General Electric‘s [GE] Aviation business has entered into a cooperative research agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to evaluate the company’s flight management system used with manned aircraft for application to unmanned aircraft, marking a step toward integrating unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the national air space.
GE’s FAA-certified flight management system already operates with over 6,000 Boeing [BA] and Airbus commercial planes and is finding its way onto certain military aircraft.
“Our interest in the CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) is to take this already certified flight management system for manned aircraft and to adapt it for certified flight management for unmanned aircraft, which is a very unique approach in the industry,” Craig Hoover, director of Advanced Technology Marketing for GE Aviation, tells TR2. “Rather than taking a non-certified system and trying to certify it, in other words the idea is to extend the capabilities of the current certified system and achieve a certifiable solution for flight management for unmanned aircraft.
In addition to the FAA, GE will be working with Textron‘s [TXT] AAI Corp. subsidiary which makes the Shadow Tactual UAS for the Army and with General Atomics, which makes the Army’s Warrior UAS, a variant of the Predator. AAI has signed a separate CRADA with the FAA.
This month GE and AAI will be going into the FAA’s lab in Atlantic City, N.J., to do simulations with GE’s flight management system, using four-dimensional trajectory-based operations with the Shadow during simulated flights. Later this year the team will be using Army supplied Shadows for actual flight testing with the flight management system to prove that four-dimensional flight operations that were lab tested work in actual airspace, Hoover says.
The Shadow system has its own auto-pilot but GE’s flight management system will control that and “put the aircraft more precisely in space and time” so that it can be flown by either auto-pilot or a pilot controlling from a ground station, Hoover says.
The agreements with General Atomics are still being worked out and the plan is to fly the Warrior later on, Hoover says.
The flight management system is used by a pilot to create an aircraft flight plan, including inputs such as way points and arrival time, and then the system develops an optimum trajectory in four dimensions and during flight controls the aircraft. The flight management system “tells the auto-pilot what to do,” Hoover says.
Currently air traffic control systems manage aircraft in two dimensions but with the FAA’s Next Generation ATC system the plan is to control aircraft in four-dimensions, which will allow for increased air capacity, more optical fight trajectories, which will save on fuel, and safer operations through better separation of aircraft, Hoover says.
Under the new CRADA for UAS flight testing, the goal is to be able to have the flight management system communicate with air traffic control to negotiate a trajectory and agree on one, Hoover says. “And to do it digitally because today what happens is the unmanned aircraft operator sits at the station and he’s on the radio talking to air traffic control and they’re saying, ‘turn right, speed up go this altitude;’ with this technology we could even over a land link with air traffic control have them feed digital directions to the system and have it agree upon a trajectory and fly it and make it a lot safer and more efficient.”
Another aspect of the upcoming simulations and flight tests is to be able to file a flight plan for a UAS and allow them to fly shortly thereafter. Today, when UAS operate in, or transit, the national air space flight plans are filed days in advance and require special approvals, Hoover says.
Hoover says the current effort applies to military UAS that would fly in the nation’s air space. It will be a while before UAS are flying over largely populated areas, for example in support of homeland security missions, he says. There still needs to be other technologies incorporated into UAS such as sense and avoid systems, he says.