Unmanned Cargo Aircraft??
 

A Startup’s Plan To Cut Air Freight Costs In Half With 777-Size Drones

In 2020, Natilus’s huge unmanned planes could carry 200,000 pounds of goods across the world. But first, a 30-foot prototype must pass test runs.

http://https://www.fastcompany.com/3...77-size-drones

Brand new airframer plans to get a remote piloted, widebody, amphibious freighter flying in 3 years with less than $1M invested so far?

That's cute.

Three millennials in sports shirts.

Ten out of ten for fundraising skills, though.....

It would be more believable if it was round and edible , as this is such a pie-in-the-Sky idea , anyone with knowledge of logistics , engineering , industry best practices and a bit of pragmatism would soon realise that this idea will never materialise in it's current flawed form. No business case here.

LOL! One reason at my age I won't ever fly for a cargo outfit. You guys flying for FedEx/UPS or Kalita are the last of the " stage coach drivers". I work with drones a lot and the technology and enthusiasm of the younger gen doing it are amazing. I figure they drone a Van then move on up the food chain…..then pax ops. ;-)

I love this:
Well, because water landing rights for an amphibious 300,000# airfreighter are gonna be simple! Just land right there in Long Beach harbor and taxi on up to the docks. I'm sure such landing rights are gonna be just as simple in China, India, UAE, etc., because coordinating with the ships going in and out of those ports are going to be a snap.

Of course, there's also never bad weather or poor sea conditions right there by the docks.

All of which is just gonna save so much time and money!

I can't wait to see how the longshoremen "revolutionize" the freight industry after this thing arrives.

Good luck, and party on dudes.

Better off to retrofit a 777 instead of trying to make an all new airplane.

These designers are about to have a very painful learning experience.

Cessna Caravans already have an optionally piloted version for military use.

It's only a matter of time.

Hell, I'm sure Amazon is looking into it.

Like I've said before, just because the pilot(s) aren't in the cockpit doesn't mean they are out of the loop. You'll still need pilots somewhere. I for one would be interested in converting a room in my house to a remote cockpit office.

I could fly a morning shift from home then head over to my hangar (1 mile from my house), pull out the bug smasher and fly to lunch. I don't need to go to the big airport and deal with that crap anymore. Sleep in my own bed, hell yeah.

And, of course, the satellite time and bandwidth to operate these things transocean is just going to be so much cheaper than paying pilots.

I expect that satellite time and bandwidth will be an order of magnitude less expensive than pilots. Please correct my very rough math: ~5000 pilots at $200,000k/yr is $1B. This does not include healthcare, or travel costs, or lost cargo space, and likely several other costs.

SpaceX launches rockets to space, which then deploy several satellites, and steer themselves to land vertically on a barge floating in the ocean. I don't in the least doubt that someone, whether it be Boeing, Airbus, or a startup, will produce autonomous aircraft within the next 10 years.

I don't have to like the idea of non-piloted airplanes, but it seems to me best to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

I built my own UAV with open sourcecode and hardware. The tech is already here. The holdup is regulators and economics.

It will happen one day, in our life times for sure, but today is not that day.

Today is not the day, and we have plenty of time to figure out a plan B. If I didn't need to fly an airplane to pay the bills, I'd stop flying tomorrow.

The old timers need not worry.
It's the rookies that should think long and hard about their long term plans.

Airplane pilot shouldn't be your only skill. have a fallback.

Well, there's no shortage of trolls jealous of UPS/Fedex pilots.

:rolleyes:

I would suggest you discuss the current situation with RPA crews in the AF/ANG. The processes to do this flying are very complex, expensive and dangerous. Hence why the "GO-CO" contracts pay soo much money to hire these folks once their mil obligations are up. HUGE money! The technology must advance greatly before the cost/benefit makes this a feasible alternative to passenger/cargo operations.

It's not just stick and rudder. There are many peripherals that go into 121 flying than just that. How will you manually lower a stuck landing gear? Notice an issue before the gauges( which are presumably thousands of miles away) give you the bad news(smoke, engine failure on takeoff), flight an onboard fire, do a walkaround, etc etc. What if a lightning strike takes out the ability to receive data from a ground based system? (Saw an article about how the one of the Service Academies is teaching celestial navigation after a 10 year haitus for this reason). Also, see my reply below.

You should YouTube 'Humans Need Not Apply'. Or google The Technological Singularity.' What skill would you develop now that isn't prone to AI? Particularly over decades? The Economist recently had an article about a robotic surgeon that's being developed next. Saw on CNN what they are doing with IBMs Watson and medical care. Wired magazine had a cover recently that said 'The End Of Code.' The concept of Universal Income is being bantered around. So is The End of Work. AI won't stop evolving like the human brain. It will surpass. So technology won't just affect one profession.

