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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 30 Interview + Report 31
32 Anecdote Perfectionists in the sky By Robert Wouters As a sports highlight, the championship game of professional American football, known as the Super Bowl, is impossible to upstage. Each year it enthuses 75,000 people in the stadium and some 100 million fans on TV worldwide. Nonetheless, early in February, Glendale, Arizona, hosted another icon of American showbiz when the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy’s legendary aerobatic team, started this year’s season with a flyover of the Bowl. By November, the Blues will have participated in well over 40 air shows in the United States. When they fly their complete routine, the six Angels will be aloft for well over an hour. Last year, they amazed some 15 million people. In all, since the squadron was formed in 1946, that number meanwhile totals some 427 million. To have the show unfold in its incredible precision, it needs preparing accurately and executing with maximum concentration on the job. Each performance is taped and subsequently analyzed. For a safe airshow, the aircraft need to be in technically perfect shape. Owing to the torturing loads encountered by the aircraft during flight maneuvers, the ground crew will have to support the jets more extensively than standard equipment. Since 1987, the squadron has been flying McDonnell Douglas F/A-18A/B Hornets. These are equipped with two General Electric F404 engines, in which MTU has had a role since early 2007. For the F404, the German engine maker is manufacturing the high-pressure compressor spool. For the successor model F414, which so far finds use only on the Super Hornet, MTU is also manufacturing the shrouds of the two turbines. 33
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