Speech Recognition and AI Help Take the Pressure off Aircrew

On the same subject

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  December 3, 2020

  Aviation Startups Making Progress, But Can They Disrupt The Industry?

  Graham Warwick December 02, 2020 The concept of a minimum viable product is not new to aviation. It is how the industry started. But as aircraft technology has advanced, customers have come to expect more than a minimum capability. Along comes Silicon Valley's startup culture, with its drive to find a foothold from which to launch a new technology—a less-than-perfected product that can be developed quickly to disrupt or create a market. How well is that going for aviation? From autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI) to hybrid-electric and hydrogen propulsion, is there a viable product taking shape that can perform a valuable mission? Autonomy The vision: unmanned cargo aircraft plying the skies to meet the ever-growing express logistics needs of the e-commerce giants. The reality: a pair of startups that are converting the Cessna Caravan into a remotely piloted regional cargo aircraft as a first step. The goal is that supervised autonomy would enable several aircraft to be managed by one remote pilot on the ground, increasing aircraft utilization and reducing operating costs. Reliable Robotics and Xwing plan to operate their aircraft manned initially, the autonomy advising the pilot while accumulating the experience required to certify the system. The companies hope to begin commercial flights by 2022. There are plenty of startups pursuing the express logistics market with unmanned cargo aircraft, but by targeting an existing market—several hundred Caravans fly as freight feeders for package carriers—and modifying an already certified aircraft and taking a staged approach to introducing autonomy, these two companies hope to lower the certification hurdles. Artificial Intelligence The vision: automated aircraft flown by machine-learning algorithms that replicate the skills of human pilots but not their mistakes. The reality: The initial approach is to use AI to help the pilot in high-workload phases of flight, such as landing. Swiss startup Daedalean is developing a camera-based system to provide safe landing guidance for general-aviation aircraft and vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles. Airbus has the longer-term goal of bringing autonomy to its commercial aircraft but has started in the same place, demonstrating fully automatic vision-based takeoffs and landings with an A350 in April. By tackling one well-defined subtask of visual flying, and proving the system can be safer than human piloting, Daedalean hopes to create the path to certification of AI for safety-critical applications. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which has been working with the startup to frame the rules, expects the first AI applications to be certified in 2022. Hybrid-Electric The vision: propulsion systems that overcome the limitations of batteries to deliver the economic and emissions benefits of electrification in larger, faster, longer-range aircraft. The reality: Starting small, startups Ampaire and VoltAero are testing power trains in converted Cessna 337 Skymasters. Ampaire's route to market is to modify existing aircraft, beginning with the Skymaster as the four-seat, 200-mi. Electric EEL but moving on to the 19-seat de Havilland Canada Twin Otter. France's VoltAero, meanwhile, is taking the clean-sheet approach with plans for a family of hybrid-electric aircraft with up to 10 seats and 800-mi. range. Delivery of the initial four-seat Cassio 330 version is planned for 2023. While batteries have improved enough to make pure-electric urban air taxis feasible, longer ranges are still out of reach. But there are startups working to field all-electric nine- and 19-seat aircraft within just a couple of years of the first hybrid-electric types. It remains to be seen whether hybrid propulsion is just a stopgap, as with cars, or a long-term market niche. Hydrogen The vision: zero-emissions flight for aircraft of all sizes and ranges. The reality: adapting automotive fuel-cell technology to modify regional turboprops and kick-start the market for green hydrogen as an aviation fuel. ZeroAvia made the first flight of a six-seater with a fuel-cell power train from Cranfield, England, in September and plans a 300-mi. demonstration flight. The startup's route to market is to modify existing 10- and 20-seaters to hydrogen-electric propulsion, aiming for its first certification within three years. Universal Hydrogen is more ambitious, targeting the 50-seat de Havilland Canada Dash 8-300 for conversion to hydrogen fuel-cell propulsion for market entry by 2024. Introducing a new fuel to aviation is an infrastructure issue. By starting small, the startups believe the challenge of producing green hydrogen can be made manageable. But to have an impact on aviation's contribution to climate change, hydrogen needs to be scaled up to larger and larger aircraft as quickly as possible. https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/emerging-technologies/aviation-startups-making-progress-can-they-disrupt-industry

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  March 8, 2021

  USAF Planning Boss Pushes for Flexible Budgets to Keep Up with New Tech - Air Force Magazine

  As the Air Force pieces together its fiscal 2023 budget, due early next year, it must think about a murky future five years down the road.

