(Music)
Many pilots today don't go out with an
immediate concern on their flight that they're going to
run into the ground.
There is a problem in aviation
of controlled flight into the terrain.
Controlled flight into the terrain is a case where you
have a perfectly healthy aircraft that is
what's called "under controlled flight."
In other words, it hasn't stalled. The pilot has full
control ability of that aircraft. Yet,
the aircraft ends up running into the ground
in some way.
We're developing an automatic system to avoid
a ground collision in a case of a fully functional aircraft.
Which will automatically take control of the aircraft
and automatically fly that aircraft away from the ground
to save the pilot and the vehicle.
You don't need a multi-million dollar fighter
with digital fly-by-wire flight controls and very expensive
hardware to implement a system like this.
We can put these algorithms that determine if there's a
imminent ground collision, we can put them on a phone, which
we've demonstrated on the Droid, and give out that application.
When you go from an F-16 to something like a small UAV,
we unplug the F-16 model, we plug in the small U-A-V model
and the rest of the system remains fairly much the same.
The technology that we're developing is important.
We all have friends And colleagues who
aren't with us anymore because they've run into the ground.
Sound of of ejection seat exploding.
(Music)
(Chatter)
In the fighter area, there were
about one or two people dying a year in the Air Force alone
due to this controlled flight into terrain problem.
And that is when an airplane
in perfectly good health crashes into the ground due
to either pilot error or possibly the pilot is
unconscious as in fighter jets pulling high Gs, they
may lose consciousness.
This is something that's not just confined
to military aircraft. And it's not
confined to UAVs. General aviation aircraft have a big
problem with running into the ground. Pilots do for
whatever reason, they're distracted, they can't see,
they're in a fog bank. Another case is where they
are spatially disoriented. A good example of this is the
J.F.K., Jr. mishap that happened out on the East
Coast a number of years ago. They fly in, uh, sometimes
extreme landing and take off locations, up on mountains
and things where aircrafts don't have the aerodynamic
ability to climb like they think they should.
A number of years ago, the Defense Safety Oversight Council
out of the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness
saw this problem and asked us to begin
addressing it for fighters. In conjunction with the Air
Force, the Air Force Research Lab and Lockhead,
we went out and did an intital program for, on the
F-16 that would help address the problem on all Air Force
fighters. The ground collision avoidance maneuver
chosen for the F-16 is a wings level climb. It climbs
really well and it doesn't turn very well. So we don't
try to turn in front of an obstacle, we try to climb up
over the top of the obstacles. So regardless of
what position you are in, in the F-16, if there's an
impending collision, the airplane will roll to wings
level and begin a five to six G wings level pull to
clear the local terrain.
(pilot)Okay. Gonna roll inverted. Pull the nose down.
It's going to roll itself upright.
And pull. Bingo. That's all automatic.
When you have that kind of automatic computer actuation
of a decision, you have to take into consideration a
few more things than a warning system would. Don't
make things worse is the first requirement and the
second one is don't get in the way of normal piloting
activities. And then the third is, actually avoid collisions.
You've got an auto pilot that has the
ability to really move this airplane around. We have the
ability to put six Gs on this airplane. Six Gs is not
an easy thing to withstand. Fighter pilots get used to
it but still, six G's when you didn't ask for it is a
surprise and it's really gonna get somebody upset if
it didn't have to happen.
(Automated voice from cockpit) Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.
(Pilot) This is just downright annoying.
(Automated voice) Altitude.
What ends up happening is after a few false warnings in the
cockpit, a pilot either tunes out the warnings or
turns the system off and now that warning system provides
no benefit. In a figher aircraft, these collision
avoidance maneuvers are very aggressive so when they
happen when they shouldn't it's going to get in the way
of the mission and it's going to upset the pilot,
severely. So avoiding nuisances in a fighter
airplane is extremely important. Their concern was
that they weren't going to be able to carry out their
mission and that the system was going to interfere.
When they were shown that they could still do their mission
and the system would wait longer than they would
before initiating a recovery they realized that was not
going to be a problem. We believe that the system we
developed in the ACAT program that's being fielded
in the F-16 now, will prevent above 90%, maybe as
much as 98% of the mishaps.
We went out and tested the system
against every historical category of
controlled flight into terrain mishap that the F-16
has seen and based them on actual mishap cases. And we
showed that across the envelope of operation of the
system, it prevented every single mishap.
Music
We wanted to set up a system that would be easy to adapt to
any different aircraft. At the heart of that is a modular
software architecture. These pieces could be replaced
like an F-16 piece could be removed from the system and
then a UAV piece inserted in and then the rest of the
algorithms could remain the same. The F-16 represents
the high-peformance top-end of the performance spectrum.
Airplanes that go real fast, climb real well, have great
climb performance, but because they're going real
fast, their lateral turn performance is not as good.
