fiightglobal.com 22 August-4 September 2017 | Flight International | 35
AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS
While Boeing has announced its ambition to
develop autonomous (pilotless) capability for
commercial transport aircraft, Europe has
hedged its bets.
The European Aviation Safety Agency ad-
mits a relaxed approach to companies develop-
ing pilotless small aircraft – potentially including
air taxis – and the European Commission has
financed an industry-wide research programme
called ACROSS that aims to enable both re-
duced crewing and increased safety in large
commercial aircraft.
The objectives of ACROSS – Advanced
Cockpit for Reduction of Stress and Workload- are to enable the development of technolo-
gies to help pilots in a number of ways. These
are: to cope with peak workload (dense traffic,
bad weather, emergencies); to enable re-
duced-crew operations, including single-pilot
crews, through the use of a crew monitoring
system; and to cope with crew incapacitation
by providing an “electronic standby pilot”
that would recover the aircraft to the nearest
suitable airport.
Participants include big European compa-
nies such as Airbus, BAE Systems and Thales,
along with smaller companies, universities and
interest groups such as pilot organisations.
The programme concluded and published
its findings last year. Solutions identified, ac-
cording to the Commission, are designed to
help industry develop “useful tools, technolo-
gies and guidelines” that will enable progress
towards autonomy for large commercial trans-
port aircraft, while addressing the pilot supply
problem by enabling reduced crewing.These solutions will include: technology for
automatic crew monitoring; new avionic func-
tions to improve the performance of all basic
crew tasks (“aviate, navigate, communicate
and manage systems”), especially during peak
workload situations; and the technical capabil-
ity for continued safe flight and landing in case
of crew incapacitation. With specialist crew
training, these could enable the safe manage-ment of reduced-crew operations.
The ACROSS summary calls for develop-
ment of advanced displays, capable of provid-
ing guidance for upset recovery along with
aeronautical information and mission manage-
ment assistance. It also calls for advances in
controls and interaction, and in automation and
assistance. Better crew monitoring systems are
also on the agenda.
Meanwhile, the principal adviser to the flight
standards director at EASA, Yves Morier, is re-
laxed about the prospect of companies devel-
oping autonomous small commercial aircraft
such as air taxis.
The way the regulators think about airwor-
thiness and certification nowadays is not as
prescriptive as it used to be, he says. To para-
phrase the EASA attitude: “Bring it to us with
the test results, and if you can prove equivalent
or improved safety compared with piloted ve-
hicles of the same size and in the same role, it
will be approved.”
In fact, when true autonomy becomes suf-
ficiently sophisticated to entrust it with the
control and management of airliners, Morier
suggests, it will be through lessons learned at
the smaller end of the marketplace. ■DEVELOPMENT DAVID LEARMOUNT LONDON
European researchers expect airliner autonomy to emerge from smaller aircraftFor crew incapacitation, an
“electronic standby pilot”
would recover the aircraft to
the nearest suitable airportA big hurdle will be
getting passengers to
accept pilotless aircraftChameleons Eye/REX/Shutterstockrare cases, Sinnett says. Suppose the
crew has programmed the autopilot to make
a turn, but then it does not turn and the air-
craft continues on its original course. The pi-
lots are on board to recognise such problems,
he says. They would disconnect the autopi-
lot, make the turn manually, then reconnect
the autopilot while making a note to report
the incident.
HUMANS IN CONTROL
Such a scenario involves a functional failure
but not a safety issue, Sinnett says, since a
human intervened to solve the problem The
system is designed to be extremely safe, with
any quirks managed with human monitoring
and intervention. In a fully autonomous air-
craft, the systems would have to be reliable
enough to manage themselves.
“Without the pilot in the loop to catch
that first link, it begs the question, what
would the next thing be that happens?
Would the airplane go five miles off
course?” Sinnett asks. “Some of the work
we’re doing today is to try to figure out
where all those gaps are in the design of an
airplane and how you would close those
gaps successively through a series of steps
that go from where we are today to full au-
tonomous operation.”
Boeing may also have to persuade regula-
tors not only to accept autonomous systems,
but to change the way they verify that
software is safe today. The most advanced
software in aircraft today is certificated as
airworthy using a prescriptive series of tests.
To be certificated, software code is given a
set of inputs and it must generate the same
set of outputs without variation. A fully
autonomous system, however, uses machine
learning software, which reacts differentlyto situations as flight conditions change –
sometimes in ways that are impossible
to anticipate.
“Nobody is smart enough to programme all
the potential things that can happen in the
operation of the airplane and then demon-
strate the airplane does the right thing all the
time. So we have to come up with a different
way to do it,” Sinnett says. ■❯❯