Boeing Boosts Pilotless Aircraft
Whenever some heretic neophyte innocently asks on a pilot forum, “Why haven’t airliners been automated and pilots dispensed with?”, he can be guaranteed a rabid response from the aviators.
Inundated with harrumphs, the questioner will be dismissed with the usual derogatory comments about his patently oblivious ignorance of the factors involved. However, that scenario changed somewhat last week when no less than Boeing did the patently unobvious. It received a patent application approval covering every professional pilot’s worst nightmare.
Boeing now has a patented design for a system that, “once activated, removes all control from pilots to automatically return a commercial airliner to a predetermined landing location”. The impetus for it is, like most everything else nowadays, the war on terror. According to the patent, the “uninterruptible” autopilot would be activated – either by pilots, by default, by onboard sensors, or even remotely via radio or satellite links by authorized government agencies….if terrorists were to attempt to gain control of a flight deck.
The consequences of such a system for air safety are worth contemplating.
The Aug. 7 issue of ASW (“The Relentless March of the Robot Planes”) considered the burgeoning developments in unpiloted flight. The July 31 ASW also grappled with this issue (“Europe’s Plan for Hijacking the Hijackers”). That article described a very advanced and futuristic $55 million project to create an ability to wrest back control from a band of hijackers inflight.
The system, which could only be controlled from the ground, would forcibly conduct the aircraft posing a problem to the nearest airport whether it liked it or not. It’s known as the European SAFEE project [Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment]. Boeing’s system design would seem to be a logical sequitur – or perhaps a copycat.
Whether it is to be Euro-collaborative or competitive remains to be seen. Was Boeing stimulated into acting on a patent by the European consortium’s announcement? Who knows? What is known, however, are the origins of the concept. The detailed proposal for RoboLander was submitted by the International Aviation Safety Assn. (IASA) a few days after 9/11 and first published in detail in ASW Sept. 24, 2001. See: tinyurl.com/yb8onl
A Bird In The Hand
In his Sept. 27 speech on airline security at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, President Bush said, “We will look at all kinds of technologies to make sure that our airliners are safe, and for example including technology to enable controllers to take over a distressed aircraft and land it by remote control.” At the time that proposition was widely scoffed at. Now, given the sophistication, reliability and advanced nature of unmanned flight, it would seem to be a technologically viable fall-back position for enhancing airline security.
One of the first cockpit security measures enacted after 9/11 was the code-lockable reinforced cockpit door. However, it became apparent that this barrier was not inviolable because flight attendants need to access the flight deck and pilots need to use toilet facilities. Congress started pressing for a secondary barrier system (ASW Oct. 25, 2004 and Sept. 27, 2004).
This cargo net barrier approach was seen as another frontline method of staving off a cockpit invasion via headlong rush – but it was ungainly, time-consuming to set up and dismantle and made severe inroads into space available for pax seating.
The fortress/bastion approach to sealing the cockpit hasn’t been totally successful. There have been successful cockpit invasions since 9/11, but luckily only by maniacs, neurotics and drunks – albeit sometimes with great violence.
There have been some successful old style hijacks. Few pilots have taken up the suggestion of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) of becoming trained cockpit gunmen. Only a very few airlines took up the idea of issuing TASERs or stunguns. Most of the post-9/11 measures have to some extent fallen into disrepute.
When the Helios 737 crashed due to its pilots becoming incapacitated in the climb many hours before, we agonized over the pilots having been inaccessibly sequestered in their cockpit. In fact, it’s a distinct pity that the mooted system wasn’t available to help out that hapless 737. But many of yesteryear’s flight security solutions are now being seen as what they really were – urgent interim measures.
The quest throughout has been for a universal solution to counter possible terrorist use of large aircraft as a weapon of mass destruction. Rendering an aircraft passive by having it cede control to a ground agency has always been a lingering meritorious proposition, whether pilots like it or not.
That Lingering Need
The Boeing patent authors wrote: “There is a need for a technique that ensures the continuation of the desired path of travel of a vehicle by removing any type of human decision process that may be influenced by the circumstances of the situation, including threats or further violence onboard the vehicle.”
According to the patent, existing preventative measures are less than foolproof; pilots can decide to open the lockable, bullet-proof cockpit doors and federal air marshals can be overpowered and disarmed. The detailed schematics in the patent for the Boeing design seem to have snapped up the IASA idea of taking even the decision to “go hands off” away from the pilots.
In the IASA design, this was done by having pilots regularly punch in a RoboLander disabler code every 20 minutes. Failing that periodic reset of ground zero, the system would auto-arm and self-trigger (as well as being able to be triggered for cause by the ground agency).
However, for urgent in situ immediate action enabling of the RoboLander process, either pilot would simply lift a guard and trip a switch. This would start in train the recovery phase as well as advising their ground-based command authority that “a situation” had arisen. It would conceivably also start a number of hidden cockpit and cabin cameras and microphones transmitting, via satellite, an audio-visual real-time panoramic medley of onboard cockpit and cabin events.
As per the IASA concept, Boeing has its system’s electrics and physical access sequestered and unable to be interfered with inflight — i.e., compartments would only permit access via an external entrance hatch and all related avionics and power supplies would be separated from aircraft systems via a Virgin Bus.
IASA made provision for the ground-control agency to enable reversion to onboard control in case of a greater emergency arising. It also reassured: “It’s not as if we are talking pilotless drones here, although system checkout on maintenance air-tests might require provision of a one-time-issue override key-code that could be quickly pilot-injected onboard (if the system appeared to be unreliable, inoperative or comms deficient).”
Some might see the IASA/Boeing concept as a logical development of the Oct. 1, 2001 proposal to utilize GPS satellite navigation and Ground Proximity Warning System to embargo the use of aircraft as weapons. The original idea was that the “weaponized” aircraft would simply refuse to enter specified “no-go areas”. That idea came out of Transportation Sec Mineta’s post-911 Rapid Response Team Think-Tank. (tinyurl.com/ygmmsv)
Much water has passed beneath many bridges since that gabfest on Oct. 1, 2001. In particular, there were many laughable solutions put forward – a personal favorite being: “fill airplane with soap-suds to slow down the hijacker” – with “gassing all onboard/pilots to don smoke-masks” a poor second-best. They’re all still there, at that link above. Hysterical now perhaps, but it was all indicative of the desperately somber mood a mere two weeks after the dire events of September 11, 2001.
The world has moved on but terrorism is still waiting to pounce. It has been emboldened by the survival of bin Laden and the invigorating resurgence of militant Islam in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Lebanon and the Intifada.
It’s too terrible to contemplate the carnage that could result from a terrorist takeover of an A380. Neither is anyone prepared to give the order to shoot down an incommunicado airliner. The proven reluctance to authorize that ultimate act, over numerous scenarios since 9/11, has provided the momentum for the European initiative.
It would appear that Europe and the United States have independently taken some giant steps towards a new, acceptable and achievable security goal, which is to make airliners off-limits and impractical for martyrdom attempts at large-scale cataclysm.
Whether or not pilots worldwide are fans of remote control, RoboLander would now appear to be the one solution that finally “got the guernsey”, on both sides of the Atlantic.