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Every once in a while,
it is fun to take a
moment off to think
about where us
general aviation pilots
and aircraft owners
will be in the next few
years.
T
HERE is little doubt
that we aren’t in the
heady boom times of
the 1960s and early
1970s, when general
aviation aircraft
manufacturers were
churning out thousands
of aircraft every month. Those were
times when almost everyone was keen
on going through the rigours of learning
to y, not so much as a career, but as
something important in your lifetime list of
achievements, something that was fun to
do.
To take the family away for a weekend
in your own or rented aircraft was
something to aspire to. To y as an adjunct
to your business or profession was a
bonus. And many wondered whether they
should perhaps even study to become a
professional pilot one day.
But aviation is, across the board, in a
slump. A paltry 1,000 or so certied private
aircraft are presently manufactured every
year. Even airliner order books are thinning
and delivery backlogs are shrinking. Much
of the historical changes corresponded with
worldwide economic health, but there are
several other factors to take into account
when gazing into the GA crystal ball.
The post-war boom in aviation
was largely attributable to the large
number of trained pilots, technicians and
manufacturers produced by WWII. The
baby-boomers, inuenced by their parents,
were also strongly enthusiastic about
aviation, but that generation is now retiring,
and GA is following suit. Just like the ageing
technologies, the aircraft acionados are
also getting older and greyer.
A critical look at aircraft developed
since WWII reveals that there has been
astonishingly little development in either
airframes or engines for the past 70 years.
This includes both large and small aircraft.
Aircraft structures largely still
use sheet and rivet or tube and rag
technologies. Since WWII, only wood has
largely disappeared and the use of bre
composites has grown somewhat.
On large and military aircraft, turbines
swiftly replaced pistons, but even these
engine technologies have plodded
along slowly in recent times. Turbojets
have incrementally moved to higher-
bypass turbofans in the quest for greater
efciencies, but turboprops and piston
engines have barely changed for many
decades. Pratt and Whitney’s ever popular
PT6 was rst installed on an aircraft in 1963
– more than 50 years ago.
Most embarrassing of all is that we still
rely on ancient, unintelligible, half-duplex
CHRIS MARTINUS, PRESIDENT AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA
FUTURE PLANE,
FUTURE PILOT
Volocopter ‘pilots’ need little or no flying skills, but do
have control over heading, speed and altitude.
e-volo - Nikolay Kazakov
www.sayermag.com
radio technology for communicating crucial
information.
DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGIES
Standards and regulations have long
recognised that greater automation has led
to greater safety.
Sure, Crew Resource Management
(CRM) and improved procedures have
brought tremendous gains in aviation safety
to the airlines and the travelling public, but
it is instructive that today’s airline pilots
hand-y airliners for only a few minutes of
each ight.
The correlation that the majority of
aircraft accidents are attributable to that
loathed term, ‘pilot error’, adds weight to
the move towards aircraft with greater and
more sophisticated autonomy. Put simply,
the conventional view now is that the less
the pilot ddles with the controls, the safer
the ight. Flight crews are thus being
relegated towards more of a management
and oversight function. In this era of
semi-autonomous ight, most recent
airline accidents occur when control of the
aircraft shifts between pilot and electronics
– the old “I have control/you have control”
problem, but now between man and
machine.
It’s increasingly likely that in the
commercial environment, where
passenger safety is paramount, aircraft
will become fully autonomous – the key
question is when? The technologies for
fully autonomous operation are now fairly
mature. In the military environment, drones
(I will use this popular term, rather than
RPAS, UAV, etc) have been doing much
of the dangerous work for some time. In
the USA, Reaper and Predator military
drones are already sharing civil airspace
with manned aircraft. Regulators around
the world, including South Africa, have
already promulgated rules mixing civilian-
operated drones in airspace regularly used
by commercial and GA aircraft.
It emerged at IAOPA’s World Assembly
in July this year that civilian drones now
outnumber manned aircraft by a ratio of ten
to one. This obviously creates a great deal
of unease among pilots of manned aircraft,
since the ‘see and avoid’ ability of civilian
drones is extremely limited – and collisions
are statistically inevitable. Nevertheless,
even with this current unsatisfactory
state of affairs, as of this writing, there
has yet to be a serious accident between
an unmanned and manned aircraft.
Technologies exist for autonomous aircraft
to swarm and avoid each other, but these
technologies aren’t really compatible with
sharing airspace with human pilots.
