Unmanned Systems Europe 2015: Turning Collaboration into UAS Integration
Sky-Future’s Chris Blackford speaks on a panel about commercial UAS end users at AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Europe 2015.
Whether between air traffic control and operators or between unmanned systems companies and the regulators attempting to wrap their minds around how to tackle the technology, coordination is a key theme that emerged from the first day of AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Europe 2015, being held this week in Brussels.
The day began with a keynote address from Jeff Poole, the director general of the Civil Air Navigation Services Organization, who focused on how to integrate unmanned aircraft seamlessly into current air traffic operations.
“Our task to challenge is safety,” he said. Drones are becoming increasingly common and have the potential to spread through many markets and applications, he said. It is his organization’s responsibility to work with partners and customers to ensure UAS can be integrated safely.
A particular challenge with UAS is the novice users that aren’t even aware they are violating airspace regulations, “and they do not have the training or awareness that traditional users have,” he said.
Denis Koehl, the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) program senior adviser for military affairs, concurred in his speech, saying this is the first time air traffic management has had to deal with regulating activity below 500 feet. And this will be part of the issue tackled in Horizon 2020, Europe’s framework for air traffic management.
“The challenge for us is mainly below 500 feet. … There are crazy guys who are flying there,” he said, including paragliders and lighter-than-air systems.
The solution to busier airspace is not just building more airports, he said. “This solution is not acceptable by the overall population. We need to fly more in the windows we fly today and on the runways we fly today,” he said.
Koehl said the only solution to integrating is having UAS fly in the airspace in entirety — not regulating them to certain altitudes or some distance away from certain location. And Koehl said if this goal cannot be met with SESAR’s current funding, then the goal will have to be pushed back, not compromised to partial integration.
“I am convinced the commission and all the stakeholders and the industry that we have to have the full package,” he said, which will cost an estimated 50 million euros, less than the current annual United States buy in. “That’s the game. Have we this money? The answer to be honest is no in SESAR.”
Commercialization of UAS
One of the areas UAS companies are focusing on is the oil and gas industry, which is a dangerous and costly arena to inspect manually. Representatives from UAS data inspection firms Cyberhawk and Sky-Futures discussed how they rigorously train their staffs to operate in this space.
Sky-Futures has its background in the military experience of its founders, which they applied to commercial UAS data gathering, and Cyberhawk’s past grew out of inspection. However both are focused on safe operations, with Cyberhawk even requiring its pilots to have more than 500 UAS flights before they can operate offshore. This high level of risk lends itself to automating the industry even more, according to Sky-Futures’ Chris Blackford.
“I believe everything will go to be fully autonomous,” he said, since humans are a liability and businessmen will want to reduce liability in their bottom line. However, the oil and gas industry is conservatively cautious, so it is not ready to make that leap.
Fellow panelist Ian Davies, head of engineering at commercial low-cost airliner easyJet, is coming from a very different tack. The company would like to start using unmanned aircraft to perform inspections of giant aircraft, like Airbus 380s, onsite at airports after incidents like lightning strikes. He said it is “literally impossible” to perform these inspections at busy airports like Gatwick in London because of the aircraft’s size and how busy it is. For smaller aircraft, people on cherry pickers can do the work, he said.
Currently, if the company has a delay of longer than three hours, regulations mandate they must pay their passengers more than the passengers paid for their tickets. These faster inspections will cut down on their bottom lines and free inspectors to do more sophisticated parts of the job.
“There is all the Luddite view of this will replace my job. ... The key to it is inviting the people in” to see how it will help, he said.