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  January 31, 2020

  Tech startups still face the Pentagon’s ‘valley of death’

  By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Brooklyn-based technology startup goTenna launched in 2014 with a candy bar-sized gadget that pairs with smartphones to create off-grid, no-network communications. Though it was originally a commercial product, the company has received millions of dollars' worth of government business since 2015, mostly with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but also with Special Operations Command, the Air Force, the Navy and the Army. About 150,000 devices have shipped. The Army has spent millions of dollars with goTenna, but the service cannot give the company one of the most important things for a small business ― the certainty of recurring revenue. “Now the funding is out, and even the program officer for that program doesn't know where we go next within the Army,” goTenna founder and CEO Daniela Perdomo said at a Defense News-hosted roundtable in December. “That's in part why we've been spending more time, frankly, on civilian public safety. Because even though DHS is consistently [under funding restrictions], they seem to be moving. They seem to move faster.” That sort of inconsistency and confusion is why tech startups dealing with the Pentagon, as well as investors, so dread the gap between their innovative product's development and the Pentagon's sluggish decisions to launch. That gap has a nickname: “the valley of death.” The Pentagon has experimented with a variety of means to buy emerging technologies, an important goal as it seeks to preserve its edge against Russia and China. But one truism ― affirmed in a recent report from the Ronald Reagan Institute ― is that the federal government has been unable to fully adapt its practices to promote and harness private sector innovation, despite making strides. Addressing the House Armed Services Committee on Jan. 15, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy said the valley of death between a product's development and the moment that product becomes part of a program of record remains an obstacle. She said that's partly because acquisitions officials don't use the new authorities granted by Congress over recent years. The excitement of receiving development money from the Department of Defense stands in stark contrast to what often follows. “[Startups] win the prototype competition: ‘Great, we love you.' And that's in, like, FY19,” Flournoy said. “And then they are told, ‘OK, we are going to have [a request for proposals] for you in '21,' and [the startups] are like: ‘OK, but what do I do in '20? I have got a 10-year hole in my business plan, and my investors are pressuring me to drop the work on DoD because it's too slow, it's too small dollars.'” How would Flournoy fix it? She advised the Pentagon to hire tech talent ― “smart buyers and developers and fielders of new technologies” ― and create a bridge fund for firms in competitive areas like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing. (The idea seemed to resonate with Texas Rep. Mac Thornberry, who is the panel's top Republican and the author of multiple acquisitions reform laws passed in recent years.) At the Defense News roundtable, leaders from the tech community said not only has it been difficult for small businesses to enter an aerospace and defense market dominated by five major firms, but it's hard for startups to justify to investors that the government should be retained as a client when it is often the least decisive. “I think the fundamental misunderstanding between the DoD and venture investors is just how difficult it is to keep the wheels on a fast-growing startup,” said Katherine Boyle of venture capital firm General Catalyst. But the Pentagon is working to bridge the gap between prototype and production. Over the last year, the Defense Innovation Unit ― the department's outpost in Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; and California's Silicon Valley ― has launched two internal teams, for defense and commercial engagement, to envision these transitions and match them to the Pentagon's five-year budgeting process, according to DIU's director of strategic engagement, Mike Madsen. These teams are tasked with learning the needs of the services, working with commercial industry to develop prototypes to meet those needs and then helping market the prototypes more broadly within the Defense Department. Along these lines, DIU helped a company that developed a predictive maintenance application for the Air Force ― Redwood City, California-based C3.ai ― win a predictive maintenance contract for Army ground vehicles. C3.ai has since created a federal arm unit. A quarter of all prototypes awarded by DIU transitioned to programs of record, and another 50 percent are eligible for the transition. “It will take time for us to develop the right cultural instincts, but it's already happening,” said DIU's director of commercial engagement, Tom Foldesi. Anduril Industries co-founder and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens has often criticized the DoD's approach to Silicon Valley. But speaking at the Defense News panel, he acknowledged progress through DIU's ability to harness the flexible other transaction authority, a congressionally mandated contracting mechanism that makes it easier to prototype capabilities. He also praised the Air Force's effort to rework Small Business Innovation Research funds to target more mature technologies. “I don't know who's responsible for banging the table about it over and over, but somebody is out there saying it," Stephens said. “It seems to be coming across in the messaging in some way.” https://www.defensenews.com/2020/01/30/tech-startups-still-face-the-pentagons-valley-of-death/