Commercial drones with a sting in the tale

Just seven months later, the imagery was far less impressive and the implications sobering when a Russian parcel-delivery drone dashed itself to pieces against a wall shortly after take-off on its inaugural flight in the city of Ulan-Ude. The idea was sound enough: a drone mail service to connect isolated Siberian villages. The reality was a little less so, with the evidence flashed in photo and video around the world.

To be fair to the parcel drone developers there has been plenty of upside, too, with various companies making successful, small-scale deliveries in parts of China, Japan, Germany, the UK and United States. Australian start-up Flirtey, now based in Nevada, Amazon, Google, DHL and the French La Poste are among leaders in further pushing the boundaries

But if nothing else, the crash underlined that for some there is still a way to go in perfecting navigation and training in the operation of even the smallest commercial drones, and that maybe – despite the superb reputation of German engineering – Sheikh Hamdan should be congratulated for his chutzpah: short flight, big leap of faith.

It is clear, however, that the future for both smaller-drone commercial operators and their much larger autonomous passenger vehicle cousins, hinges on greater co-ordination of regulation and development of more sophisticated and co-operative air traffic management systems. Key issues, depending on the size of the drone involved, include beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, airspace navigation, air traffic control integration and, not least of all, collision avoidance.

Until then, full-scale expansion of the industry will be limited to current regulatory frameworks.

The good news is that both industry and key global regulators, led by the US and Europe, either recognise or are beginning to confront barriers to development. Co-ordination and co-operation is now a work in progress.

What’s in a name

The terms unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or, simply, “drone” are in common use depending either on the specific vehicle type and mode of operation, or country of origin and/or regulation. The common denominator is that when it comes to machines we are talking about aircraft piloted by remote control or solely by on board computer systems.

The growth of the drone industry in the past decade has been exponential. In January, US drone registrations (FAA) exceeded one million for the first time, though just over 12 per cent were classified as commercial operators. In Australia there are now 1310 Remotely Piloted Aircraft Operator Certificate (ReOC) holders on the CASA register, close to double figures for last year. Holders of a ReOC are both licensed and certified by CASA to conduct commercial operations and employ licensed RPA pilots.

While most of us can be forgiven for thinking drones are a relatively recent phenomenon, history tells a different story. Long-time aerospace strategist and acknowledged RPA expert Peter La Franchi points out that Australian inventor A. J. Roberts was demonstrating radio-controlled unmanned airships as early as 1912 in Australia. He then took his invention to the United Kingdom with an Australian Government recommendation that maybe he should demonstrate possible military applications to the UK War Office.

Regulation, meanwhile, dates back to 1944 when unmanned aircraft first received coverage under the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, Article 8.

That said, growth has really gathered pace in the past 10 years with the development of off-the-shelf drone packages pitched both at hobbyists and small commercial operators: literally buy the thing in the box, open the box and fly. For Ben Harris, CEO of commercial operator National Drones, that growth has been further spurred by swift technological development. “Miniaturisation of technology means you can get a DJI (company) drone today for $1500 to $2000 with a capability similar to a drone that would have cost $100,000 five years ago,” he said.

While the individual commercial operators have been beavering away in developing businesses aimed at a wide range of applications such as commercial photography, aerial mapping, surveying, search and rescue, crop spraying – even mustering – it is the industrial and commercial giants who have grabbed the consumer headlines.

Amazon was one of the early adopters with what is now part of its Prime Air strategy: at one end of the scale it involves a fleet of Boeing 767 freighters and, at the other end, a fleet of parcel delivery drones capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (2.2 kilos) in weight within 30 minutes. Its drone plans have been in the air for more than five years and there are now development centres in the US, UK, Austria, France and Israel. While there has been some progress with trials in the UK in particular, and speculation deliveries in rural areas could begin as early as 2020 following an easing of European line of sight flight regulations, there is more doubt about a start date for delivery in and around cities where navigation and safety issues are far more prominent.

None of that is stopping Airbus in its quest to join the automated package delivery revolution. Drawing on the expertise of Airbus helicopters and Airbus Defence and Space, its Skyways project based in Singapore signed up SingPost in April 2017 as its logistics partner to trial small parcel delivery via drones to designated stations on the campus of the National University of Singapore.

The ultimate aim of Skyways is a safe and commercially viable aerial unmanned delivery system for use in dense urban cities, but that doesn’t preclude another phase in its development: shore to ship maritime deliveries. Airbus has teamed with Wilhelmsen Ships to trial delivery of goods from the Singapore Coast to ships at anchor.

