FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation 215
coondoggie writes "Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu (an independent subsidiary of Boeing) and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction, and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft."
Cue Skynet jokes (Score:5, Insightful)
Drones in US airspace? (Score:3, Insightful)
But..but...why would our government want to spy on its own citizens???
Don't be silly, they told me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward a few years....
Re:Drones in US airspace? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not doing anything wrong, right? You should have nothing to hide.
Re:Drones in US airspace? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, commercial planes will be unpiloted - pilots are expensive. I'm guessing this will be a good test of that eventuality.
Re:First thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
UPS and FedEx and other air cargo type things I could see as a huge advantage.
Eventually refining the confidence and quality of the AI to the point where it could haul actual passengers. I'd bet that they mean time between failures of machines could out pace that of human error fairly quickly so it'd actually be safer.
Remember the Elevator had the same type of history. There was a time when an attendant was there to push the button for you as a way to reassure everyone that it was safe. Eventually people learned they could push the button on their own.
Re:Cue Skynet jokes (Score:5, Insightful)
Only now they're not quite so goddamn funny.
Considering that the FAA's critical infrastructure still runs on technology that's 30 years old, old mainframes that don't have spare parts, and a lack of qualified workers to direct existing traffic, I don't think Skynet is happening anytime soon.
Re:Cue Skynet jokes (Score:3, Insightful)
Only now they're not quite so goddamn funny.
a.) Terminator was not a cautionary tale.
b.) There's a huge leap between unmanned drones and what happened in that movie.
c.) You should be thinking about Enemy of the State, not Terminator.
Re:Priority Failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't the FAA building and deploying UAV's on any kind of scale. This is the FAA trying to figure out how to safely integrate UAV's into the national aerospace system (NAS). Personally, as a pilot, while I distrust the FAA to some extent, as the agency charged with ensuring safety of all operators in the NAS, they are the right agency to be performing this study.
When some other agency says they're going to start launching UAV's in the NAS, the FAA needs to have ammunition to enforce safety measures to ensure that the UAV's not pose an undue hazard to other aircraft and that the UAV operators respond accordingly to instructions from air traffic control.
Re:I see dead people (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cue Skynet jokes (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks as though someone's been paid off to get the ball rolling. Special interest groups, perhaps? I predict that we'll be seeing a lot of future studies on the subject with the majority being positive to the UAV/drone idea, and within ten years, we'll have UAVs in the skies. Imagine all the cheap police UAVs out patrolling everyone's backyards surveying the nude sunbathers and what's growing back there.
Re:Drones in US airspace? (Score:3, Insightful)
And so will your flying car.
rj
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thing is, military drones have no people on board. Passenger jets would have people on board.
Why would they do it? it's all about saving money, it's not in the interests of passengers.
Re:Cue Skynet jokes (Score:3, Insightful)
Terminator was not a cautionary tale.
Seemed pretty cautionary to me: don't create powerful networked and potentially evil AIs with access to military killbots and manufacturing facilities.
It's good advice!
Re:If I'm going down, so are the pilots (Score:2, Insightful)
OTOH "when your rear is in the hot seat and death is riding you", people tend to act erratically (there were some catastrophes essentialy due to humans arguing with the machine...). And we can't be certain if knowing that you will surely survive any catastrophe is not actually at least as strong deterrent & motivation - after all, you know you will face the consequences if that was your fault.
Re:First thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
So, do you think Sully would have pulled off a perfect water landing if he had been miles away from the cockpit? If the pilot's life isn't at risk, I just don't think he's going to have the same drive to handle an emergency. He's not going to have all the visual, auditory, and tactile, information a human in the pilot's seat is going to have either. Sometimes you need the reflexes of a well trained human being whose life is on the line.
Re:If I'm going down, so are the pilots (Score:3, Insightful)
And we can't be certain if knowing that you will surely survive any catastrophe is not actually at least as strong deterrent & motivation - after all, you know you will face the consequences if that was your fault.
And what about the possibility of the remote pilot ditching and making a run for it? At least with the local pilot they'd need to parachute out of the plane. In this case, Jim takes a coffee break and never comes back.
Re:Drones in US airspace? (Score:4, Insightful)
If we had a current generation of Sully Sullenberger pilots, I'd agree with you.
However, he made the correct point that most pilots are not given the training they need to perform as he did. I'd take a computer over a human that overrides the airplane & causes it to crash. See Flight 3407 [wikipedia.org]
Re:First thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
So, do you think Sully would have pulled off a perfect water landing if he had been miles away from the cockpit?
I don't see why not. I don't know if I'd be under any more or less stress to handle an emergency if my life is on the line or if its hundreds of passengers.
And essentially, some of the mistakes that might cause emergencies will be reduced by a drone that doesn't forget things. And for the record, no human has ever had faster REFLEXES than a modern computer, we've just had the gift of INSIGHT. The only reason we can outsmart a computer in various fields is being able to do what it does not expect. Usually a pilot in the sky is best for situations where your target is also human so you need to be able to have someone who can continue another person's train of thought based on one action (Like fighter pilots watching how enemy pilots fly, and Rescue teams saving victims). It's the unexpected elements of humans that require another human to assist.
In the case of a commercial airliner needing to make an emergency landing, I don't see why a computer couldn't handle it, should proper emergency protocols be handled. The only problem I see arising is instrumentation error, which a few cameras in the cockpit could fix.
Re:out-of-date complaints are out-of-date (Score:3, Insightful)
"The third and by far most complex step (ERAM Release 1) is the replacement of the Host Computer System with new software and hardware ... national deployment begins in FY 2009 and concludes in FY 2011"
That's all well and good except for the part about it not lasting more than 6 days when they tried to use it in production [businessweek.com]. They may be *trying* to replace the old system. Whether they're succeeding at replacing it is a whole other question.
Re:Drones in US airspace? (Score:3, Insightful)