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Pilotless aircraft
By Andreas Spaeth
The joke is as old as the autopilot: Sitting alone in the cockpit of a modern aircraft are a pilot and a
dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot as soon as he tries to
touch anything. Scenarios like that aren’t the last word in aircraft automation, however. Experts are
confident that air traffic is moving relentlessly toward full automation and abolition of the cockpit. You
may wonder whether passengers will go along with that.
“The question is not whether pilotless aircraft
are coming, but when. We’ll have to
face it,” says Denis Chagnon, a spokesperson
with the International Civil Aviation Organization
(ICAO) in Montréal. In Europe and the
United States, research activities are bustling:
The airliner-to-be finds its way across
the sky more or less on its own, with no pilot
onboard, and is monitored and controlled, if
necessary, from the ground. Such capability
is expected to make flying more efficient, environmentally
friendlier and safer.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying military
missions are not new, being used as
robots to patrol outside of controlled airspace.
In the civil arena, UAVs are in a first
step supposed to assist civil science in tasks
such as environmental monitoring, volcano
observation and atmospheric research. For
such tasks, pilotless aircraft benefit from their
ability to stay aloft longer than their manned
counterparts.
In Europe, researchers are examining the
utility of civil UAVs within a new air traffic
control system: The European Defense
Agency (EDA) is presently pursuing a roadmap
study to assess the compatibility of civil
UAV missions with concurrent manned aircraft
operations in the crammed European
airspace. A consortium of 12 leading European
aerospace companies is trying to find
ways to implement such coexistence no later
than by year-end 2015.
Simultaneously, the European Commission is
pursuing a research project that is dubbed
Innovative Future Air Transport System
(IFATS) and coordinated by the French Onera
research organization. Sharing in it also is
the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The
IFATS concept envisions the formation of a
new global airspace management system
that computes four-dimensional flight routes
for all air traffic participants. “That’s a revolutionary
system considering there’re no
pilots in the aircraft and no controllers, both
being replaced by control systems on the
ground,” explains Onera’s Claude Le Tallec. A
substantial benefit it affords is improved utilization
of the airspace through automated
control of the aircraft in all flight phases from
taxiing out from the airport of departure to
parking the aircraft at the destination airport.
The IFATS team is also looking into the estimated
costs of a pilotless airliner: Development
investments would run around 525
million euros and purchase of a 230-passenger
airliner almost 38 million euros. Omission
of the cockpit would provide room for
ten additional passengers. In terms of efficiency
improvement, each aircraft could fly
80 hours longer per year than a conventional
jet transport and use up to 3,000 liters less
fuel per hour.
As yet, there’re many unknowns in these revolutionary
simulations: precautions must be
in place, for instance, to keep control of the
aircraft from being criminally manipulated
from the ground. The most critical question,
however, involves the passengers. Will these
people trust an automated system? While the
Driverless train: Germany’s first fully automated
subway has been in operation in Nuremberg since
2008.
use of driverless subway trains has become
commonplace in many cities, many passengers
of high-speed intercity trains may begin
to hesitate knowing there is no driver up
front. A German poll indicated that with a
pilotless aircraft, 33 percent of the passengers
will not come aboard in the first place,
and 48 percent only provided a pilot is onboard
to monitor the computers. Only 19 percent
of the respondents said they wouldn’t
mind traveling without a pilot.
Nonetheless, there’re facts speaking for the
pilotless aircraft: Demonstrably, many flight
catastrophes are attributable to human
error, and the Onera experts and others are
confident that human error is exactly what
can practically be eliminated by automated
aircraft.
For additional information, contact
Heidrun Moll
+49 89 1489-3537
For further information on this article go to:
www.mtu.de/108UAV_E
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