Comment by MarcS on July 13, 2012 at 1:52am

Hi Stephen, thanks for posting, good list of many SaA options.

Acoustic detection is a nice idea but especially here in central Europe you will get a problem with gliders... Very silent, potentially no transponder and hard to see (white...).

The next problem is the avoidance maneuver. Your opponent (manned aircraft) is probably faster so you can not find a maneuver which can not be "mirrored" by the manned aircraft. You have to guess the most likely path..

Comment by Carl La France on July 13, 2012 at 4:54am

I say put transponder  and encoding altimeter on the drone file a IFR flight plan with ATC the operator of the drone in direct contact by  radio with ATC and fly like every body else . ATC can see the drone and how high it is When there is a Medivac flight they get priority

and every body gets out of the way and the odd time a "Nut Case"that doesn't know what he is doing will get up in the air ways and he gets priority also to get him out of there  in a small plane on VFR it might be comparable

to a bird strike if they are close they go by in a blink of an eye . To hit the plane first they have to make it through the prop

Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on July 13, 2012 at 5:01am

You are supposing that the information about other vehicle is equal to avoidance capability. This is major negligence here. UAV flying at 40km/h in 20km/h winds is basically like a baloon. Or a glider evading fighter jet.

Therefore you ignore the fact that only one side can make real evasive manauver in most cases, this in turn means putting active search systems on slow UAV is pointless in all but very rare cases.

Does fighter jet has a capability to avoid a glider? no. it cannot detect it. it cannot track it. it cannot see it on time. yet, everything works so the assumption that anybody needs any sort of tracking system in order to operate safely is false. Therefore you don't need active detection system on UAV in order to operate it safely, and even beacon system is not necessary for that.

So what can be improved using mini UAV vs general and military aviation, if little can be done with probability of impact beyond segregating the airspace? Improve realibility of the machines involved, remove power transmitters and consumers, numer of components  and reduce the mass of a flying object. Assuming existing manned aviation designs as fixed, the ways is to simplify the UAVs, while removing dead mass: all those stupid avoidance systems.

You say UAV must give right of way to other aviation and therefore everybody is searching for the solution. This si exactly the wrong way round. Give UAVs the same rights as a glider and suddenly everything is solved. PlS dont tell me this is more dangerous than seeing a glider thermalling somewhere. While all the infos available about them are NOTAMS, reserved airspaces etc.

The problem is not in technology, the problem is in retarded politics that didn't witnessed a major economic downfall or a global war since 60+ years. Patching the problem by magical detection systems is like storing CO2 in your basement.

Yoiu might say it is strange to give right of way for UAVs while it is not.

You are supposed to give right of way for somebody who is:

-less maneuverable

-has slower response time

-has more predictable flight path

You do not decide right of way based on number of persons aboard, otherwise light passenger ship would have right in front of a tanker, or freight train would be required to stop if there are several cars waiting on unguarded train passes.

Comment by Carl La France on July 13, 2012 at 9:38am

Funny you should mention gliders thermalling  In commercial air craft you fly IFR all the time even on a clear day Back in the 1980,s I was coming into YXU Descended to 3,000ft slowed to 210 kts dialed up the ATIS to hear Glider activity on the 060 radial 10 nautical miles  I looked out and the windshield filled up with the back end of a glider going up and went under him. crusing at 38 kts the glider was backing into my wind shield at a speed of 172kts. I went over to the glider field after we landed and told the pilot he almost bought it right there . He never seen me until after I went by He was concentrating on staying in the thermal . Another problem we had in the early 1980's  ultra lights were using conventional air ports without radios you would be 2 miles straight in on final

when what looked like a giant bug would pull in front of you and land going 25mph

Comment by Harry on July 13, 2012 at 11:53am

Rule #1, see and avoid regardless of type of flight plan.  I used to fly gliders and I would avoid certain areas on the sectional but that didnt guarantee anything.  I remember some twin once was coming right at me and I could tell he didnt see me, so I pulled up hard to show him a better profile.  Luckily when I leveled out, he started to gently turn out of the area.  If he hadnt started to turn, my options were very limited.  Big sky, little airplane still applies but areas where traffic converges will always raise odds of collision.

Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on July 13, 2012 at 12:04pm

So guys, at the end, it worked. If the plane woudl be 3kg you wouldnt even spot him, because he woudlnt even be aiming at the same airfield. Do you guys realise tha chance meeting an UAV near airfield are similar to meeting Chilean Condor over european city? So all yoru stories remain stories of brave airmen. The last thing one will ever use is the same airfield as manned aviation for practical reasons: there is usually nothign interesting around airfields.

Comment by MarcS on July 14, 2012 at 12:20am

Krzysztof, I second your opinion that reliable sense and avoid for small UAV is nearly impossible and because of small speeds even useless. On the other hand I can not imagine regulators agreeingto the opinion that it will just work... Sooner or later something would happen and someone would be to blame... So in the end there is segregation of airspace or some kind of cooperative system mandatoryfor every "flying object". Time will tell. Again, we are talking about beyond lineof sight here...