In the software world failure is tolerated and problems are expected. After all the fix is just some code. Products routinely go to market with known defects.

The problem, as seen in the failure of Eclipse Aviation and the looming problems at Tesla, is that the rest of the world does not work like that. Failure is often disastrous, perhaps even fatal. Fixes after release are difficult to impossible. You don't get "do overs", you don't get to just throw out release 1.1 with a FAQ and a PR "sorry". 99% good is not good enough.

Add to that the simple truth that the real world is really, really complicated.

Business focused aircraft working in a world with a low risk tolerance are going to continue to have two pilots sitting in the thing for a long, long time.

Those of us who are trained in all aspects of aviation related black magic already have a plan B & C & D.

So I assume your UAV has a backup system in the form of a parachute or secondary power source that will let it land at a safe location following a power loss? You know, so it doesn't land on the head of some kid or go through someone's windshield...

Why land in the sea, dumb idea. It would be cheaper to by your own airport, used airframes and hire RJ drivers at 50%.

Well first of all, the worst possible case is that it takes out one of the farmers cows. I am resposible enough to not fly it where children play, or any one else for that matter. I fly it at a location reserved for such things, under rules and guidelines, backed up with insurance. It really limits what I can do, which is unfortunate for what the system is capable of. I like to fly it FPV or first person view, and really, the UAV autopilot was originally intended as a backup incase I lost the video feed. It will fly the airplane to a rally holding point where I can regain visual control and fly it as a conventional r/c airplane.
It will do perfect circles around a point in 25+ kt crosswinds, simply incredible.

Well first of all, you said the only hold-ups were regulators and economics, so I assume you mean in terms of commercial use, not "the place you fly at under controlled conditions". So if you are going to be using it commercially, you either use it in places where it can not pose a risk to people and property, or you have to have redundant systems that allow for a safe outcome during something like a power failure. I don't care about you losing the video feed (wait, you are flying it by line of sight or by video?), because if that's what you were using to determine attitude and altitude, you were already operating it illegally, I care about what happens when you lose power and it falls from the sky. Yes, I acknowledge there are "get me home" functions in case of lost communications, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how a pilot of an airplane can glide their airplane to a safe landing, or at the very least away from people and structures. With a quad-copter type device, it goes straight down. Not even a helicopter goes straight down, the pilot has the ability to select a landing spot and get it there, which is why we have minimum safe altitudes for aircraft, to ensure they have that ability. With no glide ability and no pilot to direct the UAS under a loss of power, it needs some other kind of system, like a ballistic parachute. You are right, the technology does already exist, it's just that people(businesses/companies, etc) are unwilling to use it unless forced.

We don't need to worry until cargo ships are retrofitted with a data-linked autopilot. Then, after a costly accident, the lawyers will suggest adding a "safety human" to satisfy the insurance company. Then OSHA will demand more humans to prevent fatigue. Then a bean counter will point out that trained crew members won't cost much more than safety monitors, and will save the cost of a data-linked autopilot. :rolleyes:

Discussing this with you is like talking to a liberal about guns... You clearly have zero experience with this subject, running the ignorant ALPA BS talking points that ignorant sheople pilots out there repeat who are affraid of drones. It is line of sight, because my "required spotter" has a constant line of sight of the airplane at all times. You see, I wear glasses for being near sighted. I can't wear my glasses under the goggles, so theres a moment where I need the airplane to fly itself should I have to regain visual.
Now, as far as this other crap you talk about, most engineers would say the hardest part is getting the damn airplane to fly itself, with properly tuned PID algorithms, EKF filtering, position prediction with GPS input, calibration of accelerometers, gyro's, and compasses. Lets not forget the barometer thats onboard too for maintaining altitude. Then theres all these other safety features like geo fences and terrain / obstacle clearances that are also built in. The "redundancy" is trivial, simply triplicate everything and have a discriminator that throws out the bad one out of three. Like I said, regulators and financial are the only road blocks. The engineers have all the hard stuff worked out already. It's going to happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.2de834826a38

Until safety/reliability matches piloted aircraft, it won't happen. Civilians are constantly losing control of theirs as well. It isn't as simple as you like to believe. If the airlines lost 24 aircraft in one year like the AF did, the industry would be set back decades in trying to regain the public's trust.

And what do you suppose is a much harder thing to achieve? Self driving cars or autonomous airliners?
I'd say the car... Once they have the car done, it's all over for us.

