Pilotless Plane To Be Tried Out By BAE Systems In UK Airspace | Technology | Sky News (http://news.sky.com/home/technology/article/16248435)

Oh s*#t...:(

Hardly news, they've been flying it for about the last 5 years in mixed airspace in the UK.

G

I wonder how they programmed in the sixth sense required to tell when something is about to go wrong on the J31.

They had an experienced Jetstream Captain called Roger sat in the front to do that bit.

G

Coming to an airspace near you

Plane Without Pilot To Go On Trial Over UK - Yahoo! News UK (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/plane-without-pilot-trial-over-uk-114122038.html)

Ah, I see how brilliant :) develop tech for aircraft to fly without a pilot so long as there's a pilot there for when the tech can't do it :)

^ sounds oddly familiar :rolleyes:

Also discussed at http://www.pprune.org/professional-pilot-training-includes-ground-studies/488245-news-today.html (now merged here!)

Anyhow - nothing new - I went to a conference presentation on this 4+ years ago. NLFC/CAe at Cranfield have been trialling this aircraft for a while, with their Test Pilots in a safety role, and the aircraft testing its various technologies in non-segregated airspace for 5+ years so far as I know.

A necessary move towards the inevitability of true UAVs being operated, particularly in the civil world, which too many commercial interests want to prevent happening eventually.

G

It would be too hard to accept a pilotless airplane for a general public. Usually people have barely any or no clue at all how an airplane flies (at least aerodynamicaly). Therefore I believe even in a distant future there will be a pilot monitoring (pretty much what you do now during the cruise, but the landing is a tricky bit), but again with even less workload on a pilot monitoring the person might get over-relaxed and not be capable of taking apropriate actions in case of emergency. Personally I believe pilotless comercial airplane is or in a VERY distant future maybe by the end of the century or a next ones or not gonna happen.

I'm not convinced. People will accept just about anything so long as its price is justified, i.e. very cheap. If the media says it's safe then they'll believe it.

Apple iPad anyone? Or how about buying clothes from Next?

Think of the comments before the first driverless trains came along (I remember being shocked in a theme park somewhere in Europe that there was no driver...). Now thousands of people use the Docklands railway every day in London. Even the Glasgow Metro is planning on going driverless.
To be honest - I don't think public acceptance is going to be the issue.

There appears to be the same mentality here that wanted a man to walk in front of car with a red flag!

Pilot-less aircraft have been flying for more than 30 years within UK airspace and range from Sea Vixens out of Llanbedr in the 70's to advanced modern drones at very high altitudes.

Even astronauts have little if anything to do with the take-off, re-entry and parachute return to Mother Earth!

The basic safety and utility of the vehicle isn't really an issue; the big issue HWB is a combination of sense-and-avoid and something called "reversionary logic".

The aircraft (or more precisely a BAeS led consortium called ASTRAEA) is actively looking at those issues - how to sense and appropriately take avoiding action from conflicting traffic (which may not be transponder equipped of-course) and how to show as good judgment as a current professional pilot in the event of in-flight emergencies and how that is subsequently handled.

There's a lot of work there to be honest.


The difference between this and various military/space projects is that those simply had their own private lump of airspace to operate in, whilst up to now civil UAVs have been relatively small and either operated in very quiet places (like BAS's UAVs operated in the antarctic) or with line of sight to a human operator.

G

I think that's one of the main issues is going to be mixing aircraft (or cars and buses for that matter) that are "pilotless" with ones that are not. There's a great deal to be gained from knowing what you expect another person to do in a given scenario, for instance sometimes you have to look at a driver in the car to have an idea of whether or not he's going to cut you up or let you out, or do something totally unexpected.

If the Autopilot was called Thomas, or any other persons name, the majority of the public would suddenly become okay with it I suspect. Personifying technology gives most people the personal connection they feel they need to be content with it and to trust it.

Why do Humans feel the need to create technology to replace themselves in every conceivable way though? What are we left with when everything is done by robots? Don't say, "we'll be fixing the robots that brake down", because I'm pretty sure we'll have created robots to do that for us already!

I don't think the human pilot will be replaced - more that someone with the Pilot-in-Command responsibilities will be sitting somewhere 'off aircraft'.

I was recently at the SFTE Symposium in Amsterdam and I had a chance to chat with a gentleman from Northrop Grumman, he was presenting a paper on the X-47 (X-47B UCAS (http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html)) taxiing test campaign.
According what the test team experienced, not having a pilot on board showed both pros and cons:
- they could identify a difference in braking power on the wheels although the braking system was perfectly symmetrical
- the pilot would have compensated the braking asymmetry and just reported that brakes needed some tuning; maybe the braking actual deficiency in this way would have never been discovered
- discovering the asymmetry created a lot of unexpected headaches resulting in a substantial program delay (what else?)

I agree with those saying that a self-commanding machine has no 6th sense, but the horizon is surely made by more and more perfected devices, which will replace human intelligence with huge databases... we may like it or not.
As an engineer I will always have a chance to work on these machines, but as a pilot I find it really frustrating....

After flying up from Cranfield mid November G-BWWW made what appears to be a sense and avoid test flight on Nov 29

On a number of occassions when other traffic came within 10 miles the a/c seemed to turn to avoid , regardless of the "conflicting" traffic's altitude.

The range rings around G-BWWW are five and ten miles.

Not sure if the sortie was curtailed as it didnt last long.

http://satcomuk.yolasite.com/g-bwww.php