About your argument regarding airfields I have to say that many UAV operations I know (mainly the bigger ones) are conducted AT airfields, just because regulation (in Germany) allows operations for UAV heavier than 25kg to be conducted only at these fields... Strange situation, isn´tit :-)

Comment by Peter Sunder on July 14, 2012 at 3:28am

@ Krzysztof Bosak

Your understanding of sense-and-avoid does not, I believe, reflect the reality of the situation. First of all, UAVs are difficult to see in many cases due to their size. Outside of something similar to a Mode S transponder or ADSB, this shifts the onus more on to the unmanned system to achieve some sort of resolution to a flight path conflict since a person cannot avoid what they cannot see. The claim that UAV are mostly too slow and/or unmaneuverable to make evasive maneuvers is certainly not true of systems I have flown that have light fixed wing type performance. Additionally, a survey of contemporary unmanned systems shows, with few exceptions, capabilities equivalent to or greater than LFW aircraft. Certainly, as a system decreases in size and performance your contention may becomes truer however, the idea that manned aircraft should be required to give way to what is, at that point, essentially a model size aircraft is untenable for reasons that I hope are obvious to all. As a side note to your wind comment, I just want to point out that wind is in no way a factor since the air itself is the basic unit of reference for all vehicles flying within it. Wind would only change you ground speed and track, neither of which will have any effect on aircraft attempting to avoid each other.

Additionally, I find your statement that “the assumption that anybody needs any sort of tracking system in order to operate safely is false” to be both patently false and dangerous. I am unaware of anyone within my field who shares that view. I can tell you first-hand of probably a couple dozen instances that I can personally recall where lives were in danger due to a UAV collision conflict and two instances where lives were gravely endangered by actual collisions. I can only recall a handful of near collisions when flying as a flight instructor and for the airlines even though I have thousands more hours manned than I do unmanned. Beyond my own personal antidotes, statistics I have seen all seem to tell a similar story. So yes, I will indeed tell you that “this is more dangerous than seeing a glider thermalling somewhere” because, on average, it is both in theory and reality. Certainly operations that take place with very light UAVs at very low altitude in sparsely populated areas with virtually no air traffic would be safer statistically. Unfortunately, of the tens-of-thousands of UAV operations I am personally aware of, not one falls into this category.

Also, the idea that we “Give UAVs the same rights as a glider and suddenly everything is solved” is unrealistic for several reasons not the least of which being that it would allow it right-of-way over literally 99% of all other aviation operations to include airliners.

Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on July 14, 2012 at 5:07am

Dear Peter, I am sorry to open your eyes about how closed is your circle of known experts.

First of all there is halk of Europe where you have 10 UAVs per country and GE traffic is 1/20 of that in US.

"Certainly operations that take place with very light UAVs at very low altitude in sparsely populated areas with virtually no air traffic would be safer statistically. Unfortunately, of the tens-of-thousands of UAV operations I am personally aware of, not one falls into this category."

You have missed entire photomapping business aimed at mapping isolated areas outside of cities. For us, the question ewheter to use 2kg UAV without transponder or 5kg with transponder is abou safety, sinc both are in visual range anyway, yet the simple transponder onboard means more batteries, more fuselage, larger propeller, more wings.

Therefore I am strongly agains some narrow military-oriented circles flying 20kg 'bombs' at 20km distances to influence the majority of civilian market.

And, to make things clear, WE, civilians are the majority everywhere except US, while US laws built on military-drone populated rules are being exported across western world (this is a fact we do not contest). Therefore your rules are not your local hobby anymore, they concern everybody and as a result we exercice the right to criticize the stupidity right at its source. There is a lot of money spending on research on avoidance, but the whole process is visibly lackign common sense about it's final rules of application.

One of thos unfounded tendencies is to point to ppl with more flight hours as those with more prestige, while in fact what really matters is the most sensitive part, T/O, landing and the flighr planning.

Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on July 14, 2012 at 5:16am

"About your argument regarding airfields I have to say that many UAV operations I know (mainly the bigger ones) are conducted AT airfields, just because regulation (in Germany) allows operations for UAV heavier than 25kg to be conducted only at these fields... Strange situation, isn´tit :-)"

25kg are rare animals,. what you see in Germany is what you see after you ban flying elsewhere without per-flight permission. That is nothing. You can ban birds and then conclude that much to your surprise legally recognizable/existing birds occur only at zoo. Who has 25kg toy? A local university in a large city, flying once per month during the season. I have a fleet of 20 shifting at 3 locations, 1-10 short flights per day during the season, 3-10 flights every 3-4 days outside it. What they do at the airfield in Germany is statistical noise, an artifact of their restrictive laws.

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