FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation

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."

Key Points

[e2d2]

A few important points about this:

1. They are not talking about autonomous UAVs. These UAVs are essentially remote-controlled aircraft piloted by real pilots. I think some people assume these things think for themselves but that's not the case. Now that doesn't automatically discount concerns of safety, but "skynet" is not the case here.

2. This is not specifically for military only. Many uses for UAVs exist outside of military applications such as basic transport. Of course they'll use them for surveillance, but they already do that with aircraft. UAVs can simply linger longer because one pilot can take over during flight. Similar to how large aircraft do it now with redundant crew members.

Re:First thoughts

[Krahar]

This could be much safer, actually. Granted, something like choosing the best place for a crash landing may not be the kind of thing you could so easily program, since it would require information such as where there were likely to be people, what the ground seems to be made of and such. You can't very easily pre-program this since you don't know where a plane is going to be needing to make an emergency landing. On the other hand, you can have this sort of thing raise a flag in a remote location. There you can have the best pilot in the world on stand-by to pilot such crash landings remotely, and he can be someone specially trained to do nothing but crash landings, and since he isn't on the plane, you won't lose him in those situations that can't be saved. Today you are stuck with whatever quality pilot happens to be in the cockpit, and having experience with crashes is likely to mean that the pilot is dead and his experience wasted.

So if the remote control technology can be made secure enough from tampering and reliable enough, then this sort of thing could even make crashes less deadly. Imagine having a Sully in every plane that crashes.

Re:First thoughts

[phantomcircuit]

Would a drone using forward looking infrared even have hit the geese in the first place though?