‘The biggest change since the advent of the jet engine’

You have significant international automobile manufacturers, significant airframe manufacturers that are putting as much if not more R&D into these sorts of technologies than they are in traditional automobiles or traditional aircraft. So, there are literally billions or hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D, internationally, that’s being pushed into this pipeline. It’s just a matter of when it starts coming out the other end. I mean, in terms of when we’re going to start seeing trials, it’s a little bit more difficult. Whether it’s two, three, five or 10 years is anyone’s guess. But they’re the sort of time frames that we’re talking about here.

The first trials [of flying cars] will be piloted and will probably look a little bit like traditional helicopters, just electrified. But the economics won’t be there in the longer term – there’s going be a very quick move after that to remove the pilot, as soon as it can be safely done.

Even if you use traditional drones as some benchmark, we’ve had a commercial provider, Wing, based here in Canberra doing commercial deliveries, and now they’re operating in Queensland, too. And they’ve made more than 10,000 deliveries, just during the COVID-19 period. Now, if you’d asked us a couple of years ago whether a commercial drone operator would make 10,000 plus deliveries over a couple of months, it would have been something that we would have potentially hoped for. Still, we wouldn’t have been able to have that level of ambition. But things have changed quite dramatically. Things are, I guess, getting to a point now where the technology’s mature and there.

 There’s been a lot of advances over the last year or two, and the uptake of that technology was starting to become sizeable as it was becoming cheaper, safer and more efficient to use. There are 17,000 commercial drone licence holders in Australia, and the industry is reaching a turning point, so it was the right time for the government to come in. We’re trying to go in with a whole-of-government, holistic approach. Over the last 12 to 18 months we’ve been working on this paper, which for us is the first step towards a more enduring policy piece that we’re aiming for. And in terms of testing, and trialling, there are a few unique aspects here in Australia that do make things easier. Regional communities, for instance, are ideal testbeds for some of the products that these drones are used for.

The first trials [of flying cars] will be piloted and will probably look a little bit like traditional helicopters, just electrified.

There’s just a lot of interesting usages that we’ve seen: drones being used near beaches to provide flotation devices to swimmers in trouble; delivering vital supplies to people during COVID-19 lockdown in Canberra; and farmers during the recent drought used them to monitor livestock, crops, water supplies and to ensure railway power lines are safe.

What’s exciting is this is a transformative technology. I mean, while our attention has been on these individual bespoke uses, the paper itself looks a little bit more broadly and picks up on things like urban air mobility. Drones will be moving freight around in the short term, and then people in the longer term. They will change not just economics and transport, but the way we live and where we live, as well.

Electric urban air mobility aircraft might look like a helicopter, might behave like a helicopter and might carry the same number of people as a helicopter, but they’re substantially quieter. The electrification of aircraft, again, extends beyond small things and we’re going to see potentially the electrification of more traditional looking aircraft as well, too. And that might drive some broader changes in terms of regional aviation, in terms of the aircraft types and sizes that we see operating in Australian skies.

This new technology is going to actually change the nature of how we use airspace. With traditional aircraft, there are finite numbers that are up there to manage from a traffic-control perspective. I mean looking into our crystal ball, with urban air mobility, with drones, that airspace is going to become increasingly integrated. The numbers of things that are flying in the sky is going to increase quite dramatically. There won’t be thousands in the sky at any one time. There could be hundreds of thousands, particularly if we’re looking at smaller items that are doing commercial deliveries or providing services at a much more intimate level in urban centres.

Now, when we’ve got those sorts of huge numbers that are operating in our airspace, I mean, they’ll need a smart system to control them to be able to make sure that they interact in a safe way. There’s a whole range of other considerations, but safety is the central policy.

To run an air space of tens of thousands or 100,000 objects, machine learning [AI] will make more sense than what we’ve currently got. And that’s why the discussion on unmanned traffic management is so important. Because, fundamentally, that’ll be the mechanism, which we as the industry control how these things move around and how they interact with each other and more traditional types of aircraft.

Using tools such as unmanned traffic management, more smart systems, we can have much smarter regulations and be able to regulate these objects a little bit differently. So, we can, using automated systems or an intelligent UTM system, we can control these objects in a much smarter way than what we have done traditionally.

