Aerospace Industries Association
December 2009 Viewpoint
UAS: Shifting terrain for a new frontier
By Marion C. Blakey
President and Chief Executive Officer
Aerospace Industries Association
Many of the technological advances we now take for granted first appeared as military hardware. Global Positioning Satellites, the internet and the Humvee all originated at the Department of Defense. It’s hard to predict what military product will next enter the public domain, but moving up fast is Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Their battlefield prowess is well established; now, their potential utility in the public and commercial sectors have many in the aerospace industry working hard together and asking tough questions about how to integrate UAS into our National Airspace System.
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Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, Aurora Flight Sciences Chairman & President John Langford and FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt |
When you have tough questions, the place to go for answers is at the top. So, at AIA’s Fall Board of Governors meeting in Phoenix in November, AIA invited Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt and senior industry representatives to talk about the challenges of integrating aviation’s newest “game changer” into the civil airspace.
On the defense side, as military operations in Iraq draw down and unmanned systems return to the United States, DoD will need dramatically more airspace to accommodate a fifty-fold increase in UAS training requirements. Between 2007 and 2012, UAS flight training hours are expected to jump to 1.2 million from 30,000. The number of UAS has also jumped from about 50 tactical unmanned vehicles (most about the size of a model airplane) nine years ago to more than 2,400 today, with some as large as an airliner.
As UAS have become integrated into defense operations, it’s clear that there are many civil and commercial applications that have valuable public safety benefits -- natural disaster assessment, environmental monitoring and search and rescue, for example. Moreover, there is mounting pressure for the FAA to enable such operations as soon as possible. However, entrusted as he is with keeping our civilian airspace safe, FAA’s Randy Babbitt stated unequivocally at the AIA meeting that the era of the unmanned aircraft system in civil airspace has not yet arrived.
There are a host of issues to resolve to mesh the needs of military and commercial UAS with the requirements of operating in the civil airspace: aircraft configuration, air traffic management, performance parameters, spectrum, security, communications, human factors and pilot training. These are just a few of the “box-stretching” issues that UAS present to FAA for standards, certification and regulation.
However, all agree it’s important to step up smartly to these issues because the evolution of UAS is not going to slow down and their game-changing benefits are clear.
A new multi-agency, high-level Executive Committee consisting of FAA, DoD, DHS and NASA is sharing information learned from many combined years of experience. But there needs to be more than table-top planning. The first priority ought to be increased airspace for training and testing; not only for defense use, but for new commercial UAS products as well.
AIA believes there is a clear path forward to integrate UAS safely into our civilian airspace. We need defined goals and objectives – in other words, a roadmap -- with standards and procedures established by the FAA. We need to start collecting UAS safety data as we do for other aircraft operations. Furthermore, UAS should be included in NextGen planning and development.
These steps, along with dependable, dedicated funding and resources and a continuation of the dialogue we started in Phoenix, will result in a vibrant commercial UAS industry, beneficial public UAS applications and a fully trained UAS warfighter.
