Optionally Piloted - Bridge or Destination?

The US Army was pretty enthusiastic about the prospects for optionally piloted vehicles in its unmanned aircraft systems roadmap released in 2010. At the time, the service saw the ability to selectively "deman" its helicopters as a way to bridge the gap between today's manned and tomorrow's unmanned rotorcraft. Now it's having second thoughts.


Photo: Boeing

The thinking was the Army's UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopters would fly more hours per day if they could be optionally manned. The crew would step out of the cockpit at the end of their day and flip a switch turning control over to a ground station and the aircraft would continue to pick up and deliver loads, unmanned.

"But that's expensive, and might not be the answer," Glenn Rizzi, senior advisor to the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, told an AUVSI conference in Washington last week. Where the roadmap envisaged optionally piloted helicopters as a bridge to a stand-alone cargo UAS, "now a cargo UAS could be the bridge to a future multi-role manned/unmanned rotorcraft."

The Army is conducting an optionally piloted study at Ft Rucker this year, says Rizzi, and also tracking Marine Corps plans to deploy unmanned cargo resupply helicopters to Afghanistan by year-end. Sikorsky, meanwhile, will conduct an unmanned cargo demonstration for the Army's Aviation Applied Technology Directorate this year using a UH-60M, under its Optionally Piloted Black Hawk program.

So the idea of optionally piloted vehicles is far from dead, but it looks as if the Army would like to get some experience of operating unmanned cargo helicopters before deciding whether to head in the "pilot optional" direction.