UAVs struggle to access civilian airspace

UAVs face two distinct challenges: they have to fly, and they have to be permitted to fly. As our story last week about the Florida sherriff quite deftly illustrated — as did another recent story from Los Angeles — the domestic market for UAVs continues to be hampered by the failure of the industry to access local airspace. Disappointments have been numerous, but leading them was the failure of NASA’s Access Five program, which spent only one-third of an estimated $100 million in a prematurely terminated effort to to obtain better access to civil airspace for high-altitude/long-endurance UAVs. Now it is back to the drawing board for the UAV industry.

The first step? Renaming UAVs as “UASs” (unmanned aircraft systems) to signify the air-ground network involved and emphasize that the craft are not out of control model airplanes. “The new wave of manufacturers in this industry tend to be less defense-focused and more commercial,” said Daryl Davidson of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. “Their main objective is to be able to fly their aircraft whenever and wherever they find a potential customer. Most of them are not acquainted with the complexities and the lead time associated with making significant changes to existing airspace-access regulations, and they simply don’t understand why they can’t gain easy access to the [national airspace].”

The key issue, of course, is safety. UAVs are known to suffer from operator error, and there is great concern that they could either interfere with other aircraft or crash into civilians on the ground. Two teams — the American RTCA Special Committee 203 and the European Organization for Civil Aviation Equipment (Eurocae) Working Group 73 — are currentlty working on the problem with the inrent of creating uniform international airspace safety standards that will make UAV development easier across the board. “We do have rules, but unmanned aircraft systems can’t comply with them,” said Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety Nicholas Sabatini. Leading the agenda of the joint US-Eurocae efforts are UAV performance requirements for “detect, sense and avoid” collision-avoidance system that would let UASs fly with a safety level equivalent to manned aircraft.

Such a system is considered the first step towards acceptance by civil aviation authorities, but until the working groups decide on a standard, engineers cannot begin designing the avionics. Not that it will be easy to do, considering as that any useful collision-avoidance system will have to cover a wide range of operations. As Aviation Week reported:

BLOCK QUOTE

“It’s one thing for a remotely piloted Global Hawk to climb in restricted military airspace to altitudes above Flight Level 180, where all air traffic is under positive ATC control, and then climb above FL500, where there are very few aircraft. But it’s more challenging to also support a wide range of UAS sizes when the aircraft are below 18,000 ft. Here, manned aircraft will often be flying under visual flight rules in a see-and-avoid environment.”

-read more in David Hughes’s Aviation Week report