Many new autonomous aircraft platforms are now under development – some for specialized aerial missions like surveillance, surveying or agricultural services, some for flying parcels or cargo and even some for carrying paying passengers. Many questions arise about the autonomous functions and the types of technologies that may be used to implement them but many people don’t realize that there have been many forms of automation in aviation for decades. Traditional automation will continue to exist but there will be additional types of functions automated up to a degree that we would call it autonomy. The role of the human doesn’t go away with automation or autonomy, but the increased automation shifts the human to a different role driving the need for a well-structured overall safety assessment.
Successful development and deployment of these autonomous aircraft will require the involvement of many disciplines, not just the main functional developers but also experts in flight sciences, system integration and development assurance, human factors, operations, safety assessment, certification, modeling, and, depending on the technologies used, data sciences. Modeling will be needed to keep track of all these multiple-disciplinary interactions, and evaluate the performance in a wider variety of conditions than practical through flight testing alone.
Considerable certification scrutiny can be expected for the automation, similar to that for today’s fly-by-wire transport aircraft, as well as for the evaluation of human interactions. Many traditional Means of Compliance would still apply, perhaps with some tailoring, but many more need to be defined and planned in a way that is achievable. We will discuss the types of functions and the certification and safety assessment considerations involved.
Steve Beland, Technical Fellow, System Safety | The Boeing Company (Retired)
Steve has 36+ years of experience with the development of flight-critical complex systems using development assurance and safety assessments to shape system architectures and obtain certification approvals.
Steve retired from Boeing as a Technical Fellow in the Enterprise Safety & Mission Assurance after being an Associate Technical Fellow in Flight Controls. Before retirement he led safety assessments of 777 & 787 fly-by-wire systems and co-led development assurance efforts for the 787-8 airplane-level & 737 MAX Return to Service and also led the safety assessment strategy for commercial autonomous systems. He served as a delegate of the FAA or the ODA as a DER or Engineering-Unit Member for 30 years on many projects.
Steve served for 20+ years on the SAE S-18 Aircraft & System Development & Safety Assessment Committee, leading the DAL assignment (ARP4754A/B) and the new PASA and ASA concepts (ARP4761A); served as co-chair of S-18A for AAM/UAVs and helped launch other S-18 documents. He now teaches courses on the new AP4754B and ARP4761A for SAE.
He was an originating member of SAE G-34, “Artificial Intelligence for Aviation” and member of RTCA SC-180 leading Tool Assessment, Functional Failure Path Analysis & Elemental Analysis topics in DO-254.
BSEE from Michigan Technological University, MS SE from University of Missouri (Rolla) and Graduate Certificate in Architecture & Systems Engineering Modelling from MIT.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-beland-57ba3851/