David Learmount/LONDON
Children born today may not have the choice of becoming professional pilots if they want a career for life. New-design civil and military aircraft introduced in 2025 may either not have pilots at all or, if crewed for the benefit of passengers, the pilot may provide the ultimate last resort.
That is the view of Prof David Allerton, head of flight simulation development at the UK-based Cranfield University's College of Aeronautics. Allerton does not deny that aircraft such as the Eurofighter or the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor will still be in operation in 2025, and perhaps even still in production. But he believes that from then, fixed-wing manned aircraft will be outclassed by the combat manoeuvring performance of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), while sensor technology and computing hardware will be able to out-perceive and out-think human pilots.
"Technology is not a million miles away from this already," says Allerton who warns: "Once the enemy has one, you won't be able to put up a real pilot against it."
But the future for military helicopter pilots may be brighter, Allerton concedes. He cannot yet see this role being taken over entirely by computers.
By about 2025, says Allerton on the future of piloting, sensors will be many times more reliable - using solid state technology - and considerably cheaper, allowing for multiple redundancy without adding unacceptably to weight or cost. The weakest point, he concedes, will be in the software. But he still believes that the military, economic and performance benefits of not needing either a cockpit or to train pilots or even to cope with pilot losses in combat will outweigh any disadvantages.
Imaging systems will soon have sharper vision than a human pilot, and be more able to distinguish between decoy targets and reality, says Allerton. As for the jamming of a UCAV's command communications, the same would be true for a manned aircraft. If the only advantage is that pilots can make decisions by assessing the situation, they are no more likely to be correct than a UCAV programmed to recognise a combination of circumstances which, for example, might result in the aircraft returning without delivering the strike. Whether manned or unmanned, the weapons platform must be autonomous.
In commercial and military air transport the last reasons for retaining pilots will be software limitations and passenger perceptions that pilots will add a safety factor. In 25-30 years this will no longer be true, says Allerton. He points out that between 70% and 80% of accidents include a significant human error in the causal chain.
"Maybe the aircraft will have a big switch in the cockpit," muses Allerton. If all the autonomous technology failed, the pilot could take over manually by first throwing the switch turning off the flight management computers and then assuming control. But 'manual flying' would be a relative description, as the aircraft would be fly-by-wire with no mechanical back-up.
Allerton's vision for pilotless commercial aircraft depends heavily upon a massive advance in communications, navigation and surveillance/air traffic management (CNS/ATM), the plans for which exist but the execution of which is not assured worldwide. This would require the aircraft's operating environment to be a seamless global network of CNS/ATM centres, with aircraft datalinked to the centres for routeing, trajectory and airport arrival co-ordination while being fitted with autonomous navigation systems like GPS, terrain referencing, and inertial navigation. Given that the budgets for CNS/ATM provision may still, in many cases, be controlled by individual nations in 2025, civil transport pilots may be more likely to enjoy long-term job security than military flight crew.
Source: Flight International
