Posted on 12/30/2013 3:35:02 PM PST by Seizethecarp
The Federal Aviation Administration will authorize test sites for drone aircraft in upstate New York, New Jersey and at least eight other states, the agency said on Monday, but integrating the aircraft into the nation’s airspace, set by Congress for 2015, will be phased in gradually.
The agency picked six institutions to operate test locations, which will explore how to set safety standards, how to train and certify their ground-based pilots, how to ensure that the aircraft will operate safely even if they lose their radio links with the ground and, most of all, how to replace the traditional method for avoiding collisions.
The six winners, chosen from a field of 25, included Griffiss International Airport, a former Air Force base near Rome, N.Y., which will fly some tests from Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and Virginia Tech, which will fly in Virginia and has an agreement with Rutgers University in New Jersey for testing there as well. Virginia Tech plans to conduct “failure mode” testing, meaning what happens if the aircraft’s control link is lost.
The others were the University of Alaska, which plans to test in Hawaii and Oregon as well as Alaska, the State of Nevada, the North Dakota Department of Commerce, and Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. Michael P. Huerta, the administrator of the F.A.A., said the sites provided a diversity of geography, climate and air traffic density.
The basic concept is that everything in the sky, manned or not, will use the Global Positioning System to determine its location in three dimensions, and will radio that information to the ground, where a computer will develop an integrated picture and send that to all pilots. Sophisticated drones could use that data without human intervention to sense conflicts with other aircraft.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Your personal drone will soon be mandated to interface with the national FAA tracking system it seems...
This is HUGE for the future of Cargo transport.
Imagine fleets of FedEx cargo aircraft, all remote-piloted.
Here’s a YouTube of my son’s home made quad copter with the stabilized camera system he built.
Amazon,Fed-ex,UPS,WalMart will all have theiir own fleets.
We’re gonna need helmuts and body armor just to cut the grass.
An upward-looking, automated Ma-Deuce like the auto paintball guns should suffice at first.
>>Imagine fleets of FedEx cargo aircraft, all remote-piloted.<<
Or thousands of them delivering Amazon merchandise...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le46ERPMlWU
I wish
You will NEVER see that, I’m afraid. It’s just skeet shooting, with prizes....
Islamberg is not far from Rome, NY as the crow flies . . . though I doubt drones will be keeping tabs on those fellas.
My city was chosen (Corpus Christi Tx). Wow.
Why just cargo?
Should work fine for humans too.
Probably even less pilot error once you get rid of the human pilots.
Cheaper too.
Due to liability issues, I doubt you’ll ever see remote-piloted Aircraft like that over the Mainlands, at least in the US and Europe.
However, from the coasts, on long hauls like Miami-Africa/South America, or West Coast-Asia, this has HUGE potential.
In the latest commercial aircraft we have today, the flight crew are mostly just passengers, anyway. They program the flight profile in to the computer, and the plane flies itself, pretty much. This has led to degradation in piloting skills, that has caused several accidents, like the San Fran Asiana incident.
I just knew my RC rockets were good for something.
B.O.H.I.C.A!
You first.
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