labor saving technical change

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Drones May Be Allowed to Share U.S. Skies
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 4, 2003; Page E01


NASA launched a program this month budgeted at more than $100 million aimed at allowing
unmanned aircraft to share the skies with commercial airliners, bolstering what the
defense industry hopes will eventually be a multibillion-dollar market for drones.

The program would initially permit unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, to fly at
about 40,000 feet, which is above most commercial traffic. By the end of five years,
unmanned aircraft would be allowed to join general air traffic, flying as low as 18,000
feet. At that altitude, the aircraft could monitor border areas or check forested areas
for fires, industry officials said. The industry envisions drones eventually moving cargo
across the country.

"The ability to enter national airspace is going to be a fundamental change to aviation,"
said NASA's Jeff Bauer, the project manager.

Under existing regulations, it takes up to two months to get Federal Aviation
Administration permission to fly a drone in national airspace, limiting response to
emerging situations such as floods or earthquakes, industry officials said. In many cases,
the agency requires that a plane with a human pilot escort a drone, significantly
increasing the cost of each trip, they said.

Recently, the FAA gave the Air Force more leeway in flying Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Global
Hawk. The drone is now allowed to fly largely unfettered around the country as long as a
flight plan is filed with the FAA five days in advance and the aircraft stays above 40,000
feet, company officials said.

But the concession covers only one drone and does not reach the level of freedom the
industry envisions. Eventually, industry officials want to be able to file a flight plan
in the same manner as any manned aircraft and take off from a commercial airport instead
of an Air Force base.

NASA is funding the bulk of the cost, $100 million, and developing the program in
conjunction with the Defense Department and the FAA. The defense industry, including
Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp., is expected to contribute an
additional $30 million to $40 million. The program will develop technology, simulation
tests and policies governing the planes' use of the national airspace.

Government and industry officials have attempted for years to gain wider acceptance of the
unmanned planes but have been stymied by concerns that drones are not reliable enough to
fly over populated areas. Some point to their spotty record in combat. During the Kosovo
war, 10 times as many drones were lost as manned vehicles, according to a report from Teal
Group Corp., a defense research firm.

Drones range in size from as large as a 747 to an aircraft with a nine-foot wingspan
weighing just 10 pounds. They are operated by pilots on the ground. Critics say that if a
pilot loses contact, the unmanned aircraft could crash into a populated area.

Drones should be required to meet the same safety standards as commercial airliners,
including enhanced crash-avoidance software, said John Mazor, spokesman for the Air Line
Pilots Association, adding that NASA has not provided details of the program. "There will
be an awful lot of concerns that have to be satisfied" before drones can go into
widespread use, Mazor said.

The program will spend a lot of its money developing technology to enhance a drone's
ability to detect another aircraft and avoid it, said Bauer, the NASA project manager.
During the early phase of the program, the drones will be able to detect signals sent from
commercial jets' transponders so the pilot on the ground can avoid nearby traffic,
according to industry officials.

"You're not going to be able to utilize these things effectively if they cannot be used
safely," Bauer said.

The use of drones in domestic airspace could also raise privacy concerns, especially if
the aircraft are adapted for public surveillance, said Barry Steinhardt, director of the
Program on Technology and Liberty at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The
technological reality is that the government has the equivalent of Superman's X-ray
vision, and these unmanned planes are an example of that," he said. "Do we want to live in
a society where drone planes . . . are constantly monitoring our every activity? That's
the question we're going to have to answer."

For now, plans to allow the drones to take off and land from commercial airports instead
of Air Force bases have been postponed because of funding constraints, Bauer said. Use of
commercial airports would require an additional $200 million to $300 million investment to
gain required FAA certification for the drones' landing gear and to familiarize airport
personnel, including air traffic controllers, with the planes, industry officials said.

For the defense industry, the program is an essential first step in creating a potential
multibillion-dollar civil and commercial market for the unmanned planes, which they argue
have a place outside of combat. Mass production of the unmanned planes would lower their
prices and make them accessible to the commercial market, industry officials say.
Expanding their use to patrolling borders or shipping cargo across the country could
generate billions of dollars in revenue, they said.

But before a commercial market can be created, the industry will need to assure the public
of drones' safety, said Mike Heinz, Boeing's vice president of unmanned systems. "We would
have to deal with public concerns about how safe are these things: How do I know one of
these things will not drop in my back yard?" he said.


====================================
To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for
originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]