Unmanned aircraft flies in UK civil airspace | Hacker News Reader

Unmanned aircraft flies in UK civil airspace

nats.aero

22 pointsmaxbaines8 comments

I was a little disappointed that article was about a pilot flying a plane from the ground and not about a plane that flew itself.

Having a human in the loop does bring to mind some fun possibilities though. Imagine one pilot managing several planes at once only interceding at times too out of the norm for the autopilot. Or perhaps imagine a network of Uber pilots all over the world managing planes in their spare time (1).

Either way unmanned aircraft certainly would have made Castaway a much different movie (2).

(1) Whimsy not position.

(2) Two hours of a camera-shot of an empty beach.

    > unmanned air freight

There are some pretty interesting possibilities there. I wonder what percentage of price the pilots in the air adds to current costs.

I see this more as reducing the risk for current air freight, think an emergency delivery to a ship or oil rig in severe weather conditions.

Current generation drones don't handle severe weather conditions very well.

Even larger military drones, such as the well known Predator, have severely limited crosswind components.

http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/predator-ua...

"According to the Project on Government Oversight, the Predator "cannot be launched in adverse weather, including any visible moisture such as rain, snow, ice, frost or fog; nor can it takeoff or land in crosswinds of greater than 17 knots.""

That particular drone, the Watchkeeper, has a not-so-illustrious background:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/10/02/boxed-up-ba...

More about the plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_Watchkeeper_WK450

Are these being used in the UK for civil surveillance?

seems pretty easy to build, not many obstacles are in the sky. surprised this was a break through at all...

this just feels like a video game basically. all i need to do is bring out my xbox controls and i can do exactly the same thing in my video games.

AFAIK, the technology isn't really anything new (see drones), but I took the article to mean that the "breakthrough" was in doing this safely within civil airspace. My use of scare quotes is really just because it's the first time (in the UK, don't know about elsewhere); it's more of a milestone than a breakthrough.

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