Future Flight: Your Future General Aviation Airplane

Part 1 of 12

Starting now and every month this year, AOPA Pilot will report on a new facet of the computer-fueled revolution coming soon to a GA airplane near you. We’ll be listening, too, for your comments to be included in a wrap-up article in December.

Clues to the future are more plentiful today than they were in 1939 when AOPA was founded. If you had read the nation’s favorite guide to science in that year, Popular Mechanics, you would have been able to predict radar, the ILS, and today’s air traffic control system (see " Predictions of 61 Years Ago,"). Can we make a predictive leap ahead another 60 years?

It’s worth a try. Save this article for 10 years, and we can all laugh about it later, or admire its accuracy. All the opinions that follow come from avionics companies, the FAA, NASA, U.S. Air Force scientists, and the FAA-funded think tank, the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development.

This year and the four after it will be the years the nation slept—that is, ignored the rapidly increasing delays in the air transportation system. Starting in 2005, however, the airlines will no longer run on time unless flights are reduced to accommodate a grossly overloaded system. That will create additional pressure to squeeze general aviation aircraft from using the busiest terminals.

Later this month, NASA will unveil an alternative transportation system, one based on small aircraft that are simpler to fly and operate from underutilized general aviation airports. Aircraft can be owner-flown, but they will probably serve as air taxis that leap over clogged highways. It is called the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS). Planning this year will pave the way for the start of the program in 2001. The FAA will need to be involved in the research, but for now it lacks the money to do so.

As long as we are looking at the calendar, new diesel piston engines and smaller jet engines developed for general aviation under a NASA program are expected to fly this summer at EAA AirVenture 2000 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They will be the subject of a later article in this series.

In the meantime, planners are scrambling to cram more airplanes into the space available. The big sky no longer seems so big. Already installed in Memphis and Indianapolis at air traffic control centers are new software programs that can predict traffic conflicts 20 minutes in advance. The software will help to support Free Flight, a program made possible by GPS technology that allows pilots to choose the most economical routing and altitude.

Key to the revolution is the glass cockpit, and one is coming to a general aviation airplane near you. Already the color moving maps are getting larger, and in 10 years they will dominate the cockpit. That is nothing new, of course, to purchasers of new Lancair Columbia 300s and Cirrus SR20s. The rest of us will have to ante up for a multifunction display (MFD) to take advantage of future improvements.

Datalink messages will be sent to aircraft and displayed on the MFD, reducing the babble and leaving the frequencies quieter for general aviation aircraft that are not equipped for two-way text communications. An experiment is planned for Miami in 2002 using airline aircraft. Speaking of babble, digital technology will allow better use of air-to-ground communications frequencies by putting four conversations on a single frequency.

Weather, the leading cause of accidents, will be avoided using weather graphics in the cockpit—seen on the multifunction displays. Textual weather will be free, but graphical weather depictions showing conditions ahead will be available from private companies by subscription. They will be up-loaded frequently and held in the aircraft computer, waiting to be viewed by the pilot as needed.

More important, air traffic around your aircraft will be displayed in the cockpit, making you a part of the air traffic control decision-making process. If you think uplinked weather and traffic information is far off in the future, consider that several pilots working at AOPA headquarters tested the concept in a Cessna 172 years ago. Textual flight plans are transmitted to airliners at 50 airports around the nation today. Two-way en route datalink communications are already in use via satellite over the Pacific Ocean—even over Nepal, Russia, and India. Tests in this country are coming to Alaska and California.

Satellites are the key not only to GPS navigation but also to in-flight communications, uplinked weather, and even in-flight e-mail.

Another revolution, thanks to GPS, is building in the terminal area. Today’s instrument landing procedures are barbaric when compared to those made using large cockpit displays. GPS-driven terrain databases will make flying in the soup a VFR event. Or should we say an EFR event? EFR stands for electronic flight rules, a term soon to be as common as VFR and IFR are today.

