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19 sense and avoid (SAA) other aircraft. The Triton is designed to be able to fly not only in US national airspace but anywhere in the world; it is the first unmanned aircraft to be developed to global SAA standards. Pucciarella would go on to spend six years working on the requirements for components and training – in airworthiness, maintenance, repairs, operations and so on – for the 14.6 t maritime UAV. It is also designed for greater autonomy than standard remotely piloted aircraft including the critical SAA requirement. This begged further questions on how it would autonomously climb when needed, how it would detect and respond to weather and icing, and much more – all uncharted territory in terms of defining international unmanned operations and airworthiness. “Scaling manned aircraft standards to meet unmanned requirements is a complicated problem that changes from case to case,” Pucciarella notes. “For example, in its simplest form, holding UAS manufacturers to standards created for pilots on board the aircraft makes little sense. “But there is a core requirement for safety that determines parameters for equipment durability and ruggedness, the mean time between replacement and failure, and so on. “Manufacturers need to understand the drivers and the vernacular behind those requirements, and unless their people have been brought up in the culture of manned aviation, it’s difficult for them to get a good grasp of those metrics and make components for UAVs that are going to be safe and certifiable in our evolving regulatory environment.” Foundations Pucciarella gradually discovered that most UAS OEMs did not have such experts on hand, and there was a need for tailored and easily distributable instructions to fill the knowledge gaps. He left his defence contractor to found a UAS training and consulting company in 2013 (initially naming it ‘Alaris’ after the ancient Roman cavalry reserve), and was soon asked by the University of Maryland to help set up a testing centre that its UAS researchers could use, be it for academic studies or commercial spin-offs. “During that project, my team and I gathered huge insight into how UAS technologies were advancing in their capabilities, but continuing to lack fundamental aviation safety metrics,” he says. “Too many research projects and even commercial applications were using consumer-grade UAVs and parts – effectively toy drones. Their user manuals contained nothing on how to maintain them, so the idea of flying these unproven systems without maintenance or inspection criteria near civilians was concerning to say the least.” As he and his team worked on manuals to enable UAV users to operate and maintain such systems safely, Anthony Pucciarella | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | December/January 2021 Pucciarella (pictured with a Tigershark UAS) served as the director of operations at the University of Maryland UAS test site The AlarisPro dashboard is designed to provide an at-a-glance view of unmanned aircraft, key maintenance information and safety bulletins