82 SA Flyer
Launching into a new year
is much like those after
takeoff checks: gear up,
flaps away, adjust power
settings, change radio
frequencies, keep a beady
eye on those engine
instruments and check
the circuit for conflicting
traffic. It’s time to clean
up and get settled for the
flight ahead.
W
ITH everything
buttoned up
and the aircraft
on heading for
its destination,
you turn your
attention
to the altimeter as the transition altitude
approaches. 2017 will likely be a year of
many transitions for the general aviation
pilot and aircraft owner.
As I discussed last year, little has
changed regarding GA aircraft in the past
century. The metal frame covered with
fabric is still around – take the ubiquitous
Piper Cub and the many reincarnations of
this timeless design for instance – and the
sheet metal and rivets technology of World
War 2 still makes up the majority of our light
aircraft eet – the Cessnas, Pipers, Slings
and RVs.
The use of composite laminates
has only gradually taken over. All-metal
Mooneys moved to breglass cowlings and
now, many years later, the cabin and doors
have also gone plastic. Competitor Cirrus
went all composite some years ago, but that
was still long after the rst certied fully-
composite aircraft, the Windecker Eagle,
briey entered production as far back as
1969.
In the past 50 years, perhaps the only
signicant new technology in aviation is
GPS.
THE PERSONAL LIMITS
GA aircraft have never become
as popular as their designers and
manufacturers hoped. It was expected
that private aviation would be almost as
common as owning a car. Cessna even put
an unnecessary back window into their light
aircraft to encourage buyers to think that
ying a private aircraft was little different
from driving a car.
However, the reality is that piloting an
aircraft is much more challenging than
learning to drive, and is simply not within
either the abilities or aspirations of every
man and woman. Onerous regulations and
responsibilities have not helped either.
So, as the private pilot population greys
and wanes, while the millennial generation
expects instant gratication, discarding the
CHRIS MARTINUS
PRESIDENT AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA
TRANSITIONS
No pilot needed. Aurora's modified DA42,
the Centaur, has three modes of operation:
manned, unmanned and augmented. Is this
where GA is heading?
www.sayermag.com
value of acquiring hard-won knowledge and
skills, traditional GA aircraft become less
and less attractive.
As the market shrinks, the hard-
scrabblers proliferate and promote new
regulations to extract more and more
money from the bottom of the aviation food
chain – the diminishing pool of pilots and
aircraft owners. Thus some AMOs happily
propose and support new regulations that
make maintenance more onerous and
expensive, in the hope that they will make
more money.
Even Non-Type Certied Aircraft
(NTCA) must now have their compasses
swung and altimeters calibrated by licensed
instrument technicians employed by
approved maintenance organisations. The
supposedly low-cost Approved Person (AP)
scheme for NTCA inspections is now being
regulated into eradication by forcing APs to
work under AMOs and have an expensive
xed and approved maintenance facility at
an airport. In addition, CAA and RAASA
force NTCA owners to take out liability
insurance when no such requirement has
been prescribed by law. NTCA owners are
also compelled to be members of CAA-
appointed associations. All this is making
NTCA ownership more expensive.
Regulatory proposals have also been
made by supposedly representative bodies
making it illegal for anyone other than
licensed fuel suppliers to keep their own
fuel – even if such suppliers are unable to
supply, as has so often been the case.
Training schools are very happy
that regulations will require annual PPL
renewals, instead of the usual two year
checkride, despite there being no rational
reason for doing this.
Short-sightedly, this all means more
money in the very short term.
In the medium term, it means that
GA infrastructure and markets are being
wiped out, and arguments and litigation are
likely going to characterise 2017, as the
scavengers ght over the scraps of GA.
THE AUTOMOBILE EXAMPLE
As Cessna recognized with their back
windows, there are signicant parallels
between the needs and desires of private
aviators and motorists.
Non-Type Certied Aircraft have their
roots in the homebuilding community,
where enthusiasts built aircraft in their
garages from either their own designs or
from plans. This spawned the kit aircraft
industry, in which factories would fabricate
some of the parts to make things easier
for the builder. So-called quick-build kits
soon followed and the experimental aircraft
industry boomed.
Unsurprisingly, eager entrepreneurs
offered to build the kits for a fee. Today we
have ‘production built’ aircraft which are
simply kits which have been built on behalf
of the individual who lacks the time or
inclination to build an aircraft, but is willing
to pay someone else to do it.
Similarly, back in 1964 an engineer
by the name of Bruce Meyers began
producing beach buggies in California.
The Meyers Manx, as it was called, was a
simple breglass tub body grafted onto a
shortened Volkswagen Beetle chassis. The
Manx, being light and simple, had stellar
performance, particularly off-road.
The beach buggy spawned a
large industry of hundreds of kit car
manufacturers and kit builders worldwide.
Authorities quickly placed limitations on
these vehicles, which were not subject to
the rigorous regulation and testing required
of mass-market vehicles. For example,
in the UK a limit of 200 vehicles per year
was placed on manufacturers, as well as
simplied roadworthiness inspections. This
nevertheless led to an expanding industry
of small producers.
However, in the 1990s, interest in kit
cars waned and the manufacturers of beach
buggies, AC Cobra replicas, both as kits
and completed vehicles, all but disappeared
due to regulatory pressures and their lack of
practicality compared to modern production
cars.
Will the kit and ‘production built’ kit
aircraft go the same way as the kit cars? In
all probability, yes. Although development
and innovation in production cars and
aircraft has been largely stagnant for a
number of decades, the kit car and kit
aircraft have also not seen signicant
evolution in fundamental technologies.
