20 Integrating uncrewed vehicles into controlled airspace that has evolved to handle aircraft carrying human pilots is a long and slow process. As chief technologist for future airspace operations at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, USA, Andrew (Andy) R. Lacher is charged with thinking about this goal, and how to reach it in a manner that identifies and exploits synergies with other efforts throughout NASA and the industry. He describes today’s airspace operations as very human-centric and heavily reliant on voice communication. While there is some data comms for time-critical aspects of operations, such as when an aircraft is being vectored in a terminal area by a controller, it’s all voice, he notes. “When I think about uncrewed aircraft that are highly automated and increasingly autonomous, they really don’t fit well with human-centric airspace operations, and as their numbers increase, the procedures we have are not likely to scale,” he says. “And, whether it’s UAS with a remote pilot responsible for a single flight or a remote pilot responsible for multiple flights at the same time, some of the same challenges will exist.” Lacher is wary of the term ‘autonomous’ in relation to UAS and prefers to refer to them as ‘increasingly autonomous’. “I don’t believe the flights will ever be fully autonomous, because they will always be under the guidance and management of humans on the ground.” Seeking coexistence “My vision of the future is that we will have a mechanism that will allow our automated systems to operate in most of the airspace without requiring very human-centric procedures. Any time we have to translate highly automated systems to a human process is where we run into challenges and difficulties, so we need to find a way to allow them to coexist in the same airspace,” he says. “It may take 20 or 30 years, but we will get there.” Lacher describes himself as a systems engineer and his role at NASA as that of an individual technical contributor, where he draws on his experience in industry to NASA’s chief technologist for future airspace ops tells Peter Donaldson why uncrewed aircraft will always need human beings Their master’s voice August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Fitting highly automated vehicles into an air traffic management paradigm that remains very human-centric is a major challenge for government and industry (Images courtesy of NASA)
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