jul-aug2012

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10 FEATURE Unmanned aircraft UAS—the safety case But the payoff is huge: they do dull, dirty, dangerous and demanding jobs without putting the pilot at risk Some Australian examples of UAS use Surveillance – fishing Law enforcement Noxious weed identification; for example, Siam weed in northern Queensland Aerial photography Powerline monitoring Animal population monitoring – counts of migratory whales; feral animals in northern Australia Crop monitoring Crop and noxious weed spraying Search and rescue Customs/border surveillance Meteorology Emergency services support – firefighting. Paul Martin, a CASA-licensed UAS operator, as well as a manned helicopter pilot, has been using UAVs in his aerial photography business since 2008. ‘I think UAS will have a huge effect on safety. At the moment they’re incorrectly categorised as being a safety risk. But the payoff is huge: they do dull, dirty, dangerous and demanding jobs without putting the pilot at risk,’ he says. Peter Smith says UAS can take the risk, and the corresponding moral dilemma, out of scientific research and mercy missions. By using UAS, the question of scientific breakthrough versus loss of human life no longer arises. ‘Nobody in their right mind would go into a hurricane and fly below 1000 feet, but we flew an Aerosonde into a hurricane and got down to below 100 feet,’ he says. ‘The result was to confirm what science had suspected— that there are surface friction and low-level atmospheric effects. We got the aeroplane out of that one. You can do stuff that morally you could not expose a flight crew to.’ Smith says UAS can benefit from 100 years of safety development in manned aviation. ‘UAVs are different but they’re not unique,’ he says. ‘They’re part of a spectrum of air vehicles and need to be put into context. We don’t have to invent a brand new wheel: there are elements of existing systems that can be used. There are a huge number of issues about privacy, safety and other aspects but none of them seem to me to be more demanding than those surrounding manned aircraft.’ After a government employee was killed in a helicopter crash, the Queensland Government has decided to use UAS more widely to avoid placing employees at risk. A trial to monitor fishing off North Stradbroke Island (illegal fishing costs the industry hundreds of thousands of dollars) using UAS was the first known flight of a UAS in class C airspace, and demonstrated that UAS could do the job at least as well as a manned aircraft, while collecting terabytes of valuable data.
Flight Safety Australia Issue 87 July–August 2012 11 Sharing the skies Currently, Australian UAS operations are limited to visual line-of-sight operations in visual meteorological conditions (VMC) below 400ft AGL. However, CASA’s Phil Presgrave says the long-term goal, based on the growing competence and sophistication of the UAS industry, is to allow routine operations beyond visual line of sight in VMC/IMC in all classes of airspace by the end of 2017. To do this safely, UAS will need reliable and increasingly sophisticated safety systems. Dr Duncan Campbell, who heads the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) says ARCAA is working with global industry partners on four main areas around this broad theme. The first focuses on the development of advanced systems for navigation, automating airspace management, and importantly, on dynamic and static ‘detect and avoid’. There will be a progression towards greater onboard computational intelligence and autonomous mission replanning, dynamic path planning, and as the highest priority, an automated emergency landing system. Secondly, another research area focuses on developing aviation risk management frameworks and tools relating to UAS, and appropriate regulation. (Australia led the way in UAS regulation with its Civil Aviation Safety Regulation [CASR] Part 101, which is ten years old this year. Only one other country, the Czech Republic, has formal UAS regulation, since last year.) A third research area is focusing on multidisciplinary design and optimisation, especially human-machine interaction around multi-UAV mission command. ARCAA is working with Telecom Bretagne in France and Thales on several related projects. And finally, ARCAA is working on advanced sensing for specific UAS applications. Peter Smith sees particular potential in the development of sensors for UAS. He says that as an IT-based technology UAS have benefited from Moore’s law—the rule of thumb that says computing power (defined by the number of transistors on a chip) roughly doubles every two years, with corresponding benefits in size and cost. ‘It’s happened with the military already and when civil volume is added, I think we will get to the point where Moore’s law really shows us what can be done. CASA has a full program of planned training, licensing, certification changes and education over the short-, mediumand long-term, from now to 2030: Integrating remotely-piloted aircraft (RPA) into airspace Further developing the rule set—reviewing and updating CASR part 101, and releasing a suite of eight advisory circulars: general UAS, training and licensing, operations, manufacturing and initial airworthiness, and continuing airworthiness Regulatory oversight—for CASA, flying RPA safely is paramount. Illegal operations will be penalised Education: of the UAS sector, the aviation industry and the general public. ‘When I first came into the industry ten years ago, the only sensors were lipstick cameras like the ones fitted to Formula One cars—they cost a few thousand dollars each and you could just about see something on the ground from 3000 feet. Then there were infrared sensors, and all you could see with them was a white blob on the ground. Since then the resolution of those sensors has roughly doubled every 18 months, to the point where you can carry a useful suite of sensors in a small UAV. The latest Aerosonde for the US military allows the operator to differentiate between a shovel and a weapon in a person’s hand.
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