Took a quick shut eye last week heading to Cologne and looked over at the FO and he had drool puddling. Technically we were an unmanned drone. Maybe in 15 - 20 years.....not 2020 my friends.

Lordy.

Glad I don't fly with you.....

Likewise??

I mean, you actually believe that there are fewer variables in flying a jet than driving a car?

I didn't say it's not going to happen, the reason you hare having trouble talking with me is because you are not listening. What are the failures per hour of operation of each of the associated components? I've already seen plenty of the geo fences and return functions fail, resulting in destruction of the drone and damage to property. My main point is about things like electric motors, batteries, circuit boards, etc. You think these things work infinitely? You think there's never a flaw in a circuit board or part? It's not like an airplane because like I said, an airplane has the ability to glide to an area that wouldn't endanger people and we have established minimum safe altitudes for that reason. I'll ask you again, what is the backup if the battery fails to prevent the UAS from going straight down?

http://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/news/...ration-ban.jpg

Ah, I see the issue here, my uav is a fixed wing airplane, not a quadcopter. It has an Ardupilot FC on it with the airplane firmware. You are right, if the FC takes a dump, the airplane is going in. If the transmitter dies, the airplane will go to RTH mode automatically and circle over a safe spot until battery is dead, or I attempt to fly it through the telemetry link and joystick. If the elevator servo dies, its going in. If the Lipo battery pack catches fire, totall loss, if one aileron servo dies, no problem, if the receiver dies, the FC has a failsafe mode that I need to set to RTH mode. If the ESC dies with the BEC, It's goin in, even though the power board is connected to the FC providing power, it does not power the servo rails, but the gps and telemetry radio still are powered, providing a location, but its always within LOS anyhow.
Theres ways to make all of this redundant, but it's a small model, and it's maxed out on room inside. The airplane has well over 100 flights on it now, at about 8 minutes a flight. With the autopilot system, probably about 30, with 100% success rate on the RTH gps mode, and auto waypoint modes.
In the back of my mind I think about added redundancy, but there has to be some trust in said equipment. So far so good, but I will not tell it to go beyond the farmers field and put peoples property in danger, and break a number of rules set in place.
I mean, the damn thing will fly where you drop a point on a map, and do something at that point, and continue on to the next one, only limited by duration. It must be respected like a firearm. It is however safer and more redundant than a conventional r/c airplane, without these added features.

All true and I think the technology exists to make them work, but the logistics and requirements for flying over people and property have to be worked out. There are solutions and ways to do this.

I was thinking of the technical side of getting a car to stay in its lane and account for the endless amount of variations in roads, traffic, etc. In comparison, an airplane is flying in a big blue sky, and theres much more room for error in terms of positioning, traffic, etc, than in a car. So yes, thinking as an engineer, a car has million more variables that need to be accounted for to be considered safe and compatible in most driving conditions on any road. The infrastructure for an airplane, for the most part is already compatible and far simpler for automation than what a car has to deal with.
Now as far as the human aspect is concerned, of course a pilot has much more responsibility than a driver in a car. Our brains handle all the complicated stuff in driving a car, that is ultra complex for software and embedded cpu's to do. Airplanes are almost an opposite. We can easily demonstrate the computer automation in airliners, as well as model airplanes with off the shelf components totaling less than 120$.

The technology's been there. It would not take much to line up a MD11 on the runway, press takeoff and then recover it in Shanghai. The problem is everyone else will have to get put of its way and accommodate them.

I think autonomous vehicles are much further in the future than most people think.

Sure, the airport subway hasn't had a driver in 40 years-but that thing operates in a tightly-controlled, sterile environment.

The problem with all these technologies is complexity. Cars and planes operate in a challenging-and at times almost chaotic environment. Humans deal with those challenges well, machines do not.

Uber has had so many problems, they are shelving the self-driving program. Teslas have had numerous wrecks. The environment airliners operate in is far more complex.

We are decades (at least) from seeing pilotless airliners.

I'll have to disagree on the environment being more complex for an airliner than a car, at least in terms of designing a system to navigate safely in the environment. Uber started their program back up, it was only shelved until they investigated what happened. If you noticed, these self driving cars use a lot of lidar, and cameras, and need to constantly process a lot of input due to road variations, other human drivers, etc. Airliners already have 90% of the required sensors, talking on standardized data buses. Once they get the cars working to satisfaction, airliner system integration will be an afterthought. The self driving car is what will change the opinions of the regulators and populace. The self driving car is a bigger threat to us than anything else