airliner flown without pilot

www.newscientisttech.com...

Qinetiq have flown an airliner over southern england in an attempt to see if a pilot of an aircraft can also control a 'pack' of uav's.

Due to civil aviation rules the pilot was onboard the aircraft, but sat at the back. At the same time he was controling computers for four simulated uav's.

An interesting step forward i think.

www.qinetiq.com...

I will admit to reading several dale Brown novels in a row.

If I understood the articles correctly they flew "uav" tornado's?

The article do not reveal much, I googled a bit, are they any british sites that might be full of fun info related to this?

THe big jet had a pilot (even if not in the cock pit), would they have made the tornado have pilot's too?

Dead steve

just a guy trying to strike up a conversation

Originally posted by dead steve
If I understood the articles correctly they flew "uav" tornado's?

No the aim of the programme seems to have been to develop a man-machine interface and UAV control system that would allow fast jet pilots to control multiple UAVs along with demonstrating the ability of a swarm of UAVs to operate together autonomously. This particular demonstration involved the BAC1-11 acting as a UAV surrogate along with a number of simulated UAVs all being controlled by a single operator who was situated in control station set up to be representative of a fast jet cockpit. I’m not sure whether that was onboard the aircraft or not.

The Tornado will come into it when Qinetiq put the control station into a Tornado and have an actual fast jet pilot (I’m assuming it’ll be the pilot here) control a package of UAVs. There has not been and it doesn’t seem like there will be any plans to turn a Tornado into a UAV in its own right.

I’d like to know whether the “real” aircraft to be used in the next phase will include any actual UAVs.

The fast-jet pilot was on the BAC1-11 but was not in the cockpit, he was tasked with flying the airliner and also controlling the simulated uav's at the same time. For safety reasons there was also emergency crew aboard although they didnt control the aircraft apart from take of and landing.

The evential aim would be to have a tornado type aircraft (GR6 anyone????) acting as a mother ship for a swarm of uav's all controlled by the tornado crew. Why they want to give control of the swarm to the pilot rather than the weapons officer is beyond me though.

According to Qinetiq the BAC-111 was converted into a surrogate UAV, in other words the pilot wasn’t directly controlling the aircraft. There was an emergency crew to take over flight operations but the UAV controller may have been on the ground or in the back of the aircraft.

As to why have the pilot control the swarm I imagine it’s partly because we might have to put this into a single seat Typhoon and it would probably be much easier to modify the system for use by a weapons officer rather than modify it for use by the pilot.