A cornucopia of news, opinion, views, facts and quirky bits that need to be talked about. Join our community and join in the conversation on all matters aviation. The blog includes our weekly round-up of the bits of European aviation you may otherwise have missed – That Was The Week That Was
In a recent blog post, we addressed ICAO’s burgeoning involvement in disruptive technologies like drones. One of the dangers of the application of aviation-based rules and regulations to new areas of activity is that an institutional bias creeps into the process. After all, when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Regulators, including ICAO, treat all drones as aircraft. Regardless of whether you buy in to this line of thought, not all drones fall under the Chicago Convention or the ICAO rules and procedures. ICAO is responsible for international aviation. States then bring those rules into their national rules. So far so good, but still not all that relevant to most drone operations. For instance, ICAO regulations prohibit flights within a certain distance from the tops of buildings. But why should that apply to drones used to inspect infrastructure?
In mid-September, ICAO hosted back-to-back events on drones: the Second RPAS Symposium and Drone Enable, ICAO’s UAS Industry Symposium. At the RPAS symposium, the ICAO secretariat explained that ICAO is taking a two-tiered track to tackling drones. As to sUAVs, ICAO admits that is has a mandate issue. Or, more accurately, a lack of mandate issue. It will provide guidance to member States, but for the time being, nothing more. Larger RPAS that will be incorporated into controlled airspace, however, will be subject to the full force of ICAO SARPs and PANS.
ICAO will redraft 18 of the 19 Annexes of the Chicago Convention to accommodate RPAS. Additionally, ICAO will develop Competency-Based Training. Why CBT? Because at the 38th meeting of the ICAO General Assembly back in 2013, member States determined that CBT was the way forward for today’s aviation world. They adopted PANS on competency – a dimension of human performance that is used to reliably predict successful performance on the job. Seems like a circular definition? That is because it is. If the RPAS community is soon to feel the full weight of the aviation industry, it had better get used to this sort of stuff.
According to panellists at the RPAS symposium, ICAO wants to apply its air traffic control and capacity management competency-based framework to RPAS, or maybe RPAS and UAS – it was unclear. The relationship between aviation ATC and drones is equally unclear, but that did not stop ICAO representatives from asserting that CBT developed for ATC should be applied to RPAS.
Presentations on the meaning of CBT were so broad that it likely could mean anything. It is a negative feedback system where performance is continually evaluated by success. It is simply modular learning. One panellist remarked that his organisation had been doing CBT for 25 years and did not know until now what it is called. Another panellist implied that proponents of other learning styles are daft. CBT is the way forward. But other than being modular and a teaching style tailored to the task being taught, the contours of CBT remained murky.
The notion of ICAO’s involvement with the development of CBT for UAV pilots and other operators in the drone space seemed to unravel during a panel on ‘What will competency-based training look like?’ Unfortunately, competencies that are beneficial for international civil aviation might not translate into competencies for UAV piloting. Operators of UAS made clear that being a pilot, for instance, or an ATM provider, does not necessarily qualify you to operate a drone. Problems with applying aviation CBT to drones are myriad.
Take, for instance, Facebook’s Aqilla system. It launches and is recovered from traditional airports, but like other RPAS, that is where the analogy to international civil aviation ends. Rather than a traditional linear trajectory, they climb from an airport in a corkscrew pattern to over 60,000 feet, well above the altitude of traditional aircraft. They have a longer mission profile than international flights and operate under different physical environments. These create new challenges for both the aircraft and the operator.
From the perspective of Facebook, this is not just a nascent technology; the uses and environment are totally new. Is there inherent value in transferrable competencies from aviation to this new activity? Only time will tell. What we think might make a great done pilot today might not be what makes a great drone pilot of tomorrow. How would Henry Ford know what it will take to be a good F1 driver? Facebook does not know but would like to work with all civil aviation actors to find out. That seems to be the most productive attitude.
General Atomic Aeronautical Systems noted that many of the competencies translate but not all seemingly relevant competencies make the transition. Pilots of RPAS need to know how to make a flight plan. So do traditional pilots. But, having that on a CV is not determinative of whether a traditional pilot will be a successful drone pilot. After having traditional pilots in a simulator for an hour, it is easy to tell who will make it and who will not. The difference is ‘spatial presence’ – a term used by psychologists to describe the ability to acquire awareness of spatial surroundings in video games, like first-person shooter games. Not for nothing do we continue to assert that drone operators are better thought of as gamers than aviators. If this is what drone competency is, how relevant is experience as a pilot?
Undeterred, fans of aviation CBT came to the rescue. Of course, they also happened to be employed by ICAO. It matters less what the actual thing is that you are trying to do, because ICAO PANS regarding CBT for ATM ask first, ‘what tasks are you trying to do?’ ‘What competencies might you need?’ That is the starting point for ICAO CBTs. So, in essence, they mean just about anything. ICAO might as well create CBTs for a moon landing. Perhaps that is its intention. (See our recent blog post, referenced above, for more on ICAO involvement in outer space).
Again, realism crept into the debate. Customers do not want to pay for trained pilots. They want ‘operators’ with sufficient competence to do the job and fulfil their needs. Sounds a bit like Michael O’Leary’s take on pilots – bus drivers in the sky. Perhaps the drone industry does have something to learn from manned aviation?
