Will Airbus “Project Dragonfly” spell the END for Pilots?!
what actually is the Airbus dragonfly project well for me personally it's something that comes with a lot of contradicting feelings on one hand it involves some really fascinating technology stuff that could create tools that would really help Pilots maintain both situational awareness reduce our workload and probably therefore increase safety but on the other hand these same Technologies could bring changes to the industry that I think that no pilot actually want to see Australian Pilots have raised concerns about new Airbus technology inspired by the extraordinary eyesight of dragonflies stay tuned yeah if you've been watching Aviation videos for any length of time you've probably seen a discussion about which aircraft actually is the best is it a Boeing 737 or the Airbus A320 the Boeing 787 or Airbus a350 or something else we all have our favorites and often these discussions comes down to which features and equipment is the coolest in case you didn't know we Pilots we really like some cool new toys and everything that can make our life easier at work is a good thing even if many of us Boeing Pilots have some well mixed feelings about abandoning our yolks for a tray table but when it comes to aircraft systems that allow us to fly better approaches or things that can reduce our workload and increase our situational awareness at some critical moment well then we really love them obviously technology is the primary factor for making these things possible and more and more of these features becomes available over time usually after some hard lessons have been learned by the industry through accidents or incidents but sometimes it's easy to forget just how old these technologies that we actually use are what we know today as the instrument Landing system or ILS has its route back in the 1940s with other radio-based Landing systems going even further back than that but of course today these systems are getting more and more advanced and more accurate and at the same time the way that the information from these systems is being displayed on our instruments have also changed a lot we used to have to look at loads of different analog instruments that will spread out all over the cockpit but nowadays we have these huge great ifas screens where the basic flight instruments have been combined with the navigation instrument to make it just much easier and better to interpret on scan but the thing is like the ILS system if screens also aren't really new anymore this system started to become the standard in new airliners back in the early 1980s and that's over 40 years ago and the first airliner with a good enough autopilot and ILS system to make an outline was actually the Lockheed TriStar which entered service even before that already back in the 1970s now of course the screens have become much much bigger since back in the 1980s but in my 20 plus years of working as a professional pilot probably the biggest Innovation that I've seen in these systems is the introduction of ornav approaches which is basically the ability to land with the accuracy of an ILS but using GPS data instead of radio beams but basically all new systems in professional Aviation moves very very slowly and because the stakes are so high any new technology has to go through extremely rigorous testing before it gets adapted and even when it is unless it come with significant safety or economical benefits it's unlikely to be retrofitted but that doesn't mean that new cool things are not on the way in fact there are many of them that is already being in use but in smaller aircraft and they tend to stay there before making their way into the big jets and that's the way that a lot of new cockpit Electronics have been developed lately these include things like moving map touch displays for our navigation and flight management computers or things like synthetic Vision that replaces the blue sky and brown ground in our primary flight displays to show ground elevation and other useful things like the actual runway for example both of these Technologies are already in use in some airliners today but they haven't gotten very widespread use just yet even more clever Innovations like enhanced flight Vision systems that help pilots during low visibility approaches by using one or more cameras in the aircraft's nose are also finding their way into more and more airliners again after having been introduced in business Jets and other smaller planes those systems usually require a head-up display or even in some cases a special headset now these are fascinating awesome Innovations who can help us remain situational aware in challenging conditions or reduce our workload but if they are so positive then how does the Airbus dragonfly project differ from it well I'll tell you all about that after this before I continue I want to share something really personal with you as an airline pilot content creator and that it can sometimes become very stressful trying to 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the plane's nose and also in other places but rather than simply present additional visual cues to the pilot this program goes a little bit further by identifying objects landmarks and possible obstacles and then processing them to verify the plane's position dragonfly also uses voice recognition during communication with air traffic control for example when the crew are taxing out for departure where the aircraft could identify its own call sign and then use that to interpret the tax instructions into a route onto the airport map which the pilots can now follow and obviously that would be a really handy additional cross check for really busy big airports but the most interesting part of the dragonfly project is what it can do in the air now there are other devices like small quadcopter style drones for example that uses cameras to position themselves and who can even identify obstacles and measure the distance from them but these drones can only see and avoid these things when the obstacles are just a few meters away for an airline that's doing for example 150 knots on Final these type of clever cameras would have to be able to see a lot further than that and also to be able to identify what's out there in order for it to properly work now the ability to identify landmarks on the ground combined with cameras that can see in very low light or through clouds even could make it possible for Pilots to land at further reduced minimal than we currently can today but airbus's ultimate goal with this technology is to make it possible for an aircraft to make an outer land on runways that have no ILS infrastructure on the ground basically by the aircraft doing a synthetic visual approach now to put this into perspective while we use