Pilot error, of course, is a fancy name for human factor. So how would you like a robot co-pilot as a team member having the ability to deal with pilot’s error?
Commercial aviation is already heavily automated and modern airliners are capable of largely flying themselves. According to a recent study conducted by Duke Researcher Missy Cummings, in which she interviewed 11 commercial pilots who fly both Boeing and Airbus planes, the controls are barely touched at all. Those operating Boeing 777s reported that they spent just seven minutes manually piloting their planes in a typical flight. Pilots operating Airbus planes spent half that time.
You might be surprised, but robots fly planes all the time these days. Drones are old news and there are already a few projects looking at how to use what we’ve learned from drones to boost commercial flights.
The Pentagon’s defense research agency, DARPA, is working on ALIAS - an advanced form of autopilot that can adapt and respond to changing situations. Essentially, it's a digital co-pilot. The technology is promising enough with investing $57.5 million to make the digital co-pilot a reality for military and commercial aircraft within the next decade.
The creators from DARPA believe co-pilot may stop a repeat of the Germanwings crash, where a lone pilot intentionally flew an airliner into the ground. And the 1999’s EgyptAir Flight 990, crashed in the North Atlantic with 217 people dead, attributed by U.S. investigators to a suicidal pilot. And 2012’s JetBlue Flight 191, where a pilot left the cockpit screaming about terrorists and the FO locked him out of the cockpit.
Gary Claiton, a Chairman at the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems (a non-profit trade association representing the whole unmanned aerial industry), is pretty sure that one day aviation will foremost shift towards robotic co-pilots.
“As the technologies developed for large unmanned systems become understood and trusted, we will see a reduced manning level in the cockpit. This is not to say that there will be less pilots but a backup pilot may be situated on the ground“, says Gary.
To support Gary’s opinion, there's indeed a debate in aviation circles about whether over-reliance on automation will result eroding pilots' flying skills. To calm those who are worried – the new program’s goal is to use robots to augment, rather than automate, flight.
One of the ALIAS developers, Jessica Duda, explained DARPA would like to use the humans for what the humans are really good at and the automation for what the automation is really good at.
“Airline autonomy has led to major safety gains for commercial aviation, as it reduces the workload of the pilots allowing them to manage the flight, rather than fly the aircraft”, says Richard Taylor from UK CAA’s communication department.
Still, the problem is that the passengers aren’t ready for robotic planes — and neither are human pilots. But minds can be changed. Similar concerns accompanied the removal of a human navigator from the cockpit in the 1970s, but, hey, now we are absolutely fine.
Technology is always advancing to ensure safety, to say. “There are threats but these relate to public perception and soft issues of that nature. The use of electro-optical sensors fused with other technologies has already proven that it can achieve a wider angle of view and at higher resolution that the human pilot can. Add to this that cloud detection, both distance estimation and type recognition, has been proved to be more reliable than the human. It is easy to see that new technologies will make all aviation safer“, explains Gary Claiton, the Chairman at UAVS.
Despite that, many experts are worried over the deployment of increasingly autonomous systems – some believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will not always be safer planes considering cyber attacks. But the military does it with drones all day, every day, and well-encrypted communications would go a long way to preventing that from happening, ensured ALIAS developers.
“Totally safe and secure command and control systems need to be developed to ensure the link between remote pilot and unmanned aircraft cannot be broken or interfered with. Unmanned aircraft technology has great potential in all sorts of areas, however, it is vital that this technology is developed safely”, comments Richard Taylor from UK CAA’s communication department.
Moreover, some have looked into a system in which one pilot and the robot is in the cockpit, and the others are on the ground. Most probably, it could save a massive amount of money for airlines in terms of pilots' salaries and more importantly put an end for highly-criticized Pay2Fly schemes expansion. So the robot co-pilot would work in cases such as the 9/11 attacks, in which the pilot, or a hijacker, or someone flying the plane, becomes the most dangerous thing to a specific plane's safety.
In fact, one of the commercial planes manufacturers already though about that. Boeing has already patented an "uninterruptible autopilot system" that could take over the plane from the ground. "A pilotless airliner is going to come; it's just a question of when," said James Albaugh, the president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airlines, in a talk he gave in August at the AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference, in Portland.
“As part of the UAS industry, and someone that has researched the technologies for large UAS for many years, I welcome this path of travel. It is through the extended use of these new technologies, as additional safety aids in manned aviation, that overall acceptance will be gained leading to the introduction of more and more unmanned equivalent aircraft in the future“, says Gary Claiton.
To prove the point, technology company BAE Systems recently flew a converted Jetstream aircraft – known as “The Flying Test Bed” – with no pilot in UK air space. The trial flights did have people on board, allowing a human to take control in an emergency. But, for the large part, Jetstream flew itself.
However, the biggest impact of automated systems development for UAS, some argue, will be in the general aviation segment. According to R. Steven Justice, the Director of Center of Innovation for Aerospace from American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the FAA will first require sense-and-avoid technology systems to be very reliable and robust to assure the safety of other aircraft and people on the ground, while we will see them migrate into the General Aviation segment to further improve utility and safety afterwards. Within a decade, explains R. Steven Justice, UAS derived automation technology will greatly improve the safety of the general aviation segment.
“In a country with very little GA traffic, it is much easier to introduce UAS while in the U.S. we must ensure that the wide use of UAS does not reduce the overall level of safely. There are almost 250,000 general aviation aircraft in the U.S., equal to the combined GA fleets across the rest of the world. Balancing safety and commercial interests is the challenge to the FAA as it moves forward with rulemaking“, continues Steven.
The other major challenge is the development of successful business models. It is only one year removed from the first commercial authorizations by the FAA for commercial UAS operations and we are just beginning to see the natural evolution of the business sector. The next two to three years will see many business models that fail and a smaller number that will succeed; that natural “weeding out “ process will shape the competitive landscape and drive the next round of technology development. “We have overcome such issues before with other technologies and we will be successful in integrating UAS into the everyday fabric of our lives and commerce“, revealed R. Steven Justine.
On the 5th of March 2015, an American Airlines pilot died suddenly during flight, leaving the plane's first officer to make an emergency landing with 152 people on board. The scenario is rare, but not unheard of. Seven pilots for U.S. airlines and one charter pilot have died during flights since 1994, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. UAS will allow us to do many current commercial activities without the risk to human life; the same reason UAS has become commonplace in military missions. As with any new technology we must balance the pros and cons of the technology with many issues resolved through education of the operators to minimize the negative impacts.
To get its competence and trust, the robot co-pilots of tomorrow will have to start today by exploiting niches where civilian pilots can't or won't work—just as was the case in the military or rescue operations.
“There are no barriers, just work to be done! The airspace is open, as it is for all air users, as long as Equivalents and Transparency can be proved“, concludes Gary Claiton.
With time, the systems will improve and eventually conquer additional segments of the broader market. And we believe these baby steps in automation will eventually collide with another trend in aviation - instead of a two-person cockpit, we'll see one person only, and software would serve as a backup.
Since the Germanwings crash last March, pilots’ behavior has been under scrutiny. However, researchers believe we are still a long way from switching to completely automatic, pilotless planes or even planes with just one pilot onboard. Pilotless planes, like driverless cars, will have to fit in with existing infrastructure and regulations before they can take off.
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