Skyways drones will fly along aerial corridors to avoid collision while a central ground operations centre continuously monitors flight operations. Initial delivery range will be about three kilometres.

Other companies in the delivery space include DHL (Parcelcopter) and Google (Project Wing) which has been trialling package delivery over multiple test flights in Tuggeranong outside Canberra in conjunction with separate trials in the US. Apart from its UAVs, Project Wing integrates an unmanned traffic system that may have implications for successful development of integrated air traffic management worldwide.

Meanwhile Boeing has joined the race closer to home in a joint venture with the Queensland Government to develop and trial UAVs for a variety of roles. The three year deal, signed in March, covers land, sea and air projects, and includes search and rescue and agricultural applications as well as ocean and land-based monitoring.

Queensland has been particularly pro-active in evolving a strategy for drone management that includes scoping a possible drone test site near Cloncurry, while search and rescue potential has already been thoroughly demonstrated by the Little Ripper system linked to Queensland and NSW surf rescue organisations.

Boeing is also involved as a development partner in one of the most imaginative global projects in terms of scope and scale: Uber Elevate, the ultimate in aerial ride sharing – a vast network of dedicated skyports handling thousands of vertical take-off UAV flights carrying up to four passengers at a time over the top of crowded cities.

The sheer weight of corporate giants partnering Uber in the Elevate project should go some of the way to burying scepticism that this should be parked in the realm of science fiction. Bell, Embraer, Boeing, Pipistrel and Karem Aircraft are all involved in the development of electric VTOL aircraft capable of meeting Elevate specifications, while Uber has signed an agreement with NASA aimed at resolving airspace management issues. The Uber timeframe would see trial flights of experimental vehicles around 2020.

‘Uber has signed an agreement with NASA aimed at resolving airspace management.’

Anyone doubting the viability of autonomous vehicles themselves only need look at trials by the Volocopter in Dubai, a machine capable of both controlled and remote-control flight. Volocopter CEO Florian Reuter has said his company hopes to launch a flying taxi service by 2022.

Then there is the equally ground-breaking work undertaken by Chinese company Ehang with its 184 AAV. Ehang’s first test flights in China, carrying the company CEO and subsequently local government officials, took place in February in Guangzhou. Ehang has undertaken further tests and demonstrations, also in Dubai, and is pitching for more regular public flights of its single passenger quad-copter later this year.

While these ambitious projects seize the headlines, the current mainstay of the commercial drones industry, in Australia at least, is based around less glamorous pursuits that nevertheless have huge implications for regional economies and asset management.

Gary King, director and manager of Toowoomba-based Universal drones, specialises in services to regional and rural Australia with a focus on agricultural work, surveillance and inspection, and damage assessment for insurance purposes. King believes that what he calls “the bread and butter” of the drone industry is farm work, and he is convinced drones will help to keep younger people on the farm.

A former military intelligence specialist regularly based in and around the Oakey Army Aviation Centre, King says he chose nearby Toowoomba to establish what he claims is the biggest drone showroom in Australia because of the city’s agricultural linkage: close to the produce centre of the Lockyer Valley and within striking distance of the sorghum and grain heartlands of western Queensland.

King extols the virtues of using drones on farms for tasks including crop spraying, spraying in areas inaccessible because of difficult terrain – limited more by battery life than the weight of the aircraft – crop stress analysis and crop health including available water levels.

“For example we were involved in a government trial on an olive farm – six spots to cover on the same paddock. The drone took 17 minutes with 11.2 litres of chemical mixture. A tractor over the same distance used 210 litres of chemical and took an hour and three minutes.

“The industry is still developing and there are lots of jobs out there that have never been done before by a drone, or thought of by a drone,” he said.

As an example of a recent innovative farm application he said imagery of a crop can be used to sell to market pre-harvest. “Sorghum is an excellent example where you have an A and a B class grain. Price can be dictated by the quality of the sorghum by appearance.”

Universal Drones also runs a training school for drone pilots. “We get a Good spread of ages at the school including a lot of older people. We find the best guy to fly a drone on a farm is an older farmer. He’s tired; his body can’t cope with the tractor and other heavy work. The drone is a great alternative.”

National Drones, with offices in Sydney and Archerfield, south of Brisbane, has seen greatest recent growth in asset management using drones, particularly of relatively inaccessible assets such as cell phone and radio tower peaks, and roof inspections.

