JOINT BASE LANGLEY-EUSTIS, Va. — Imagine a future where a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot, mid-flight, loses consciousness, and an onboard automated system reads the pilot’s vitals and autonomously flies the aircraft back safely, even alerting a medical crew to be at the airfield ready to treat the incapacitated pilot.
A groundbreaking fusion joining autonomous flight and operational monitoring of pilots’ vital signs just made that future possibility a present-day reality recently at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
“This is the first time we have integrated the pilot’s health status to an autonomous flight control system,” said Carl Ott, a U.S. Army experimental test pilot with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center Technology Development Directorate.
Ott successfully flew this scenario together with co-test pilot U.S. Army Lt. Col. Greg Sievers, rotorcraft in-flight lab branch chief, James Carr, flight test engineer, and a team monitoring the mobile laboratory from the ground, integrating mission adaptive autonomy, and operator state maintaining, or OSM.
“This demonstration added in the capability of the OSM, so now if I have a pilot managing the system, he is flying, and all of a sudden gets incapacitated, he can [return to base], essentially going back to the point of origin,” Ott said.
While the aircraft was operating, data and video from the pilot and the helicopter were live streamed and monitored in real time. Mission adaptive technology is the term used to describe the autonomous flight capabilities, and OSM manifests itself as an arm band that monitors vital signs of the pilot similarly to an EKG machine.
“Our goal is to provide a tool to save the pilot, the crew and anyone on board, whether helicopter or another aircraft. If we can prove that concept, then everyone and everything can come home,” said Harrison Whittels, CEO of Tiger Tech Solutions, the company providing the OSM technology for the experiment. Whittels and his team monitored as the integration of all the systems were tested.
The flight was the product of a cooperative research agreement with the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Lab and Tiger Tech. While autonomous flight is something that is being tested already, this specific capability test is connecting the health and well-being of the pilots to an aircraft’s autopilot functions.
“This goes beyond flight stabilization, altitude and heading control,” said U.S. Army Col. Justin Highley, commander, DEVCOM Aviation & Missile Center Technology Development Directorate at Fort Eustis. “This technology has the further capability of connecting the status of the human flying the aircraft with the autopilot functions."
The directorate Highley commands develops and demonstrates new technologies for aviation.
“We have a flying laboratory, which is only flown by test pilots such as Carl (Ott), specific for experimental test pilots for research type systems, used as a learning system, where we try in a flight environment different capabilities with the autonomy,” said Highley.
DEVCOM AvMC is the Army’s primary center for developing, integrating, demonstrating and sustaining Army aviation and missile systems. DEVCOM AvMC is a part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Futures Command.
“What we are doing here is finding ways to cope with adaptive behaviors in the cockpits and aircraft that allows them to reduce the cognitive workload on pilots,” Highley said.
“Within DEVCOM AvMC we are working on how to add autonomy to the aircraft for high risk and really dangerous missions; we are particularly looking for ways to take our conventional aircraft and make them optionally manned,” Highley said. “For really dangerous operations, if we want to pull the pilots out and let the aircraft go by itself for a mission, we need to be able to provide that option to commanders.”
Highley added, that the technology of fully automated flights is still several years away. “You can never replace a pilot,” he said. “But now we have new ways to save a pilot.”
“We have some accidents in aviation, that a combat system can come in and warn the pilot it can save lives,” Highley continued. “All the modern cars nowadays have lane stabilization, so if you get too far out of the lane it shakes to let you know. We can do similar, where if it gets too far out in the danger zone or too far off your route, it can cue the pilot, have it shake the stick.”
The combination of the OSM with the autonomous flight also opens doors for additional possibilities, according to Ott. “Partnering with aeromedical research for this operator state monitoring, in addition to sending information itself, the OSM could also transmit to an aid station on the ground and there could be a medical response waiting for them, another possibility to broaden this capability,” he said. “We try to answer how to use technology to our advantage. The demonstration was small in scope but great in what the capability could look like on the future battlefield integrated with human users.”
OSM has been also recently tested in various capacities, to include monitoring Soldiers jumping out of airplanes, divers, and now with pilots.
“The future is this will be in common aircraft,” said Rick Whittington, chief operations officer, Tiger Tech Solutions. “If you can monitor your pilots, imagine how much it will assist air traffic controllers, how many lives it can save.”
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