Devising the technology is the easy bit for the Innovative Future Air Transport System (IFATS) project. The hurdles to overcome are the psychological and security issues surrounding the concept of pilotless widebody airliners operating globally with no air traffic controllers watching over them, but with remote human intervention systems on the ground in case anything unforseen happens.
Donald Rumsfeld's best-known quote describes the biggest hurdle IFATS faces: uncertainty. The former US defence secretary said: "There are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." The IFATS team has a strategy for dealing with unknown unknowns it discusses them under the heading: "Failure management when the failure is new." In this case the strategy is: "The aircraft state is downloaded to a dedicated ground infrastructure." This consists of "aircraft specialists" - humans, presumably - and "high capability simulation means". Next: "When a recovery strategy is found, it is sent back to the aircraft, the aircraft applies the recovery strategy, and the feedback is used to improve all the fleet."
But unknown unknowns are scary, and that's one of the big problems. Technology will probably, eventually, solve all the problems involved in enabling unmanned airliners to be virtually autonomous in their conduct of complete flights between two points, but if passengers refuse to buy tickets on them, the effort would be a waste of time and money.
Let's explore the psychological issues. Not just for the passengers, but for the intervention teams on the ground. For the passengers the issues are simple: having pilots in charge is the reassuringly familiar scenario. In addition, the crew and the passengers, while they are on board, know they will share the same fate - whether benign or not and one things humans are usually better at than computers is handling unknown unknowns, which often occur in the form of unanticipated combinations of known knowns.
On the other hand, a human operator on the ground who is remotely intervening in a potential disaster scenario does not share his fate with the passengers. Is this good, bad, or does it make no difference to the outcome? Industry has to find the answer to this. Psychologists will have plenty of opportunity, given the inevitable proliferation of military and civil unmanned air vehicle activity over the next few decades, to study the reactions of remote operators to unfamiliar situations, and to determine whether - on average - they react as effectively as pilots would have done in manned aircraft. On-board pilots have well-known, well-researched strengths and weaknesses. The same is not true of remote pilots, and particularly not of remote intervention specialists, who will not be pilots as we know them today.
Meanwhile, there are security issues. If an aircraft is designed to be controlled from the ground, the signals, datalinks and ground stations must be secure, or otherwise hostile parties could take control of the aircraft. It would be superfluous to spell out the multiple potential outcomes of that scenario. Additionally, hostile jamming of some or all of the multiple datalinks or signals that comprise the network-centric architecture that is the system's nervous system would have to be unable - or least unlikely - to succeed. The systems in each aircraft would have to recognise jamming signals and be able automatically to withdraw into a completely autonomous mode, or to operate without some of its data sources, which could jeopardise the traffic separation systems. That can probably be done, and Thales is certainly working on all the communications failure and interference issues today.
UAV airliners will happen. It is a question of when, not if. The whole of life will gradually become more automated, and people will come to take automation for granted. Jokes like the one about the pilot and the dog on the flightdeck (the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches anything) have been around since autopilots were invented. The UAV airliner will arrive shortly after it becomes clear that the pilot can contribute absolutely nothing to the safety of the aeroplane that it can't do itself. The fact that this remains such an uncomfortable thought testifies to how long it will take to overcome natural human resistance to the idea. But that fact should not stop projects like IFATS.
Source: Flight International
