Nearly a century ago, Maj. William Ocker and Capt. Charles Crane developed a new piloting technique at San Antonio’s Kelly Field called “blind flying,” where the pilot relied on new kinds of instruments to navigate without needing to look out the window.
Pilots still use Ocker and Crane’s techniques when flying through clouds, fog or darkness.
Today, companies occupying the former Kelly Air Force Base — now called Port San Antonio — are working on the next revolution in aviation: aircraft without pilots.
Jim Perschbach, Port San Antonio’s CEO, told me the old airfield’s days at the cutting edge of flight are far from over as Texas takes center stage in developing automated flight rules for pilotless planes.
“The aircraft are capable of getting in and out of really dense urban environments. It’s going to require the development of modern airspace management,” he told me, standing before a model of Port San Antonio. “It’s not just these little four-passenger vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. They’ll be closer to being flying buses, with 40, 50, perhaps 60 passengers.”
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American airspace desperately needs new rules. U.S. air traffic control remains rooted in the 1970s and can barely keep up with current demand, let alone delivery drones or electric vertical take-off and landing air taxis known as EVTOLs.
“We still have, I think, some real reliability risk in the system because we’re running off of 1970s and ‘80s computing power, compact discs. It’s crazy what the system is using today,” Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford told CBS News. “We have 313 FAA facilities and each of them are essentially running off Compaq computers. … It works, it’s reliable, it’s safe, but it’s not efficient.”
A Boeing-backed startup operating at Port San Antonio, SkyGrid, is leading the efforts toward the development of what are called automated flight rules.
“There’s visual flight rules, you fly by looking out the window, then instrument flight rules, which interestingly enough, were developed here in San Antonio by Ocker and Crane in the 1930s,” Perschbach said. “Automated flight rules you can think of as being like drivers’ aids that you have on a car.”
SkyGrid is developing more precise systems that share data between individual aircraft as well as with air traffic controllers. The company hopes to automate decision-making and create predictable aircraft behavior, whether a pilot or a robot is in command.
See here and here for some background. I’ve mostly been thinking about these things as taxis, and thus not as vehicles capable of transporting 30 or 40 people at once. There are those, but there are also plans for these things to serve more as regional transport, which would be more like bus service. It makes sense, and that changes my perception of the business model. I still have a lot of questions about how these things are supposed to work in urban areas, but I suppose this is a first step towards answering them.