More than a dozen companies are currently prototyping pilotless personal air vehicles (PAVs) – drones that can be summoned via an app and which can hold up to four people. Advances in the ground-based autonomous vehicle sector have encouraged optimism about when we will see them in the air. In 2020, we’ll realise that that this possibility is still a long way off.
The challenges will be fourfold: power supply, economics, air-traffic control (ATC) and regulation. Current PAV designs are battery powered and, just as we have not yet developed batteries suitable for long-distance road travel, we are still wrestling with bringing down the weight-to-power ratio needed for batteries in the air, especially for small vehicles. And PAVs will need to be battery powered – the cost of conventional aviation fuel would make them economically inviable.
But it is ATC issues and regulation that will really slow the move from PAV prototypes to commercial flights. Current ATC systems are unable to handle a significant increase in the number of flights at low altitude, which is where PAVs will operate, so authorities will have build new ATC infrastructure to manage them. And the fact that PAVs will be pilotless brings up new problems. What happens if the PAV is hacked or loses an engine, for example? Can we be sure that its onboard computer system will be able to pick a safe emergency landing spot?
Finally there is the aftermath of the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019. As well as flawed software, lack of Federal Aviation Authority oversight has been noted as a significant contributor to these and, at the time of writing, Boeing is still waiting for FAA certification to fly the 737 MAX again. The certification of a control system like that on the 737 MAX is complex, but it’s far simpler than what will be required for the certification of PAVs with no pilot.
While battery technology is advancing quickly and ATC systems can be built, certification of new engines and on-board flight-control systems is extremely lengthy and costly under the best circumstances. The fallout from the 737 MAX crashes will undoubtedly significantly increase the time and costs of PAV certification.
In 2020, we’ll still be just dreaming of escaping the grind of the daily commute in our personal air taxi.
Mary “Missy” Cummings is professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, and a former US navy pilot
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