Powerline inspections are an extremely hazardous job that has traditionally been undertaken by helicopter pilots. Now that’s a task that is being done increasingly by drones. It’s just an example of the type of thing that can be done much more safely, where you’re not putting human life at risk.

There’s going to be other, I guess, products or services such as mapping, aerial photography, that can be done so much more cheaply now than what they used to be. I mean, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you would have to purchase the services of a helicopter, or a light aircraft or a balloon to do some sort of mapping activities. And now that could be done for, you know, hundreds of dollars with your own drone, in some instances, or fairly cheaply with a commercial provider. There’s a whole lot of small opportunities; where the really interesting sort of stuff starts is in the medium to long-term future.

And if we’re moving freight or people but we’re not tied to existing infrastructure, then we can start looking at, for instance, where we need to build roads. We can look at emissions issues, we can look at a whole range of environmental impacts in terms of how we can reduce these and save money at the same time.

And I’m crystal balling here a little bit, but for instance, if you’ve got a long road that serves two remote properties, in 10, 20, 30 years, do you need to build that road anymore? Can you be flying people in and out with electric VTOL aircraft and having things delivered there with a much smaller environmental footprint than what you had?

It frees us from the shackles of existing infrastructure in some ways. It is happening, and it will happen. I guess that’s the exciting thing. And that’s the thing that makes the time that we’re living in here, now, for aviation, perhaps the biggest change since the advent of the jet engine. The wonderful thing is that when we look at the drones now, it’s like looking at the Wright Brothers flying all over again. It’s looking like that smartphone in your pocket back when it looked like a lunch box that you had to carry out with a cord.

Things are changing quite rapidly, but it’s just the start. It’s the start of much more fundamental changes that are going to be driven by whether you talk about drones as in the smaller objects or whether you talk about drones as the VTOL aircraft that are carrying freight around regional Australia and metropolitan areas. It’s going to be fascinating to see how things pan out.

If we’d published this a couple of years ago, it would have been too early and too speculative in terms of what the pickup was going to be and what sort of models we could talk about when we talked about things such as unmanned traffic management, what type of services that we would see delivered, and what some of the risks were, as well.

Now we’ve got a little bit of a clearer idea of what the timelines potentially could be, what the usage and technology is going to look like. I guess we’re hoping to hit some sweet spot here in terms of government policy and regulation: where we haven’t gone too far ahead and made policy for something that didn’t quite exist yet, but we haven’t been too late, either.

We’re setting a framework for industry to follow. The feeling is we’re getting a bite. But we’re also committed to developing co-ordinated and consistent whole-of-government approach. The last thing we wanted to do was stymie the exciting innovation advancements for the sector and overregulation at a point where it wasn’t ready for it.

It’s this whole-of-government, holistic approach that appears to be most appreciated by industry at this point. Australia was one of the first countries to move in terms of drone regulation. And a number of other countries came up and kept pace, and some even overtook Australia.

In a couple of years, you’ll have a farmer sitting there on his property with a piece broken on his combine harvester and rather than spend a day getting to town, maybe overnight, you can have something delivered by drone in 20 minutes in a direct line.

It’s going to be tricky, because, look, there are potential problems with these sorts of technologies. There are security issues. There are privacy issues. There are noise issues to be managed. But there’s plenty of benefits, too, and the potential benefits mean it’s easy for us to justify the amount of time and effort that we’re going to put in this to make sure that we get it right. And overcome those obvious challenges as well.

I think we’re going to see general aviation in the community that is more alive than it has been through its long, proud history. It’s just going to change a little bit more than what we’ve experienced before. The nature of things that are going to be flying in our space is going to be changed, but airspace, in general, is going to be better utilised. And aviation is going to provide more services to people than what it has done traditionally.

It will unlock us from infrastructure. I mean, we’ll have a lot more freedom in being able to live where we are and not be burdened by roads or transport networks in the way that we have been, as I said, a little bit further down.

But the implications for that are enormous in terms of where we spread ourselves geographically where we choose to live, where we choose to work. I think there are going to be quite fundamental shifts to the way we engage with society and why we connect as a result of these technologies as they mature over the coming decades.

 Simon Moore is Assistant Secretary, Aviation Safety and Future Technology at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. You can read the National Emerging Aviation Technologies Policy paper here.