Busy bee drones!

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Daddy O
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Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2010 9:32 am

Busy bee drones!

Post by Daddy O »

So many of you have likely seen the video of an Air France Airbus clipping a CRJ200 at JFK? Really great little clip, the airbus just spun the CRJ around a full 90 degrees! No deaths, no serious injuries, but someone is in serious trouble.

But the clip got me thinking, maybe we need some drones at the towered focus airports. ground based drones that is. The idea is to have planes doing push-backs and taxiing to maintenance, small craft moving around the airport, possibly even vehicles (those would have to be added to the css tables) None would ever cross runways or actually take off, but they would provide more stimuli for pilots to deal with. Every time I fly commercially out of the bigger airports I realize just how much crap they have running around the tarmac at any given time. Fuel trucks, APUs, luggage trains, pickups, food delivery vehicles, aircraft on their way to 100 hour checks, etc.

Just an idea.
david
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Joined: Sun Nov 28, 2010 2:35 pm

Re: Busy bee drones!

Post by david »

what a great idea!!!!

If can only be a code to detect the crash if it happens on xp be even better.
Keith Smith
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Re: Busy bee drones!

Post by Keith Smith »

Visually-immersive, no question...but in real life, most of those things give way to aircraft. If they're not smart, or being operated by a human being, then it's a problem when it comes to their actual use on a daily basis.

If things go well, there will be plenty of things going on at the larger airports in terms of live traffic. You'll have to take my word on that for now.

If there IS a way to do this that actually works on an operational basis, then I'd be interested, but I suspect it might be best handled at the local sim level through 3rd party plugins. I have to imagine FS9/X already has a solution for that, and the people who are normally most interested in such visuals, in my experience, are FS9/X people. Correct me if I'm off base there.
Daddy O
Posts: 450
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2010 9:32 am

Re: Busy bee drones!

Post by Daddy O »

Visually-immersive, no question...but in real life, most of those things give way to aircraft.

Being drones you could turn them on and off as you choose, prolly turn on groups of drones as you please. You can see them on your ground control scopes so you would be able to adjust ground taxi instructions to work around the drone aircraft.

It just seemed like an interesting idea to make the ground based part of the flight more realistic. When I fly I really prefer to start from a specific point on the airport (like GA parking or a rental agency) and either return to that spot, or another specific location at my destination airport. I was never one of those people who want the eye candy, I skin the airports for realism. Lotta sim pilots can fly coast to coast, but never practice the basics like parking on a flightline or finding the FBO in the dark.

Just seemed like a simple thing to beef up ground traffic at focus airports.
Keith Smith
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Re: Busy bee drones!

Post by Keith Smith »

Being drones you could turn them on and off as you choose, prolly turn on groups of drones as you please. You can see them on your ground control scopes so you would be able to adjust ground taxi instructions to work around the drone aircraft.
Who are you suggesting would turn them on and off?
It just seemed like an interesting idea to make the ground based part of the flight more realistic.
Quite right, it is interesting, and if implemented perfectly, it would certainly make ground-based ops at larger airports more realistic.

[quite]Just seemed like a simple thing to beef up ground traffic at focus airports.[/quote]

Agreed, the basic idea is simple...but the devil is in the details.

My problem with it is this, ground controllers have authority over the moment of all traffic operating in movement areas on an airport. If they do not, the system will break down under heavy load, and I think it's important to design for heavy load.

The two alternatives are:
1) give the controllers ability to pause/resume ground-based drones. Doable, but it'll be a while before I can get to this.
2) make controllers aware of the patterns of the drones, and then control 'around' them. This has scale limitations and does not make for an agreeable working environment for controllers, particularly when working multiple airports (which is part of our model).

I really think that much of this will go away as a requirement once we have some decent traffic.

Let's revisit it a few months after launch, after traffic density increases, and once we have regularly scheduled commercial customers operating in high volumes out of some of the large airports. If there's still a perceived need for it, then I think I'll be more willing to consider it. Right now it seems premature to add traffic at airfields to boost the traffic when we haven't yet established what the typical, organic traffic levels are.
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