AIA: Large Passenger/Cargo UAS Market To Reach $30 Billion By 2036

Feb 26, 2018 Graham Warwick | Aviation Week & Space Technology

The advent of large commercial unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), for cargo and passengers, is closer than most people believe, and legislators and regulators should begin work now to enable their certification and introduction over the next 20 years, says a new report by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA).

Annual spending on large commercial UAS, now a few hundred million dollars on research and development, is forecast to rise to $4 billion by 2028 and reach almost $30 billion by 2036, forecasts the report by the U.S. trade group and consultancy Avascent.

Growth will be driven by demand from airlines for unmanned cargo and passenger aircraft, with their lower cost of operations, the report projects. This will begin around 2025 with short-haul cargo flights at relatively low altitude over rural areas.

Sensor-carrying large UAS will lead the way, from 2018-24

Short-haul cargo flights in rural areas will follow in 2025-31

Long-haul cargo and passenger UAS will appear around 2032

Prototypes of long-haul passenger and cargo UAS will roll out early in the 2030s, with freighter aircraft entering service on international and domestic routes by the mid-2030s. UAS will account for a small, but increasing share of passenger aircraft deliveries by 2040, the report forecasts.

The report was drawn up in consultation with manufacturers, service providers and likely users of large UAS including package delivery companies, says David Silver, vice president for civil aviation at the AIA.

“Technology paces the time line, and it should. We do not want regulation to pace innovation,” he says. “The technology is a lot nearer than people imagine. We need to start thinking about rulemaking now—how we are going to certify an unmanned aircraft for cargo or passengers—and not leave it to the end.”

Because of the time required to develop large commercial aircraft, the AIA is calling for work to begin on defining the regulations. “We can see unmanned passenger aircraft in a 2030s time frame. But given the time to design a large aircraft, for OEMs to discuss this they need to have certification targets,” he says.

Today commercial use of UAS is limited to vehicles below 55 lb. In the near term, the report expects UAS heavier than 55 lb. to be introduced for sensor-carrying missions such as infrastructure inspection, agricultural monitoring and firefighting. But the AIA believes the real value will be at the upper end of the market, says Silver.

While manufacturers of military surveillance UAS are struggling to create an equivalent commercial business, cargo and passenger UAS may prove an easier sell. “If you think about larger aircraft, the rules of the road are already there, and it comes down to the means of compliance [with certification requirements],” says Silver. “If you can drive out cost [by removing the pilot], there is an incentive for airlines to purchase them. The monetization is already built in.”

The new document—the AIA’s first market report in 20 years, Silver says—is intended to show that large commercial UAS are closer than many realize but that action will be required to enable their development and operation.

“Regulations tell us what we are allowed to do and what the limits of operation are. For manufacturers to invest in R&D, they need to know the high-level targets for meeting those regulations,” he says.

The report makes three recommendations. First is for regulators to codify near-term needs for detect-and-avoid operations, autonomous systems certification and spectrum allocation for command-and-control links. Regulators also should focus increasingly on large certifiable UAS operating alongside manned aircraft in airspace above 18,000 ft.

Secondly, international efforts should be harmonized to avoid what the AIA calls “confusing, contrary and duplicative” regulatory regimes. “There should be increased regulatory reliance to performance-based international consensus standards,” the report says. But the work of the many different industry groups developing these standards must be coordinated. Silver says.

Thirdly, the multinational Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), intended to prevent the proliferation of cruise missiles, “must be reformed to distinguish between missiles and civilian UAS,” the report recommends. The U.S. government has already launched a review of the MTCR to ease the export of military UAS, “but we need to work to make sure the guidelines are appropriate to what they are being applied to,” Silver says.

For the AIA, he says, a good outcome from release of the new report would be the creation of an FAA advisory rulemaking committee, or ARC, to make recommendations to the agency on how certification regulations could be changed to enable the development of large commercial UAS.

One possibility, he says, could be to leverage the FAA’s new Part 23 regulations—revamped in 2017 to allow the use of industry-developed consensus standards for certification compliance—to be “built upward” to include large UAS.

The report concludes that almost $150 billion could be spent on large unmanned aircraft in 2018-36. “There is a huge market out there that manufacturers are not talking about publicly, although they are privately,” says Silver. “We wanted to bring it to the attention of legislators and regulators so they can get to work now. The U.S. either leads this market, or we end up playing catch-up to Airbus or China.”