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19 It was at Breconcherry that he met his most significant mentor, its then managing director David Macdonald Brown. “He taught me a huge amount about running an engineering business – everything from manufacturing and understanding just-in-time delivery, to understanding the nuances of outsourcing manufacturing to different countries. “He taught me about product development and how to handle product designers, and also about the ethos of taking an engineering product to being more than just that. Rather than focusing on the technical, he said, focus on what the solution really means for the end-user.” Unsegregated, supervised airspace Williams-Wynn joined Blue Bear in 2010, but left briefly to do other things, including helping Cosworth with its fledgling defence division, returning in 2015 to launch the Cassima simulation business and, most recently, the NBEC. Rather than a precisely defined block of airspace, the NBEC is a 17 km corridor of unsegregated, unified and supervised airspace with no hard boundaries, between Blue Bear’s headquarters in Oakley and Cranfield University, both in Bedfordshire, UK. This, he believes, is how airspace should be managed in future to integrate UAVs safely and enable the services that businesses want to provide. He argues that there are three challenging elements to the technology that have to be mastered before that can become the norm. They encompass the technology of the UAVs themselves, the ground-based monitoring systems, and the management of multiple vehicles by one person. “From the engineering side, the technology for the UAVs is there,” he says. He emphasises that industry can build UAVs that fly for hundreds of kilometres with the reliability, redundancy and conspicuity they need to fit in with manned traffic, this last quality being provided by brightly coloured airframes and lighting that makes them easy to see, as well technology such as ADS-B and FLARM (a portmanteau of ‘flight’ and ‘alarm’) traffic awareness and collision avoidance systems. Blue Bear has developed its own multi- vehicle control system that it calls the Fractionated System Human Machine Interface (FSHMI), which runs on the company’s Versatile Ground Control Station (VGCS). “We regularly control multiple UAVs with it,” he says. “We can also control ground vehicles and unmanned boats simultaneously on the same ground control station.” The FSHMI allows the operator to have any number of screens they want. “The limitation really becomes the size of the screen and the operator’s ability to handle the cognitive burden,” he says. “Many of the challenges have already been solved. We are frequently using a mix of technology ranging from COTS sensors blended with our own avionics, airframes and software,” he emphasises. “The challenge now is the integration with general aviation, or GA. In GA, we still often rely on pilots’ visual detection as the primary way of detecting other air traffic. For example, there is no current requirement for all GA aircraft to carry FLARM, ADS-B or any other tracking device,” he says. “There is a growing trend for the adoption of technology, but as this is not yet fully mandated we have to assume that the lowest level of technology will be present.” Fully sensed environment To tackle that problem, the NBEC will have primary radars that can detect uncooperative targets, and secondary radar systems that trigger any transponders that general aviation aircraft might voluntarily have installed. In addition, it has two unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems – one at Blue Bear and one at Cranfield – both of which will be able to process ADS-B and FLARM signals, along with a digital tower at Cranfield equipped with tracking cameras. The NBEC will also be covered by Ian Williams-Wynn | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2019 Initial flights at the NBEC saw Blackstart UAVs being used in short familiarisation flights. Subsequent flights will encompass the full NBEC’s corridor with its network of sensors and comms technology (Courtesy of Blue Bear Systems Research)