Wed Dec 16, 2020 8:31 pm
#1814701
When the Americans were operating their huge surveillance and ground attack drones in a certain sandy part of the world, the found that they needed to have a human pilot within visual range of the runway to “fly” the takeoff and landing, by actually seeing what the aircraft was doing. Then once airborne, the drone was controlled by pilots sitting in the US. They found that even with WAAS GPS, onboard video and rad-alt, that the time delay of only a fraction of a second in the two way transmission between the drone and pilot in the US, was enough for the pilot to get out of sync with the aircraft, causing PIO, and causing them to crash several of the $multi-million drones. Hence they reverted to controlling takeoff and landing from the side of the runway.
I think that any firm operating fixed wing drones would have to do the same. I really don’t think these will be able to fly in conditions that would ground the Islanders.