You won’t make outbound turns and inbound turns and time your approach. And you certainly won’t remember what a nondirectional beacon approach was. The path, even for the approach, will be displayed on your screen. The approach will consist of one turn, and then it’s down final to the runway.

Before that can happen, methods to improve the accuracy of GPS signals will be refined. These include the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) and the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS). There is even an extended-range Local Area Augmentation System.

Looking out 60 years, expect automation of all of the above. The pilot will be more of a systems monitor. Air traffic control may be entirely a function of the pilot’s computer, with controllers on the ground acting as master strategists.

Summed up, safety should hopefully improve greatly as a result of coming improvements in airframes, engines, and avionics. Sixty years from now, aircraft will recover on their own if the pilot loses control. Currently in the labs at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is just such a system. The record of Wright Pat is a good one. In the 1980s, Air Force scientists were at work on synthetic vision, and now an infrared system that allows pilots to see through fog and clouds is installed on a Gulfstream V.

It should be remembered that many of us are flying into the future in expensive hand-built aircraft—many of them designed in the first half of the 1900s. That has to change if the cost of aircraft is to come down, and that means greater use of composites and automated manufacturing. Flight training will be based largely on the new technology, but it may still include VOR navigation and ILS approaches. Those will be the backup systems to the newer technology.

There are still problems to be solved, such as interference to GPS signals that comes from today’s television transmitters, but your tax dollars are already funding solutions. All the future requires is will, vision, and money—but that’s a lot.

What about the hobbyist? Can you still crank up the Piper Cub without downloading a flight plan or arming the autoland system? You bet. The future wouldn’t be as much fun as the past, otherwise.

Links to other information about general aviation research can be found on AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/pilot/links/links0001.shtml). E-mail the author at [email protected].

Predictions of 61 Years Ago

The future lies in the clues

Popular Mechanics was the most popular guide to the future of science in 1939. One photo, for example, showed a man in a power station holding a ham sandwich between two bare electrodes. Now we call that a microwave, but we don’t put our hands in it.

Yet, the clue to the future was there. That year’s issues also contained clues to the future of aviation. Here are a few.

• Pilots, one article predicted, would one day use oxygen to "fly above the weather." That dream has come true, although oxygen is no longer delivered through a hose held in the mouth.
• ADF was the latest rage in navigation. Now it is considered an outrage—outrageously inaccurate and difficult to use. It has been supplemented by VOR and GPS.
• Holding and landing instructions were telephoned directly to airlines where new radios of "unusual clarity" were used to relay instructions to pilots. Now controllers have "unusually clear" radios, too, and talk directly to pilots.
• Radio navigation ranges were aligned directly with runways at airports, a forerunner of today’s ILS.
• Altitude records were falling faster than the 1929 stock market. A single-engine Caproni aircraft in Italy had reached 56,017 feet in 1938, several months before it was reported in Popular Mechanics. Add several thousand feet, and you’ll have the Concorde’s cruising altitude. (But the altitude record still stands. Texan pilot Bruce Bohannon intends to break it.)
• The Boeing 314 Pan American Airways Clipper was called a hotel on wings and even had a bridal suite. Today designers have 1,000-passenger airplanes on the drawing boards, but no bridal suites.
• Speed records continued to fall. A Curtiss Hawk 75 achieved 575 mph in a full-power dive. Some doubted that speed, however. It was thought that a shock wave formed at 500 mph that prevented further acceleration. Today’s jets achieve that speed quite easily without the macho dive.
• The Lockheed Vega used actual auto designs for its cabin area, and twin Menasco engines totaling 520 horsepower turned a single propeller, achieving cruise speeds of 210 mph. Today we are quite content to let airplanes be airplanes, and we can achieve that speed on one engine.
• There also was an intriguing test at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, of a "bouncing radio beam." It could warn pilots of mountains, tall buildings, and aircraft miles away. All the pilot had to do was watch a voltmeter, and when it quivered, watch out! A pilot at 3,000 feet over Long Island detected the Trylon at the New York World’s Fair. Today we call it radar and fly higher than the buildings. —AKM