Unmanned Vehicle Market Surging

none.

we don't even have trains without drivers, and those are on the ground, and on rails... so who is going to trust the robot to drive the plane at 30,000 feet. we will always want to have Captain Sully in the pilot's chair, no matter how smart the guidance system...

AI is proving to be an elusive target...

Chris

There are driver-less trains. We have at least one system in the UK in the Docklands Light Railway. There is always a member of staff on board, but they usual are working as conductors, in emergency they can drive or when track maintenance is under way and a lookout is needed.

In-other-words, it is a manned, unmanned train ... lol.

The principle of flying commercial aircraft without pilots or flight crew is nothing new. Automatic Landing Systems are used on most modern airliners for example; but still need to be monitored by a flight crew (aka Paris accident with A320 during the 1990's); and more recently, the Heathrow Boeing 777 accident.

Ultimately the airlines are dependent unpon passenger confidence, and it is commonsense that passengers would not entrust their lives to a fully "unmanned aircraft" even though of course as with all UAV's the operator is sitting in a computer room somewhere remotely. UAV's do have accidents or problems related to systems communication failure, so an immense effort would be required to upgrade the safety protocols of any flight control system of an "unmanned passenger aircraft".

In the end, Airlines will always have a captain aboard the aircraft, even in the distant future, but it should be remembered that at one time there would be upto "five or six" flight crew on the flight deck of an airliner, and the trend is to reduce the number to a maximum of two (Airbus); so the question is a vaild one. Personally, a captain aboard will always be required because he is able to react to any changes effecting the aircraft far better than someone say hundreds of miles away in a control centre. However, a computerised partially unmanned airliner may be possible in the future and would reduce the number of take-off and landing accidents, and possibly collision avoidance issues more effectively.

Farnborough 2010 was indeed littered with UAV's, almost every aircraft company had got one on display, but equally, from what I saw, some were no more than "model aircraft with sensors on board" and professional model makers could do better. UAV's are far from new however, I personally worked on a UAV project similar to the "Predator" some twenty-two years ago, but due to lack of interest and funding the project never got beyond prototype stage. It is big business now, and the activities over Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza have shown the immense benefit of such systems; but wrongly specified, they are little more than a flying camera or CCTV system; and many of those at Farnborough 2010 could be considered amongst that category.

With time and investment new developments will come, so do not expect any unmanned civil aircraft for at least another twenty to twenty-five years. And educating the passenger is amongst the biggest problem, not necessarily the technology!

ARJ

"Educating the passenger......" will certainly be the problem.

Back in the 1970s, a NASA representative came to our college to describe the Space Shuttle, including its landing profile.

He also mentioned, that commercial airliners had been tested using similar profiles in hopes of reducing airport approach path noise and airspace requirements. The largrest impediment to engine idle, steep nose down attitude approaches was the passenger discomfort with what they saw as the end of the world.

Technicaly practical, more so now with computer aids, but not customer acceptable.

The biggest problem with an 'efficient' landing approach is the inefficient recovery if there should be a problem. Read this as ... if we took all the air bags and seat belts out of cars, the fuel saving per year would be great ... but some people might die.