Are automated flights the future of air travel? - BBC News

Lose is one of the most historic cities in France known by locals as the Pink Veil or the Pink City. It is also themed around its tasty foods, as it is so close to the border with Spain that there is culture, art and architecture, but there is also something else that we see. As undoubtedly the aviation capital of Europe and perhaps the world, our history and aviation in Toulouse dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and, in fact, just 300 meters from where we are sitting in this fabulous modern A350 find the hangar where the French Concords were located. built in the 1960s and it is here that Airbus is reaching its latest technologies in the areas, firstly, the ability of an aircraft to assist pilots by automating some of the functions required for a diversion in the event of a problem during flight where the plane needs to land quickly. the second stream was related to opening possibilities for auto landings at airports that are not equipped for the auto landings normally used today and the third stream was helping pilots with taxes, which seems like an easy task, but on my screen here you can see the complexity. from a busy airport, so we wanted something that would help with that and reduce the pilot's workload during the taxi phase.

This might look like an average cabin. They come with me and I'll show them that we're on a demo plane. This is where all the technology is being tested and the idea is that Airbus wants to make its

flights

safer, known as Project Dragonfly, based on the insect's ability to recognize certain locations. The team has been working on these futuristic capabilities for the past few years and just before. The investigation is closed, I have come to see what they have been doing, starting at the Airbus laboratory in Lima, diverting to the Caja de Lima airport in front of Bravo Oscar, the aircraft was able to generate a new flight path plan and using artificial intelligence to generate a synthetic voice, The plane was able to communicate with both air traffic control and the airline's operations control center via the radio scenario in which the crew can no longer control the aircraft.

This feature will take full control of the aircraft and fly autonomously and safely. plane to another end on a runway suitable for a diversion and so what were the main challenges with this job? One challenge is explaining to controllers exactly what will happen so they can manage surrounding traffic. We have made two

flights

in the middle of civil airspace, so with other commercial aircraft around us and the French control authorities, they were able to fully understand the situation. We landed the plane safely. It was truly an amazing combination when it comes to helping with the landing.

Typically, an aircraft plugs into existing ground equipment technology, but the team here is trying to make it possible without that tag. They say their innovations could allow the plane to land at any airport in the world and to help they are using a combination of regular cameras, infrared cameras and also radar technology which the team says helped. When they see behind the clouds, they're just capturing the trajectory of the plane and then we use these images, let's say, and try to extract the information that will make the pilot feel comfortable with the fact that he's really aligned and he's really in good shape. path. go to the runway and that's what we've seen in the last flight test is that you can really have confidence in the solution, yeah, so we've been doing these dragonfly tests for the last two years, yeah.

You've really seen an improvement in capability over that. Yes, step by step, we have reached a very good level of implementation, which I would say is not very far from what a solution in cv.com could be to do the pilot again. Life is easier and safer It will be up to Airbus to decide whether they will implement these technologies in their fleets, but not everyone in the aviation industry is a fan of the research Airbus is doing. Pilots are mostly fans of automation, we like things that reduce our workload, but automation is supposed to help pilots make decisions, it doesn't necessarily replace the cognitive decision making we do, those applications should Considered in terms of support, a two-crew flight deck, we have two engines for redundancy, we have multiple electrical systems. for redundancy, that seems crazy.

For me, we would consider replacing One Pilot and the only redundancy for that pilot will be automation. What do you think about aviation becoming fully

automated

? I'm a pilot, okay, we don't have any strategic objective to get pilots out of the cockpit, that's our policy, but we will do what is safest for the overall safety of the plane, where a fully automatic plane is many years away. . I can assure you that fundamentally all this research means that probably in the not too distant

future

you could find yourself in an airplane with many more

automated

functions but without a pilot, well that still seems a long way off.