GPS based approaches today like I mentioned before these approaches can only get us down onto our minimum from that minimum we still have to be able to see the runway and land visually from there and that's because that for all its merits GPS and other satellite-based navigation system don't actually have the accuracy to get us all the way down to the runway and land properly in the touchdown Zone but the technology behind project dragonfly won't rely on GPS at least not for the actual Landing the idea here is that the system could combine information from multiple sources for the flight including the initial approach and then use visual cues to identify the runway for a safe touchdown in theory this would allow the system to Auto Land the plane on any Runway that's long enough even in bad weather no matter how little or few navigates are available Airbus is also looking into using these same sensors to enable some really interesting New Concepts in Cruise one of these is something called fellow fly something that Airbus has been working on for quite a few years now and has even test flown fellowfly involves long-haul flights where two aircraft could follow each other about three kilometers or just under two miles apart now that's way closer than the legal minimum distance between two airliners flying on the same Airway today but they could actually end up flying much closer than that if the project gets the go ahead and why would they do that well the idea here is that the rare aircraft could actually benefit from following the one in front to save fuel just like geese save energy when they fly in V formations Airbus claims potential trip fuel savings up to five percent which maybe it doesn't sound like much but it's actually a huge saving especially on long-haul routes but obviously accurate positioning between the two aircraft would be super important for this to work hence the new sensors and cameras now there's obviously much more to this story as well like they have to figure out how these two aircraft are going to come into the same airspace at the same time without having one of them having to go into the holding and burn up all that extra fuel they've saved but Airbus is working on that as well obviously on top of that they also have to satisfy all of the authorities that this is actually safe under all circumstances and this is where these sensors and cameras is going to come in very handy because that is going to provide the proof that the authorities need in order to potentially approve this type of operation but in short Airbus is bundling together a number of different Technologies under the dragonfly program all of which could really do what we Pilots want from our systems to take some workload away from us and to increase our situational awareness and to act like an additional set of eyes and ears literally but as I'm sure most of you have already guessed by now this is not all this technology can be used for the Airbus dragonfly program didn't just appear out of nowhere it builds on previous projects like attol which stands for autonomous taxi takeoff and Landing dragonfly and attol are both part of a group of projects that could enable completely autonomous flights without any Pilots now it should be said here that some of these autonomy projects doesn't necessarily involve airliners Airbus is developing a number of systems for Urban Air Mobility basically electric or hybrid electric e-vital programs that could benefit from all of these types of sensors and stuff as well and Boeing is also doing something similar by investing in a company called whiskey Airbus also make helicopters so they have a number of programs aiming to add Automation and autonomy to these designs for example with a problem that they call Deck finder which has both civil and Military applications then of course there are the pure military applications like automatic aerial refueling from a tanker or even things like swarms of drones both of which Airbus is pursuing but when it comes to specifically airliners all of these technologies that are mentioned like automatic deciphering of Taxi clearances automatic takeoffs and landings onto runways with no Wireless infrastructure sounds suspiciously like the preludes of removal of something else doesn't it so what is Airbus up to well a few months ago I made a video about the single pilot airliners and how new technologies could soon make it possible for aircraft to have only one pilot in a flight deck during the cruise portion of some of the longer flights this is something that would be relevant to specifically long-haul flights because at the moment Airlines have to roster one or two extra pilots on these flights just to give everyone a chance to go and have some rest but in the future we could potentially start to see something called extended minimum crew operations or Emco under EMC operations which Aviation authorities are currently looking at by the way the plane could take off and climb to its Cruise altitude with two pilots in the cockpit then One Pilot could go and have a rest while the other one sits alone in the cockpit of course that would require all of these extra systems to help keep the aircraft safe like I explained in that video If there's going to be a single pilot in the cockpit well then that means that the aircraft needs to be capable of flying and Landing with nobody in the cockpit since incapacitation or something just entirely unexpected could happen to that remaining pilot with two pilots in the cockpit we know that if something happens to one of us well then the other one will be fully capable of just taking the aircraft down and safely land it but with a single pilot alone in the cockpit and the possibility that an emergency could make it impossible for the other pilot to intervene quickly enough well then the aircraft will need to get to the ground by in one way or another safe on its own and that's what Airbus is trying to prove here the dragonfly aircraft wouldn't just have cameras outside it would also have equipment in the cockpit that would look at signs of piloting capacitation fatigue and and other things if that happens the aircraft will then be able to take over divert and then land in the nearest suitable Runway the system is already able to take cues from Air Traffic Control and Airline operations thanks to the voice recognition that I've talked about before and also some text-to-speech capability but in this scenario it would also select a flight path that takes it into the runway that it wants to go to by also taking into account things like airspace constraints and other considerations this is where all of these fascinating Technologies come up against this single Pilot Flying dilemma we often say that Aviation safety is Written in Blood because Through