Are we Going Towards Pilotless Airliners?

Military Leading the Way

As the United States military continues to find new uses for unmanned systems, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said this week that he expects drones to soon begin to replace the Pentagon’s fleet of traditional aircraft.

While the US remains invested in its trillion-dollar F-35 program, Mabus said that the state-of-the-art fighter jets will soon be no match to unmanned aircraft.

“As good as it is, and as much as we need it and look forward to having it in the fleet for many years, the F-35 should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly,” Mabus said.

The Navy is on the verge of opening a new office specifically for drone use, Mabus said, “so that all aspects of unmanned – in all domains – over, on and under the sea and coming from the sea to operate on land – will be coordinated and championed.”

Taking cues from the US Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency, the Navy has increasingly relied on unmanned systems in recent years. The Navy successfully launched a prototype drone from an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean in 2013, and that same year the Naval Air Station North Island base near San Diego, California received an entire fleet of Fire Scout MQ-8 B drones from the Pentagon, each capable of being operated at a distance of 110 miles away.

Earlier this week, the Office of Naval Research published a video demonstrating the capabilities of its new LOCUST – or the Low-Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarming Technology program – which the Pentagon intends to use in order to deploy swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles against enemy targets.

“This level of autonomous swarming flight has never been done before…UAVs that are expendable and reconfigurable will free manned aircraft and traditional weapon systems to do more, and essentially multiply combat power at decreased risk to the warfighter,” said Lee Mastroianni, LOCUST program manager.

Meanwhile, Mabus said this week that “removing a human from the machine can open up room to experiment with more risk, improve systems faster and get them to the fleet quicker.”

Are Pilotless Airliners on Their Way?

After the recent German Wings crash, where apparently the First Officer locked the Captain out of the cockpit and crashed the plane Airbus A320 into a mountain killing everyone there is more talk of airliners flown remotely.

Some experts say the answer is yes.
"Planes can already fly themselves," said Mary "Missy" Cummings, a former Air Force pilot, an engineering professor and director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University.

"Pilots only spend 3 minutes per flight flying a plane anyway, and they don't really need to do that," she said. About 80% of plane crashes are caused by human error, she adds.

The U.S. military already flies Global Hawk drones, which are nearly the size of a the widely-used Boeing 737 passenger jets. And military data shows that drone flights crash less often than piloted flights, Cummings said.The pilotless airliner is no longer unthinkable. It is just a matter of time before airliners have one pilot, and soon after that they will have none.

The first one-pilot commercial air transport aircraft will be freighters, and that sector will almost certainly blaze the trail to the pilotless passenger aircraft. That will be a cockpitless airliner in which first class passengers will occupy the window seats at the sharp end.

The aircraft might have a pilot standing by for emergencies, but s/he will be back at base.

What are the indicators?

Airliners are already highly automated, and pilots are increasingly being told not to interfere with the automation. Meanwhile it is already accepted – or even status quo – that unmanned autonomous or remotely piloted air vehicles will take over many of the military and general aviation tasks now performed by aircraft with a cockpit.

Accidents resulting from pilot inability to cope when the automation or guidance fails – or when it is simply not available – are becoming the new killers, togteher with pilot fatigue. The common serious accidents now are loss of control or controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) resulting from pilot failure to monitor, believe or understand what is going on. You will find a brief description of this concern and the potential consequences in a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago.

The main barrier to pilotless commercial aircraft operation is the current technology of the air traffic control systems we have in use today. Although controllers are provided with predictive as well as actual traffic information now, the system is completely human-driven. From about 2020 this will begin to change, and by 2030 controllers will not control traffic, they will be available in case something anomalous happens. That’s like the airline pilot’s job has been for some time, but air traffic management is about 30 years behind onboard systems.

When Europe’s SESAR and the USA’s NextGen ATM systems have been fully up and running for a few years, aeroplanes will carry out their own trajectory management and their own traffic separation. The rest of the world is preparing to go down the same path. Pilots’ and controllers’ jobs as they are today will be redundant.

Imagine an airline crewroom in 2030. The airline has, say, 300 aeroplanes, but only about 50 pilots. About ten of these will be on duty in the crewroom at any one time. There they have several cockpit-like interfaces that can link them electronically to any of the fleet that’s airborne at the time. They have ten engine and systems engineers to help them. On the rare occasion that something anomalous occurs on an aeroplane, an alert sounds and all the flight and systems data for that aircraft are made available on the interface in real time, together with a systems diagnostic report. They can intervene as effectively as they could have done in the aircraft.

The aircraft commander will be the Purser – the senior cabin crew member – and the pilot back at base will be the driver.

It raises a lot of questions for the industry, especially the training industry and those who supply it. But also for the avionics industry. Avionics will still be essential, but the interfaces?

From the point of view of an airline management board, what’s not to like?

After the freighters have gone autonomous, the low cost carriers will be next, probably pioneered by Ryanair. The legacy carriers will not take long to follow.

While I can see the Military going in this direction first, I am wondering how many passengers would actually get on plane knowing it is actually driven by someone sitting on the ground... I can see aircraft being flown by one pilot, teamed-up with some sort of holographic co-pilot, not quite sure about  no pilots on the plane. I guess it will take a new generation of thinking, a bit like young people today reading books from electronic devices instead of paperback books...

What do you think? 

Fabrizio Poli (on the left) is an Aviation Analyst & Managing Partner of Boutique Aviation Company Tyrus Wings. He is also an accomplished Airline Transport Pilot having flown both private Jets and for the airlines. Fabrizio is also a bestselling author and inspirational speaker. You can tune in weekly to Fabrizio's business Podcast Living Outside the Cube.