Saifullah Sani
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The passenger aircraft of the future could one day be flown by remote by pilots sitting in a control room hundreds of miles away.
Tests on a new breed of civilian aircraft which use the same pilotless technology currently found in military drones begin next month in the UK.
The consortium behind the project hopes it will dramatically slash the costs of air travel, make possible new airborne services, and free pilots from potentially dangerous but essential missions.
A twin-engined Jetstream commuter jet will take off from Warton Aerodrome, Lancashire and head north entirely under remote control towards Scotland within a few weeks, The Economist reports.
Staged by government-backed consortium Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment (ASTRAEA), the test are will look at how well communications links operate with pilotless aircraft.
It will also test failsafe systems that will allow the aircraft's computers to take autonomous control of the flight should contact with the ground be broken.
ASTRAEA is a £62million programme backed by the British government and seven aerospace companies including UK firms BAE, QinetiQ and Rolls-Royce.
Modern planes are already capable of taking off, flying to a destination and landing with no human interference whatsoever.
But the Jetstream test will see whether they are able to do those things safely without a pilot - while at the same time complying with the rules of the skies.
The unmanned aircraft will need to be able to 'sense and avoid' other planes that may cross its path. In the case of large-scale commercial aircraft this is easy. In most cases these are equipped with transponders warning of the plane's presence - and sometimes its course, altitude and speed.
However, light aircraft and gliders are not legally required to be equipped with such beacons, meaning that ASTRAEA's Jetstream must also be able to 'see' through video cameras attached to image-recognition software.
In other tests, to be carried out over the Irish Sea, aircraft will be flown near to the unmanned plane, with some following a deliberate collision course to see whether the drone can recognise the danger and take evasive action.
'The results to date suggest you can do sense-and-avoid as well as a human,' Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, director of ASTRAEA, told The Economist.
The market for such a technology is potentially huge, and lucrative. In the U.S., Congress has asked aviation regulators to make unmanned aircraft work with the existing air-traffic control system as soon as 2015.
Small drones are already used commercially for things like aerial photography, but in most jurisdictions they must remain within sight of their pilot on the ground.
With the costs of pilotless aircraft much lower than manned aircraft or helicopters, such commercial drones could make tasks like road traffic monitoring, border patrols, police surveillance far cheaper.
They also have potential applications in environments which pose a risk to pilots, including monitoring forest fires or accidents at nuclear power plants.
They even have the potential for providing temporary airborne Wi-Fi or mobile phone services.
By 2020, the global market for civilian unmanned aircraft and services could, according to some analysts be worth more than $50billion, The Economist reported.
Commercial freight and postal flights could one day also lose on-board pilots, but questions remain as to whether airlines could persuade customers to board pilotless passenger aircraft - no matter what the discount.
The hope is, rather, that such flights will have just one pilot in the future, rather than the team of two found on most modern airliners.
Would you get into a plane with no pilot? Tests begin on next-generation of civilian aircraft controlled by REMOTE | Mail Online
