SNL "Bee Hospital"
 

"Mr. Bee? I'm sorry...but...it's a drone." :(

Hard to answer without broaching barriers, but the guys that "fly" them, are in several locations for any single UAV. They get "passed" around. Plus they still need to be maintained like normal airplanes, and come with rediculously expensive, satellite based communication gear which also requires very smart folks to build and maintain.

The cost savings comes in the fact that they're small and light. You can power it with a Rotax engine (and they are).

If you're talking about trying to move huge amounts of frieght, you're not saving much by taking the two seats up front out. They'll still need to be "flown" by people, and you can tack on an army of highely educated engineers and software techs to maintain the stuff, as well as the traditional mechanics to turn the wrenches on the plane itself. This is of course, after footing an astronomical bill to develop all this.

Regardless of pro/con, everyone should strive for intellectual honesty.

Unless cargo operators are going to be doing ISR and will require PED, the manning footprint will not be an issue for them. P.S. - even outside of ISR requirements, if fighter squadrons were manned to continuous 24-hr ops 365-days a year, their manning would be 3-4 times what it is now, also.

Global Hawk is not one of the advanced platforms with respect to large RPA, there are now RPA in development that have capability to land on carriers, in-flight refuel, etc (not that such capes are required by cargo operators, but the standard in guidance/reliability is no longer Global Hawk).

Remember, combat RPA were engineered with a specific risk factor in mind so as to control cost (lack of redundancy, etc). When government administrators and engineers determine a minimum required reliability or risk level, they solve the problem mathematically. Only pilots say "current RPA are crashing, therefore no RPA in the NAS because it's too risky". No engineer equates tomorrow's reliability with today's reliability because (1) today's reliability is exactly what it was designed to be and paid for (despite the reliability that you or I actually want) and (2) today's reliability is highly influenced by human error. Current MQ-1's/MQ-9's/etc are designed with nowhere near the redundancy required of a manned asset, partly for cost and partly for mission requirements. Reliability would be increased in civilian RPA because much more redundancy would be designed in due to less acceptance of risk. Engineers also believe that reliability would be increased by reducing error and increasing autonomy in areas such as landing, etc.

Additionally, this test DID NOT hack into the UAV, it fed it spoof GPS signals to it. That redirect was only possible because (1) the UAV was hovering over/near the spoof source and (2) the UAV was using only GPS signals for guidance. Knowing what route was programmed into the UAV (hover over a point was the route programmed), the team was able to feed a false position to the UAV causing it to fly to what it thought was the correct position. In order to steer a GPS-reliant UAV to a specific point (i.e. for use as a missile), you'd have to know where the UAV was trying to go then shift the current GPS position relative to the real position exactly as compared to the relation of the real destination and the intended target. You would also have to have the ability to continuously override the valid GPS signal continuously over the entire route from point of intercept to intended destination and be able to maintain that exact differential throughout.

Additionally, large or modern UAVs don't use GPS as a sole source of navigational information. This spoof is no more a valid tactic to large/modern UAVs as it is to the airliners flying overhead. Modern nav systems use GPS as only one of several sources and all sources are compared to each other, as the GPS position diverges from the blended position of the other sources it is completely dropped from consideration by the system.

The ridiculous cost is nothing more than the cost of satellite bandwidth, there is no "special" gear. The majority of bandwidth (the LARGE majority) required is the pushing of intelligence data (FMV, etc) back to the ground stations; cargo operators wouldn't require anything more advanced than the SATCOM systems currently in use. As stated above, engineers are steering towards more autonomy anyway.

The highly educated engineers and software techs have the very same training and requirements as the majority of IT people already running around FedEx. Anyone who manages a server operation would feel very comfortable around RPA operations. A small portion of those techs receive additional training to provide maintenance for the actual control stations, but they still have computer maintenance backgrounds.

As far as the cost of R&D, luckily for Northrup/Grumman, Lockheed, et al. the government is picking up much of that tab.

Drones are coming, just not to replace pilot jobs any time soon.

Right now the big hurdle is FAA certification to operate in non-restricted airspace below 18K due to the see and avoid rules. The technology is there to certify drones with sensors that will enable them to maneuver around the VFR types down low. This will happen eventually.

Even after drones are flying with the rest of us in the U.S. airspace system, the current batch have little to no weather capability. No de-icing, low crosswind limits etc. FedEx and UPS (and pax airlines) need a product that can deliver the mail/people quickly, reliably, in bulk, and in marginal weather.

The Global Hawk cost $35 Million and up. To make drones economically viable you’d have to redesign them ($$$) to be able to perform as well or better than airliners AND at a cheaper implementation cost. You could retrofit a Boeing to fly remotely but it would still be expensive to do so and the liability issues if something goes wrong are huge driving up costs even more.

With all the technological, financial, and development issues I wouldn’t be surprised if drones never replace the batch of airline and cargo planes flying today. However I do think we will see large numbers fulfilling a role in law enforcement and surveillance roles. These are the missions that drones make financial and operational sense and exactly the types of missions they are doing today. It’s interesting to note that drones still require experienced pilots for launch & recovery and their mishap rate is vastly higher than manned aircraft.

Just because the technology is capable doesn’t mean it makes economic sense to implement on a large scale.

This is an excellent point, especially with regards to the R&D costs. But the U.S. govt had:

1)an immediate need for ISR assets that weren't commercially available elsewhere. And,
2) the ability to fund it as well.

I don't think airlines or cargo carriers have either the need or the (willingness to spend) funds at the moment on an unproven concept. Especially when the cost savings by removing pilots is pretty low in my opinion to the implementation costs.

I absolutely think it CAN be done. I just don't think it will be.

Interesting thought...
 

Somebody has to fly the drone... Its not like they are "self aware."

What if you got to fly the drone from home, and there was no more commuting...!!!???

Sorry, its Saturday.