The Years accidents and serious incidents have helped introduce and develop procedures that keep us all safe and this is where we have to understand that two pilots aren't just Twice As Good As One Pilot and that's because whenever we fly we Monitor and cross-check each other all through the flight and that includes monitoring the systems and computers on board as well who actually do suffer from errors from time to time now a computer system might be able to do something like read a checklist but it will also need to know what to look for including abnormal things that aren't part of typical procedures or instrument scans and which also might be happening from the very first time and actually even things like detecting incapacitation might be more problematic than Airbus things there are already systems in cars that can detect If a driver closed their eyes for example or remove their hands from the steering wheel but over in the main Channel Metro pilot I've looked at incidents involving subtle or partial piloting capacitation that's where Pilots have continued to operate but in a degraded States now that's typically much more dangerous that's it's far from Clear what is happening even to the remaining pilot and I don't even want to think about if a computer have to try to figure that out now proving that these systems actually can detect something like that as well as fatigue and what to do if the remaining Pilot's workload suddenly skyrockets during an emergency and they're sitting there by themselves will be of the absolute highest priority before anything like this can even be considered for the purpose of reducing real eyes and brains in the cockpit I've said before that some people see single pilot operation as a natural progression after all we used to have more than two people in the Flight Deck with a flight engineer and if you go back far enough we also had a navigator and a radio operator and gradually technology made it possible for those roles to be absorbed into the existing two pilots now those who are in favor of removing one of the pilots often point out that there was resistance when the airlines went from three flight crew members down to two as well actually in some parts of the world when aircraft like the 737 was introduced that only needed two pilots some Airlines continued to fly them with three Pilots for many many years mostly on the insistence of their unions this practice gradually went away when bigger aircraft like the 757 767 and before these the Airbus a300 and the service all with the two pilot flight deck and again technology was a big part in making that development possible but going from three Pilots to two is vastly different than going down from two to one because the question here is not whether an aircraft can fly by itself it's how it will actually do so and what it will do when it's faced with something completely new that wasn't programmed into it aircraft accidents are nearly always caused by a combination of several things going wrong which all poke holes in the Swiss cheese of safety layers that we have built up over the years so reducing the redundancy created by having two professional Pilots even if it's only for a portion of the flight must be questioned even with the coolest technology in the world backing it up but here we also come to another thing that we need to discuss with developments like this not far away Over the Horizon we Pilots need to make sure that we're choosing the right battles to fight at the moment pilot shortages in many parts of the world are shining a bright light on things like the 1500 hour rule in the United States that I actually made a video about a few months ago we need hundreds of thousands of Pilots over the next 10 20 years now many U.S Pilots are
strongly in favor of this Rule and they regularly tell me so which you can clearly see if you're following me on Twitter for example but I think it's really worth looking at this rule in combination with the recent single pilot developments many assume that the point of single pilot operation is for the airlines to save a bit of money on Pilot's salaries and a wee bit more on pilot Hotel bills for example while this might be partially true my guess is that it's actually well beside the point because these are fixed costs that Airlines knows about and they can manage and they're actually not that big cost cider now what really kills an airline's profitability is the danger of regularly having to cancel flight and compensate hundreds or even thousands of passengers because of not having enough crews in their rosters and that's likely what's really making these Airline Executives drool over the idea of single pilot operations even if it involves very expensive aircraft upgrades or even slowly replacing their fleets this is why I think we have to be very smart with the fights that we choose to make sure that when we make arguments we do them only about safety artificially increasing a pilot shortage by the use of an arbitrary hour limit for new pilots might lead to better terms and conditions in the short term but if it also means that single pilot cockpits become a reality sooner it will be kind of like pissing in your pants when it's cold might feel good initially but it's probably not great in the long run what now I want to end this video by going back to airbus's fellow fly concept here's a technology that if Airbus calculations are right could save the airlines five percent on their long-haul fuel bills which amounts to tons of fuel per flight and with that tons of CO2 emissions as well that is exactly the sort of thing that I would like to see the dragonfly Technologies used for clever systems that can put two or more planes in the right airspace in the right time to get them across oceans together or just to enhance the overall safety of our current Airline operations best of all this could be done without large-scale's Replacements of aircraft fleets and crucially those tons of fuels that the airlines would save with each flight would benefit them way more than trying to say by removing a pilot from the flight deck technology is awesome when it increases redundancy and allows us to do more so let's work together to do that instead of figuring out how to do the same with less now what's your thoughts about this I would love to hear what you think so please leave a comment and a like below and subscribe to the channel if you like it if you want to support the work that we do here on the channel then please join my awesome patreon crew you can send us super thanks or buy a t-shirt you'll find loads of cool links in the description below so check them out now watch these videos next I promise that you'll find them fascinating have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye
2023-08-12 20:59
