At a recent meeting at NASA’s Ames Research Center, members of a special committee called the RTCA worked on minimum operational performance standards for large unmanned aircraft systems. The RTCA is a public-private partnership that provides the Federal Aviation Administration comprehensive, industry-vetted recommendations about critical aviation modernization issues. The meeting focused on reviewing the latest simulation and testing activities from the various contributing organizations to develop detect-and-avoid requirements and command and control link guidelines.
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is leading a project designed to seamlessly integrate larger classes of unmanned aircraft into commercial airspace. Ames is supporting the project through a series of nation-wide computer simulations, human-in-the-loop experiments involving UAS pilots and air traffic controllers as well as field tests using NASA’s Ikhana Predator-B unmanned aircraft.
The committee reviewed NASA’s surveillance, alerting and guidance requirements for pilot-in-the-loop detect-and-avoid systems on unmanned aircraft as well as human factors guidelines for ground control station operation, including pilot workload and maneuver negotiation.
“Detect-and-avoid standards are important because the ability for unmanned aircraft to ‘remain well-clear’ of other aircraft is an important layer in the overall set of methods designed for safe operations in the National Airspace System,” said Confesor Santiago, co-project engineer of the detect-and-avoid sub-team of the NASA UAS Integration into the NAS project at Ames.
Meeting these standards would help enable unmanned aircraft systems access to our National Airspace System without isolation from other aircraft. Drone maritime patrols, wild-fire monitoring, weather research, and flood mapping could safely occur an altitude ceiling of 15,000 ft.
The RTCA recommendations on final standards are expected in 2016.