Don't worry about it. All that FANS b-s that someone wrote about is totally inadequate and insufficiently reliable. To have half a chance for this to work requires failsafe dedicated & discreet datalinks for every airplane. Using FANS as it is to try to operate an airplane remotely from the ground, there'll be a crash every week due to loss of datalink. How many times have you been on CPDLC/ADS and then got "SATCOM", "SATCOM DATA", "DATALINK LOST", "DATALINK SYS"....???
For ATC comms, this is acceptable because you just revert to secondary communications. For flight control it is woefully short. Not only has the datalink got to be totally reliable from start-up to shut-down, it has to be discreet for each individual airplane flying. To control a UAV over Afghanistan by remote control from the US is a different matter as you only have a handful to worry about. Current estimates put the number of commercial airplane traffic at 30,000 plus per day - that means 30,000 plus failsafe datalinks under worst case scenarios. Anyone who thinks this is gonna happen anytime soon is engaging in wishful thinking. But then, dreaming is free....
Last edited by gengis; 4th August 2009 at 15:41.