jul-aug2012

‘They’re being used now,’ she
explains, ‘and in certain situations
are the mainstay’.
Flight Safety Australia
Issue 87 July–August 2012 09
Scan any newspaper today, and you’re likely to find reports of
activity by ‘drones’, a term unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)
insiders decry as negative, with its connotations of monotony,
menace and inflexibility. (The word drone is said to have
derived from the name of one of the first unmanned aircraft,
the de Havilland Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the
Tiger Moth biplane.)
Even the most respected media take a melodramatic tone.
When The Wall Street Journal visited the subject, the headline
asked ‘Could we trust killer robots?’ Likewise The Australian
in a recent feature summed up the subject as ‘Drones, lives
and liberties’, and declared ‘as civilian use of unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) grows, so does the risk to our privacy’.
The story invoked George Orwell’s 1984 in its discussion of
how police use of ‘drones’ may affect civil liberties. It did not
mention the potential uses for UAS until the sixth of its eight
columns, nor, for that matter, the ubiquitous ground-based
CCTV cameras increasingly watching over urban dwellers.
Hollywood can take much of the credit, or blame, for this
sinister image of what are more accurately, and less emotively,
known as remotely piloted aircraft (a part of unmanned aircraft
systems [UAS] or UAV, to use the older term). Reece Clothier,
senior research fellow at the Australian Research Centre for
Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) also points a finger at the
silver screen. ‘What most people know about UAS is what
they’ve seen in movies like Stealth, the Terminator series,
Eagle Eye and Mission Impossible. The movie images are of
killing machines rather than machines that can make aviation
safer,’ he laments.
The reliance on such vehicles for military surveillance and
intelligence gathering, and increasingly as weapons platforms,
in war zones such as Afghanistan (since 2001), Iraq (since
2002), Yemen (since 2002), Pakistan (since 2004) and Gaza
(since 2008) also contributes to a public misapprehension
about the benefits, purpose and safety of UAVs in civil use.
While civilian UAVs (also classified by the International
Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO] as remotely-piloted aircraft
[RPAs], to emphasise the fact that there is a human pilot in
control) have obviously benefited from military research and
development, they have also been described in the same dark
and often inaccurate terms.
This frightening portrayal is emerging as a challenge for
what is arguably the fastest-growing and most dynamic
sector of aviation.
CASA’s UAS specialist, Phil Presgrave, says there are now
19 certified UAS operators/organisations (UOC holders) in
Australia, comprising a mix of fixed-wing (8), rotary (6) and
multi-wing (4), and one airship, with 30 anticipated by the
end of 2012, and enquiries growing daily.
It is a technology which is ‘not coming, but here’ says
Peggy MacTavish, the Executive Director of the Association
of Unmanned Vehicle Systems Australia (AUVSA). ‘She
describes UAS in a memorable phrase, they’re ‘not the
leading edge any more, but the bleeding edge’. They have
moved well beyond the incubator of academic research and
into mainstream aviation use. ‘They’re being used now,’
she explains, ‘and in certain situations are the mainstay’.
Peter Smith, vice-president of AUVS-Australia, says ‘in three
years we will almost routinely be flying UAVs in selected
situations to provide information about the position, movement
and severity of bushfires. It will be done at night, at low
altitude, using sensors like synthetic aperture radar to look
through the smoke.’
A paper presented at a recent UAS conference identified
over 650 applications for UAS.