In the case of a small UAV aircraft, like the DROID, we
have a limited climb performance, something very
typical of a general aviation aircraft. That
performance model is very different. And hopefully, by
anchoring both ends of that spectrum, we cover
everything in between. I think it makes it a lot more
plausible that we could move to a different aircraft all
across the spectrum of aviation. One of the main
costs in bringing any kind of a capability to an
aircraft is the actual hardware.
A very small difference in where the airplane actually goes.
We had an eye on the future and we recognized that
eventually we wanted to get this into the general
aviation community. And, the best way to get something
into the general aviation community would be to put
something on tools that would be readily accessible
to them. So we moved the software from high-dollar
fighter hardware processors to cell phones. And we've
now migrated it onto a cell phone app. At bare minimum,
an app that would warn you. The more advanced versions
would tie into an auto-pilot and actually take control
and recover the aircraft. Not all general aviation airplanes
have aircraft have the auto pilot
that would be necessary, but at the bare minimum
it's an app that you can put on your cell phone
that you would get a warning that you are about to run
into something.
(sound of airplane)
And that has enabled this technology to be potentially
brought to the rest of the public for a
much broader application and life savings.
(voice on radio) I couldn't tell on that very first run...
The basic pieces that are
needed to make this system work are an understanding of
where the aircraft is. This is provided by GPS. You also
need to know what the terrain is around you. So we
have a computer model of the world that is a digital
database of elevations. We then, inside the software,
have a model of well the aircraft can perform. And
that model is very precisely tuned to that aircraft's
performance capabilities.
Even since they first started developing this capability,
back in the '90's, capabilities of computers have gotten much,
much better um, capabilities of GPS navigation systems
have become better, the uh terrain database that allows
the aircraft to know where, where the ground is where
the mountains and the valleys are, um, have gotten
a lot better. What we did was, how we kind of overcame
that was we had to go to different sources, and we
kind of had this mish-mash of sources that were at
different resolutions and different accuracies, and we
put that together in, you know our, a custom database
that really I think is tailored more to what we are
doing with auto GCAS than the original databases were.
We've built a utility that compresses this terrain into
a rather small file size, such that we can carry the
entire globe on a phone. So we got a homogeneous, much
more accurate digital terrain database to use now.
So by using improved digital terrain, we get improved
performance, and then by using improved navigation
system, we know where we are over that terrain much
better. So we can predict the airplane to terrain
collision geometry much better than we could ten years ago.
The system monitors the approach of the
ground and aircrafts ability to maneuver to avoid it.
It predicts an escape trajectory that keeps the
aircraft on a forward trajectory but pulls it up
away from the ground. But it also computes a trajectory
that moves the aircraft to the right or to the left.
It compares these two things, the, the terrain, and the
aircraft's ability to avoid it. If the system thinks
that the aircraft is trouble, it will select the
last possible option of those three trajectories. It
isn't forced to try and climb over it. It can move
to the side of it. That's unique to the DROID system
we've developed, and that is a feature that will likely
have, uh, a great advantage when we take it and apply it
to general aviation aircraft.
(music)
On a typical day of flight, the team shows up here, and at early in the
morning, we gather all our gear, we load it into our
command-and-control van, head out into the field,
assemble the aircraft, set up our systems, and then go
through a series of tests. Our first flight is going to
be against that, that hill... pilot flown, through the
gap. And we're using two vhf frequencies... What I've been
doing is operating our user interface which is the link
really between us on the ground, the test team, and
the phone. We do a run, we actually set up the
auto-pilot through the ground control station.
We give it a point that that it's going to fly to that's
actually under the ground. We're telling it to, you
know, to really run into the ground. The system is
monitoring this and at the last instance disengages
that auto-pilot system and uses the auto collision
avoidance system to take control of the aircraft and
avoid hitting the ground.
(voice on radio) 3...2...1... zero... fly up.
(Music)
Fly up right.
(sound of plane engine)
(Music)
Just over the course of our testing,
and we went through our testing as rapidly as we could,
there were no fewer than five fatalities
and seven mishaps that we could have prevented
with that software on the
very fighter aircraft we were trying to design for.
I think the system we're fielding now with the F-16
isn't perfect, uh, but I think everyone in the field
is going to love it and I think it's going to save lives.
Do we have the perfect answer?
Of course we don't have the perfect answer
and that's something that's going to evolve over time.
But we're trying to save lives.
We're trying to save pilots and passengers lives
from controlled flight into terrain.
NASA's taking the risk, and the Air Force is taking the risk
to put this system on, and I, I think, I really do, that it'll,
it'll be game changing and save a lot of
lives and really be a benefit to society and
really show what's possible.
I think it's a system whose time has come.
There's no major obstacles from a technology standpoint.
Um, it does take, it does take
work, it does take development effort,
it takes flight testing to prove it.
The technology is out there to do this.
It's a matter of bringing all the pieces together
and sewing it together with software
to make the capability happen.
(Jet sound) 01:13:10.067,00:00:00.000 (Music)