For the most part, cars and aircraft have
seen only incremental and gimmicky
improvements in trim, appearance and
instrumentation.
THE PARADIGM SHIFT
Airliners have seen incremental
developments in automation, to the extent
that they are almost autonomous today.
Indeed, new procedures developed by
ICAO and regulators have sought to
exclude lesser-equipped aircraft. Private
industry has expended considerable effort
and money to prove that these procedures
can still be safely hand-own by esh-and-
sinew pilots, but the indication is that those
days are coming to an end.
Although radio controlled and
autonomous aircraft have existed in one
form or another since the advent of manned
ight, the ‘drone’ of today has caused
major ructions for regulators. Why? The
answer is simply because they are largely
autonomous, thus making them very easy
for anyone to y – without training, studying
or bothering with paperwork. In a few short
years, drones (ofcially termed Remotely
Piloted Aircraft Systems, or RPAS) have
come to outnumber manned aircraft by
more than ten to one. ‘RPAS’ is really a
misnomer, since the drone does most of
the difcult piloting itself while the unskilled
‘remote pilot’ simply tells it where to go.
Well after drones had proliferated,
aviation authorities around the world
AOPA BRIEFING
CHRIS MARTINUS
PRESIDENT AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA
AIT's sensors can track an
aircraft against a visually
cluttered background and make
intelligent avoidance decisions.
84 SA Flyer
belatedly applied conventional regulations
regarding licensing of RPAS, pilots and
commercial operations, but much to the
consternation of the authorities, these
regulations have been almost universally
ignored.
Easy-to-y drones have become an
astonishingly popular commodity and
regulators simply did not understand that a
paradigm shift was taking place – and that
the old way of regulating them was just not
going to work.
GA ENTERS THE PARADIGM
Just like fully autonomous cars will be
in the showrooms in the coming years, fully
autonomous light aircraft will be available
sooner than most pilots imagine.
Many recent GA developments have
been implemented in conjunction with
Diamond Aircraft in Austria. This is perhaps
unsurprising, since Diamond’s DA42 and
DA62 are truly modern twins with all-
composite construction and turbo-diesel
engines.
A Diamond test aircraft has been ying
for over a year with their experimental
eSafe autonomous ight and landing
system, developed in conjunction with the
Institute for Aviation Systems at Stuttgart
University. The system is capable of
autonomously routing around airspaces,
remaining VFR compliant and clear of
cloud using weather radar and satellite
information, routing to an airport without
any ground or other air trafc aids,
automatically extending aps and landing
gear and then landing and taxiing off the
runway without any pilot intervention.
With unmanned drones, the main
difculty with integrating them into the
air trafc system is their inability to ‘see
and avoid’ other VFR trafc. So, another
development done in conjunction with
Diamond is the Austrian Institute of
Technology’s (AIT) intelligent vision
collision avoidance system.
The AIT system mounts a pair of
sensors on the nose of a DA42. The one
views the world in the visible light spectrum,
while the other uses the infrared spectrum,
resulting in vision superior to that of a
human. It reliably detects both cooperative
and non-cooperative obstacles, can track
an aircraft against a visually cluttered
background and makes intelligent
avoidance decisions.
These technologies are being touted as
pilot aids or are to be used in case of pilot
incapacitation, since there are regulatory
obstacles for aircraft to be operated as
purely autonomous vehicles for carrying
passengers.
However, a US company, Aurora Flight
Sciences, has developed a DA42-based
aircraft, dubbed the Centaur, which they
call an ‘optionally piloted aircraft’. The
Centaur has three modes of operation:
manned, unmanned and augmented. As
such, it offers the exibility of operating as
a well-equipped ordinary light twin or as an
unmanned drone.
The Centaur has been used in the
unmanned conguration in conjunction
with OCEARCH, a marine conservation
organisation, for locating and tracking great
white sharks off the east coast of the USA,
using infrared detection systems.
These are just a few of the autonomous
and semi-autonomous aircraft systems
that have been in development around
the world for several years, and many are
now at an advanced stage of development
and testing. These include the German
Volocopter and Chinese Ehang aircraft
which are modelled on the multicopter
designs of most unmanned drones. Other
ducted-fan designs from Israel are being
announced, and even the long-awaited
Moller Aircar may benet from these new
technologies.
WHEN CAN I BUY ONE?
There is no doubt that, technologically,
autonomous aircraft as a publicly available
commodity are just around the corner, just
like those autonomous cars that require no
driver to oversee their operation.
There is also little doubt that today’s
market is ready for personal aircraft that do
not require the owner to have any piloting
skills, training, testing, medicals or to
maintain currency.
The primary obstacle to the nal
development and marketing of such
products is the absence of regulatory
infrastructure that will enable these new
technologies to be safely integrated into the
existing air trafc system.
Unless the regulatory aspect is
addressed with some urgency, there is a
very real risk that such aircraft may take to
the skies without ofcial sanction – in much
the same chaotic way that thousands of
unmanned drones have already done.
Indeed, as this is written, I have been
informed that a technology company,
frustrated by regulatory obstructiveness
and lack of progressive rule-making, has
put together a robotic system, complete
with all sensors and actuators, that can be
placed in the pilot seat and will competently
y a light aircraft.
Someone may be pulling my leg, but
it certainly is not beyond the realms of
possibility. And what regulation covers pilot
licences for robots?
j
Image showing the ability of AIT's sensors to
identify an object against a busy background.
Not surprisingly, many recent GA developments
have been implemented in conjunction with
Diamond Aircraft's modern twins.
