F-16 pilotless drone

I wonder how the control is done. Presumably over a satellite link, with some sort of fallback if the link fails (self destruct?). Or was it autonomous auto-land?

I guess it’s a logical development on from the drones currently flying. I seem to recall reading that the RAF fly their Predator drones over the Middle East from RAF Waddington

It is interesting – most of us fly SEPs, but would you fly on a commercial airline with one pilot and is the risk of pilot incapacity greater than an engine failure?

Would you fly commercial with no pilots and a data link. A good friend of mine who would know reckons single pilot with a data link back up is not that far off.

I doubt the bandwidth exists. There has been much debate, post-MH370, about this stuff, and it isn’t feasible currently to even implement an “online FDR” system, for the number of airliners flying. Also the RHS does a lot more than just sit there in case the LHS dies… well that is the general idea anyway

Of course that is the general idea but it is not a big stretch to designing the cockpit around single pilot ops one would have thought – bandwidth for any serious implementation of remote ops has got to be some way into the future if ever on any scale.

Peter wrote:

I doubt the bandwidth exists.

Unlike a black box, you don’t need to send all the parameters back via the connection, as much of the processing can be done in the plane. You could probably even have a plane fly from A to B using only ACARS (satellite) messages, as long as the plane itself has a good enough computer to infer all the rest.

Peter wrote:

I doubt the bandwidth exists. There has been much debate, post-MH370, about this stuff, and it isn’t feasible currently to even implement an “online FDR” system, for the number of airliners flying.

I have not read that discussion, but I find this hard to believe. Many airlines provide onboard internet and even the satellite-based versions are usually fast enough to allow for a useable remote desktop experience (for multiple passengers per plane, presumably). An online FDR with a sampling rate of 1 Hz (not ideal, but would still give a lot of information) will need a portion of that bandwidth.

I bet you there is a nice revenue stream coming in for in-flight internet use

This is always a good indicator:

The comms security considerations would be interesting too. Probably the sole live pilot would have a dead man’s handle or similar, which would enable the remote control.

But first they would need to dramatically reduce the pilot workload.

Peter wrote:

I bet you there is a nice revenue stream coming in for in-flight internet use

This is always a good indicator:

While I agree with the idea, I might disagree with the use of the indicator (or just have too much free time available, and afford to be off topic):

Not a ton of correlation but one of the reasons for that steady increase might have just been market sentiment and not specifically satcoms