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21 Virtual cockpit experiment The chance to develop such a system came in 2003 through his involvement with Italian volunteer civil defence emergency aviation. UAVs were still a hobby at that point, as by then he had built a career in industrial robotics, automation and computer networking. Invited to give a talk about UAVs at the ITT Galileo Ferraris college in Verona, there he met Prof Athos Arzenton, who was involved in Verona’s voluntary civil defence association, which he invited Puff to join. On the first civil defence exercise he attended he met fellow volunteer Davide Burei, a light aeroplane pilot and instructor. Together with another friend they founded the voluntary association’s Emergency Flight Department (EFD) to experiment with the use of microlights and UAVs. “There were no flight controllers available like there are today, so manually controlling a drone was a cost-effective way to get situational awareness from the air. You just needed a licenced ‘real aircraft’ pilot to fly the drone,” he says. “We demonstrated this in 2006 using a test pilot with no RC model experience. He carried out aerobatic manoeuvres we couldn’t do as experienced RC pilots, which was impressive and confirmed our supposition.” The system that enabled this was developed in collaboration with a group of German companies, one of which was involved in developing the simulator for the Eurofighter Typhoon. “We used the original Eurofighter simulator throttle, stick and pedals with a CANaerospace- to-PPM converter and a Futaba RC handset,” he says. “The FPV display was based on Olympus video goggles and a 2.4 GHz analogue link with six patch antennas and a diversity receiver. “A Sony Video Walkman GVD1000E was used to record live video on a MiniDV cassette. An analogue video overlay generator was used to overlay basic telemetry data on the live video.” During this period, he recalls, UAVs were established only in themilitary, with no rules for civil use. “Froma technical point of view, themain challenge was in developing the video and C2 links using legal frequencies and power levels,” he says. Puff spent about 10 years working with the EFD while running his first start- up, a storage area networking (SAN) consultancy as his main business. SAN is a key technology that, for example, enables multiple servers in multiple data centres to share storage facilities, adding redundancy and reliability. The UAV HMI work led him to found Advanced Aviation Technology (A2Tech) in 2005 to develop the systems into industrial-grade equipment. In this time frame, however, cost- effective autopilots, miniature stabilised camera gimbals and low-cost, user- friendly multi-copter UAVs became available. These developments reduced the pilot workload involved in UAV operations, including real-time FPV piloting. Jarno Puff | In conversation Uncrewed Systems Technology | February/March 2023 Even when UAVs are operated via the internet primarily though 4G/5G, satcom is an essential back-up. This is LikeAbird’s beySAT-NB narrowband 2.4 kbit/s link (Courtesy of LikeAbird) The backpack GCS for local UAV control is a conceptual descendent of the RealityVision system, and can be used with a VR headset or conventional screen (Courtesy of LikeAbird)