposed regulations for small UAS (sUAS) by the end of 2014, but did not. To the FAA, getting the regulations right the first time is more important than meeting a deadline. With the release of the FAA’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the public will have its first opportunity to examine the proposed regulations and provide comments to the Agency over the following months. The entire process of creating the regulations could take one or two years to complete. And this is just for small drones under 55 pounds.
Regulations, Now
Many drone operators will not wait a year or two until the regulations are in place. Tim Trott, author of The Droner’s Guide, says, “The danger is that in waiting to get it all right, the FAA risks letting it all go wrong.” The recent spate of drones being flown into airspace in and around airports is an example of how wrong it can go. This has become such a problem around New York airports that US Senator Chuck Schumer has asked the FAA to speed up the rulemaking process. “Get these rules out and get them out quickly,” Schumer implored. “We need them, drone users want them, flyers want them, average people want them.”
As an interim solution, Section 333 of the 2012 Modernization and Reform Act does allow exemptions for “commercial operations in low-risk, controlled environments.” In September 2014, the FAA granted regulatory exemptions to six movie and television production companies; in December, to four companies engaged in aerial surveying, construction-site monitoring and oil-rig flare stack inspections; and in January 2015, to a company creating aerial real-estate videos and another for agricultural crop monitoring. But this case-by-case approach will not sustain an industry with a US economic impact of $13.6 billion in the first three years after integration.
The Question of Autopilot
Some imagine a future where airline flights won’t have pilots onboard. During a panel discussion on the future of aerospace at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October 2014, Jeff Katz, founding CEO and chairman of travel-booking company, Orbitz, suggests that having fewer pilots per airplane is “on the minds of airline executives today, but [it is] not much talked about.” He predicts that we could see commercial auto-piloting as soon as our children’s generation. But according to Les Dorr, media spokesperson for the FAA, “No one is seriously discussing remotely piloted passenger aircraft at this time.”
Before pilotless commercial flights can take off, many issues need to be resolved, such as regulations that ensure flight safety, an overhaul of aircraft design philosophy and unmanned aircraft certification. “There’s a lot of things that would have to change on an airplane to be able to do that … The philosophy that the pilot still has a final say and is in command is still how we’re building airplanes,” explains Dean Wilkens, senior chief engineer of Flight Controls at Honeywell.
73% of Americans surveyed want regulations for remote-control aerial vehicles.
Public Skepticism
Another hurdle to overcome is the public acceptance of autonomous commercial aircraft. Interestingly, the automotive industry also faces the same problem. Sam Abuelsamid, senior analyst for smart transportation with Navigant Research, points out that “pretty much every automaker and lots of suppliers and universities are involved in exactly this sort of research and have been for some time. A major component of getting people to accept self-driving cars is to get them to trust the technology.”
Even though people might prefer situations where humans are in control, and fear situations where people are controlled by machines and computers, the fact is that with each passing year there is less human control. This creeping automation is accepted because the change is incremental and confidence develops in the safety of the systems.
If, instead, human control is reduced in a step change, the emotional resistance can be impossible to manage. Airlines couldn’t take the pilots out of airplanes in the near future because the public wouldn’t stand for it. Richard Aboulafia, vice-president of analysis at Teal Group says, “It’s just a terrible idea. Passengers would hate it.”
If autonomous automobiles become accepted by the public because they are perceived as safe and effective, and if drones enter into the airspace in large numbers with superb safety records, the public may then be ready for unmanned passenger flight.
However, Aboulafia raises an economic point when he notes, “Pilot salaries are an insignificant part of an airline’s total cost structure. Added equipment costs, and probably added insurance costs, would wipe away most of the savings, if there were any.”
Nevertheless, if by 2025 we have autonomous buses and unmanned cargo airplanes with safety records no worse than their manned counterparts, the flying public might then consider purchasing an airline ticket for a flight in a drone.