Another relevant aspect of
autonomous aircraft technologies and
their incompatibility with human pilots
is that electronic devices are capable
of piloting aircraft that are beyond the
capabilities of human pilots. A number
of military ghters trade stability for
manoeuvrability – and cannot be own
by humans without electronic y-by-wire
intervention. So too are the current spate
of multi-rotor aircraft unyable solely under
human control without their electronic
gyros, accelerometers and rapid digital
processing.
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
The most disruptive aspect of
existing technology will probably be fully
autonomous aircraft that carry cargo and/or
human passengers.
The economies of scale enjoyed by
airlines, where a single aircraft can carry
upward of 500 passengers, have allowed
them to move deeply into this realm of
largely autonomous aircraft. However, this
scale is also the Achilles heel of airline
safety and security: a single accident can
result in huge loss of life, and an airliner
packed full of hundreds of people makes
a tantalizing terrorist, or military, target.
Giant aircraft also make effective missiles
for destroying tall buildings. By contrast, an
aspirant GA terrorist would have to wrest
control of, or blow up a couple of hundred
Cherokees to gain the same effect.
The big airports that accommodate
these huge aircraft are also attractive
targets for terrorism, as recent events have
shown.
On the other hand, toy drones have
made many of these autonomous aircraft
technologies extremely inexpensive, to
CHRIS MARTINUS, PRESIDENT AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA
AOPA BRIEFING
Ehang 184 proposes that the occupants merely tap their fingers on their
destination on the touchscreen map, and the aircraft handles the rest.
civilian drones now
outnumber manned aircraft
by a ratio of ten to one.
142 SA Flyer
the extent that their rapid proliferation
has made them hazardous to GA and
commercial operations.
That leaves the grizzled general
aviation pilots in the middle, ying their
piston-powered anachronisms by pure skill
and memorised checklists. They are even
largely denied new technologies simply to
upgrade and modernise their avionics and
instrumentation – unless they build their
own kit aircraft, or have someone else build
it for them. And is this a sustainable option,
or are kit aircraft just a fad that will fade
away like the beach buggies and AC Cobra
kit cars everyone seemed to be building in
the 1960s, '70s and '80s?
At the IAOPA event in July, Pete Bunce,
President and CEO of GAMA (the General
Aviation Manufacturers Association), bluntly
stated that today “kids can’t do anything
with their hands” – too true. Today’s kids
are more enamoured with smartphones
and Pokémon than making things with their
hands, much to the despair of their parents
who fondly remember the days when kids
happily made their own toys.
Instead of beach buggies and
Cobras, today’s market desires a new
generation of cars that drive themselves
semi-autonomously and brake and park
themselves automatically. The market
wants safety, it wants the electronic
systems to ll in for lack of skill or other
inadequacies – that is the reality. Airlines
are heading this way, and GA seems to be
following.
But, airline pilots will desperately point
out that passengers won’t accept ying in
an aircraft that has no human pilot. Well,
Uber is rolling out its new eet of self-
driving Volvos in Pittsburgh as this goes to
press. Google, Apple and Tesla are not far
behind. Initially, the Uber test cars will have
a safety driver, an engineer who will take
over and study any glitches in the systems
– perhaps the old joke about the dog in the
cockpit that bites the pilot if he tries to y
the aircraft will come to pass after all.
WHAT THE GA MARKET WANTS
Several companies, most notably
Volocopter in Germany and Ehang in
China, have recognised this change in
market dynamics – for autonomous aircraft
and safety – and have already own their
manned multi-rotor prototypes.
These two companies have slightly
different approaches: Volocopter ‘pilots’
need little or no ying skills, but do have
control over heading, speed and altitude;
while the Ehang 184 proposes that the
occupants merely tap their ngers on their
destination on the touchscreen map, and
the aircraft handles all the ying, navigation
and trafc avoidance tasks by itself.
Is this the future of short-to-medium-
haul general aviation?
More importantly, are standards
organisations and regulators making
plans and studying the likelihood of some
sweeping changes coming to GA, while
still accommodating the pilot who ies a
‘vintage’ aircraft?
The regulators didn’t foresee the large
and swift proliferation of civilian drones or
make adequate provision for having them
share airspace with existing users. Will
they similarly be caught at-footed if and
when a demand for millions of personal
autonomous aircraft arises?
j
A350 cockpit. Airliners already have a high degree of automation, where
pilots only fly for a few minutes each flight. Is GA heading the same way?
