I want to put this up because -- even though they give you no context or history -- pilotless aircraft have been patented for OVER 25 YEARS NOW!
But they would never fly REMOTE-CONTROLLED AIRPLANES into buildings or anything -- like on September 11, 2001!!!!
Ever hear of Operation Northwoods?
"Safety Fears on No-Pilot Airplanes" by MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — The plane crashed near Nogales, Ariz., because the pilot had turned off the engine and never noticed, the National Transportation Safety Board ruled Tuesday.
Normally that would be an unlikely cause of an accident. But in this case, the pilot was sitting at a control panel in a windowless trailer at Libby Army Airfield in Sierra Vista, Ariz., about 30 miles away from the plane he was flying — a U.A.V., or unmanned aerial vehicle.
The U.A.V., a 10,000-pound Predator, crashed before dawn on April 25, 2006, while doing surveillance work for the Customs and Border Patrol. Nobody was hurt and no property was damaged, but the plane, roughly the dimensions and weight of a midsize corporate jet, missed a house by about 100 yards.
The accident, which had been under investigation for more than a year, has raised concerns among aviation safety experts about U.A.V.’s, particularly as the number of such remote controlled aircraft grows.
More than 100 are now in operation around the continental United States — all four branches of the armed services fly them, and civilian agencies use them to look for lost hikers and illegal aliens, to fight forest fires and to conduct meteorological research, among other purposes.
“This accident represents some of the problems we’re facing in this whole new world,” said Kitty Higgins, a member of the safety board.
The board chairman, Mark V. Rosenker, said part of the problem was inadequate supervision and regulation of U.A.V.’s.
“We definitely need to change the mind-set from computer game-boy to pilot of an aircraft,” he said. If the object was simply to operate a computer console, with no reference to safety on the ground, “you could get an 8- or 10-year-old kid who probably could fly it better than what the pilots are doing.”
U.A.V.’s are spinoffs from military technology. They can stay in the air for 30 hours at a time, with pilots switching off every few hours.
The author of a recent Air Force report on its U.A.V.’s found that they were crashing at three times the rate of manned aircraft, mostly because of errors of the pilots who were flying the planes remotely. But the author, Robert T. Nullmeyer, said the problem was more the newness of the technology than the fact that the airplane operator was nowhere near the plane.
Still, civilian experts are worried.
“They are a potential threat to people on the ground as well as other aircraft in the air,” Capt. Brian D. Townsend, chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association’s national airspace system modernization committee, said in an interview.
The remote-controlled planes lack collision avoidance systems that are required on airliners, he said. Most also lack anti-ice equipment, he added, noting that that is more of a problem on a U.A.V. because the pilot cannot observe ice on the wings.
The Federal Aviation Administration is most concerned that the airplane cannot watch for other traffic, the way a human pilot does. In a Sept. 16, 2005, memo, the F.A.A. said that if unmanned aircraft — U.A. in its parlance — were held rigorously to its rules, “there would be no U.A. flights in civil airspace.”
“The F.A.A. is particularly concerned that U.A. operate safely among noncooperative aircraft and other airborne operations not reliably identifiable by radar, i.e., balloons, gliders, parachutists, etc.,” the memo said.
The technology has so outpaced current notions of aviation regulation that National Transportation Safety Board staff members noted that the rules giving the board its operating authority might not even apply. Its definition of accident begins when “any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight,” the board’s lawyer noted. It was the board’s first investigation of a crash of an unmanned plane.
The crash of the Predator in Arizona in April 2006 resembled a computer failure more than a plane crash.
The system had two control panels, one for the pilot and the other for the operator of its surveillance camera. The pilot’s panel had a history of freezing up, but the contractor that makes the Predator, General Atomics, could not figure out why, according to the accident investigation report.
When it froze that night, the pilot tried to switch controls to an adjacent camera operator’s panel, which was nearly identical.
But the throttle control — used on the camera operator’s panel to control the iris of the camera — was set in a position that turned the engine off. Investigators found the pilot failed to use a checklist, which would have caught the problem.
The system did not clearly alert the operator that the engine was off, and the operator, knowing something was wrong, cut his link to the plane, intending to activate an emergency procedure that would cause the plane to \fly itself to a safe location. But in that emergency mode, the plane’s on-board computer did not have the authority to restart the engine, so it crashed.
The plane also had a satellite link, but the plane’s computer had turned that link off when the engine stopped and it went to battery power."
[Beginning to think in new ways, aren't you, reader?
I would hope so, anyway.]