CEO Ben Harris said more sophisticated drones linked to improvements in software have become a very effective tool for collecting data without having to relocate an aircraft – “3D mapping, volumetric calculations for mine stockpiles, that kind of thing.”

He said battery life, a limitation on drone capability, was now starting to improve with some commercial rotor type systems offering 45-60 minutes battery life compared with 30 to 40 minutes previously.

Both King and Harris agree that regulation is the “elephant in the room” of drone development, though both empathise with a CASA wrestling with such a complex issue. “CASA is fairly proactive about industry engagement, but for them it is a tough job trying to regulate an industry that changes as you watch it,” Harris said.

It is a subject dear to the heart of Peter La Franchi who, apart from his professional life as an executive with MDA Corporation, holds a key management role with Australian Certified UAV Operators Inc. (ACUO) – a wholly voluntary industry association formed specifically to look after the interests of the commercial drone industry in Australia.
“Regulation from an economic point of view can be a great thing. An enabler that can open up all sorts of possibilities. Think, for example, about standards. If you don’t have common standards in manned aviation then you have no real means to certify that an aircraft is safe to fly,” he said.

“We are still a long way from having standards in the unmanned systems industry … drones are aircraft. We expect the best of our aviation system and it’s up to drones to comply with and to meet stringent safety goals and objectives. That way the skies are safe.”

Safety was a key reason La Franchi and ACUO were critical of a CASA decision to deregulate parts of the industry involving drones under two kilograms – criticism that formed part of its submission to the Senate committee inquiring into RPAs and associated systems, due to report at the end of July.

“Good regulation can do an awful lot to help build the industry. Questionable regulation, such as deregulation with no underpinning safety case, is a very different thing and out of synch with the prevailing trend of all aviation regulation globally.

“There are those who curse us because we have gone out and fought hard for sensible regulation, but history will prove we were on the right side.”

ACUO is in step with commercial operators in recognising the big regulatory gap in Australia around BVLOS and has called for CASA to deal specifically with the issue separate to the current Part 101 that covers existing unmanned systems.

La Franchi said rather than develop a Part 102, CASA is working on the basis of exemptions to Part 101 to allow exploratory operations, commercial operations and science missions using beyond line of sight, particularly in remote regional areas: western Queensland, for example.

“For the commercial unmanned systems industry to wholly open up to what is possible, Part 102 is necessary in Australia with corresponding regulation internationally. The upside is that ICAO’s unmanned systems regulatory project has been fast tracked for the past three years. Initial model rules are already out there and by 2019 we are pretty comfortable that there will be an accepted international guide that CASA can base its proposals on.”

Despite the hurdles, La Franchi said CASA has done some great work of late, emerging from a difficult period of strained relations with the aviation industry as a whole.

“We have a lot of confidence in Shane Carmody and the team he has built around himself. We had our annual dialogue with CASA just a couple of weeks ago and it went really well. CASA is coming back to strength and there will come a time again when Australia does lead the world in regulatory terms. Part 102 and BVLOS operations is the opportunity,” he said.

The other great challenge is development of an unmanned traffic management (UTM) system and, as part of its Senate submission, the ACUO said a national UTM is the only long term viable solution to enable all aspects of drone operations in Australia.

“There is an awful amount of work going on with personal air vehicle technology. The time for that will come. The big question obviously is in certifying what is essentially an overgrown drone to carry people. That’s a challenge for the regulators. Is it technically possible? Completely,” La Franchi said.

“Meanwhile you could have multiple, city-based drone courier services, whether it’s something as basic as pizza delivery or flying blood samples between one hospital and another … it’s all possible now from a technical point of view. The question is how you integrate that with the rest of the air traffic around you and with the built urban environment.”

One solution is standardisation and refinement of data protocols to provide for integration of drones within the manned ATC network, from the top of controlled airspace down to the surface of the earth. Current ATC stops at 500 feet, 100 feet above the current drone operating ceiling.

Harris from National Drones agrees and puts it this way: “We have a fixed wing, petrol-powered system called Penguin B, capable of flying between 10 and 20 hours. How can we safely integrate a system like that into airspace, even class G (uncontrolled) airspace for large area survey work?

“Nobody out the back of Bourke in their Cessna 172 is going to have ADS-B, so it’s very hard to know where a light aircraft might be. In my opinion when ADS-B becomes mandatary across all aircraft we will go a long way to solving that issue.

“There are some big companies working on UTM, but needs all the agencies to play along as well. And it requires a very considered approach. Yes, we could apply a Band-Aid but that will be no good in even 10 years’ time,” he said.