$HALB  I know this is a little dated article but

$HALB  I know this is a little dated article but note the highlighted areas.

The Future of the Civil and Military UAV Market

Published: 28 Jun 2011

By Marko Lukovic; Principal Consultant; Aerospace, Defence & Security

The speed of development and growth of UAV use has been uneven across global regions, with U.S. and Israel still very much leading the way. However, experience of using mature UAV systems on operational deployment has dramatically improved the understanding of the usefulness of UAVs in Europe and Asia/Pacific and this, in turn, is driving a steady growth rate across the military segment.

The success of UAVs in providing real-time information to military commanders has contributed to both mission effectiveness and in protecting personnel. It is UAV's effectiveness in these roles that has encouraged most advanced militaries to fully commit to the use of them, and this will drive rapid market growth during the next 10 years.

Over the last decade, UAV manufacturers have moved beyond pure military sales and have shown a significant amount of interest in potential UAV applications in civil and commercial markets. In line with the prevailing trends across the defence sector, the military has acted as a first adopter of UAV systems and has demonstrated their utility, encouraging the idea of their use in a large number of non-military applications ranging from law enforcement and border security to earth observation and communications.

Historically, industry has often been accused of unrealistic optimism in expecting the rapid emergence of a viable civil and commercial UAV market. However, at the same time, industry has played an effective advocacy role in driving initiatives in the area, particularly in Europe and to some extent North America.

Challenges and Solutions

It is fairly clear that the market potential on the civil side is considerably larger than the military sector in the long term. However, at the moment there are major constraints: lack of a central procurement authority for government applications; absence of legislation and regulations for safe flight in integrated airspace; dispersed and highly heterogeneous potential customer base; to name but a few. In addition, initiatives to promote and facilitate the use of UAVs in non-military applications have been relatively uncoordinated and ad-hoc in nature.

Over the last three years work has began in earnest to kick-start the civil UAV market through a number of initiatives at national and European level and in cooperation with military users. These initiatives primarily aim to deal with the key problem, which is the lack of a framework of rules governing the flight safety on the one hand and insertion of civil and military UAVs in nonsegregated airspace on the other.

A whole range of legislative and regulatory measures need to be designed, mutually agreed and then implemented. These rules will be founded upon certain essential technologies, the most notable being a reliable, light, low-power and cost-effective Sense and Avoid (S&A) system, which would eliminate the possibility of a mid-air collision between aircraft: manned or unmanned.

Both the legislators and industry are striving toward a goal of achieving a capability that would allow UAVs to operate at an Equivalent Level of Safety to manned aircraft. Until this goal is reached, UAVs are required to fly either with a special military or an ad-hoc Civil Aviation Authority exemption, or in segregated airspace. At the moment, rules vary from one country to another, an incoherence which makes things more difficult for manufacturers and operators.

However, some rules have been put in place. On the civil side, airframes with a mass of more than 150 kilos are now required to obtain airworthiness certification at a European level from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). On the military side, the French Military Procurement Agency (DGA) has also developed UAV Systems Airworthiness Requirements for fixed-wing UAVs, which has been adopted as the basis of NATO's STANAG 4671.

Another important issue is that of radio frequency allocation. Currently, there are no particular areas of the RF spectrum allocated exclusively to UAV operations, which has already caused significant problems in the military use of UAVs. As with airspace exemptions, access to suitable areas of the frequency spectrum is granted, according to availability, by the local and national authority on an ad-hoc basis. The assignment of appropriate slices of the spectrum, for UAV command, control and datalinks, will be an agenda item at the International Telecommunications Union conference that will take place later this year, though it is not yet clear whether it will be resolved fully.

Training

The final, but by no means less important, part of the UAS puzzle is the issue of pilot training and certification. As with the UAV platform, future users as well as platform manufacturers have to prove that UAV pilots can train and operate with an equivalent level of safety as the on-board pilots. As was the case with development of UAS platforms, it is the militaries that have been leading the way in terms of rules, pilot certification processes, roles, and training and simulation requirements. This is particularly the case in the U.S., which has the largest operational fleet of large UAVs, such as MALE and HALE. With increasing operational experience, the U.S. Armed Forces have been fine-tuning the training programme and requirements for UAV pilots as well as the final qualification and the ability to operate within the government segment outside Armed Forces.

The current approach in Europe has been set by EASA, which divides UAV pilots into two classes: line of sight (Class 1) and beyond line of sight (Class 2), and is working on pilot certification issues. The current view is that UAV pilots will be treated differently from on-board pilots in terms of skills and requirements but that their training curriculum will be largely similar. UAV manufacturers, as well as training and simulation companies, have been working on synthetic environment training for military UAV pilots, which is easily transferable to civil UAV pilot training. Based on military experience, a novelty that UAVs will bring into the pilot training arena, is the sensor operator training that also needs to be taken into consideration as it has a completely separate set of requirements. These roles are expected to become the norm on the civil side once larger civil UAVs are allowed to fly freely, and sensor operators will need to be trained and certified separately.

Conclusions

Military UAS operations have now become the norm in almost all important deployments, and military UAVs are leading the way in terms of standards, certification and pilot training. However, in the long term, the civil and commercial UAS market has the potential to grow larger than its military counterpart. It will take a considerable amount of time for experience and the successful use of UAS in military and a wide range of non-military applications to diffuse across a dispersed customer base. For this to happen, a set of hurdles for the future of the market must be overcome: UAS must show that they are more cost-effective than current solutions; they must be seen as more effective at completing specific tasks; and they should prove at least as safe as presently available manned systems, both in terms of platform safety and pilot training. Finally, they should be able to offer new capabilities that currently do not exist. Once these factors are in place, there are unlikely to be any other significant impediments to a large and vibrant UAS market that would include a wide variety of platforms and services.