Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words
The picture below is the penultimate image sent from an unmanned aircraft after it almost became part of the first UAV and commercial aircraft mid-air collision. The next image shows the UAV on its way towards the ground having been knocked into an unrecoverable flight upset by the aircraft’s wake turbulence.
Figure 1. A very near miss between a German Army Luna UAV and an Airbus A300
Now I’d make the point that mixing it up with commercial aircraft was not high on the list of operational scenarios considered when developing military UAVs. One might assume that this became an implicit assumption of the design.
Operating the UAV system in a low intensity conflict where both military and commercical flights must coexist, and where systems of deconfliction are rudimentary at best the potential for a classic ‘interaction’ accident (as nearly happened here) within an ad hoc system of systems has been introduced.
This neatly illustrates the problem faced by safety practitioners, it’s not the hazards we can predict that bite us but the unknown hazards that a system with new capabilities introduces, or alternately taking a well understood system and operating outside the experience base.
Now one might assume that the UAV control station was manned at the time, and probably it was. But unlike an aircraft there is nothing to stop an operator from walking out to say ‘answer a call of nature’. Not such a problem in a highly disciplined and structured organisational context as the military, but as UAVs become more pervasive, cheaper, smarter (and their operators less skilled) will this always be true?
Figure 2. A German Army (Luna) UAV control station illustrating the significant differences between piloting an RPV and a traditional manned aircraft.
Looking ahead how will we manage the possibility of fully autonomous vehicles that are waiting in the wings? Current air traffic control is based (largely) upon voice communication, will this be workable in the future?
How willl air traffic control deal with high flying ’micro’ UAVs, which could still do significant damage if sucked into an engine for example. And similarly what of the concept of ‘swarm’ UAVs which autonomously interact and demonstrate emergent behaviour? What about hackers or jamming of RPV data links?
How will the FAA’s ‘free flight’ concept interact with unmanned and/or fully autonomous air vehicles in this regard? For example if path deconfliction is used to prevent collision this presupposes that paths (and stay out areas) can be defined ‘a priori’ during mission planning. If a full ‘free flight’ capability is implemented then will automation or remote operators be expected to make flight critical decisions in a less structured and more complex environment?
Imagination is I think a necessary prerequisite for identifying new hazards and dealing with them before they result in a smoking hole in the ground…
