A few of us, like Tennyson, have the gift of foreseeing the future. (see Fig. I). Another few, like Juan de la Cierva have the gift of delivering the future. They are the innovators.

Those who know Tennyson's verse will recall that his vision was of transportation by air of people and freight and also sadly of weapons. These were the tasks for which aircraft have primarily been developed – that is until recently.

Let us move back a few years from Cierva's day to view the work of another innovator – Von Karman. His machine was a harbinger of the future in that it was not designed for a transport task but for a surveillance task (Fig. 2). It did not survive for long since Von Karman lacked the light-weight, compact, electro-optical sensors available today and he was forced to carry aloft two mk 1 eyeballs attached to a heavy and bulky man.

The CAA has recognised the need to develop civil standards for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Accordingly the CAA Directorate of Airspace Policy has published the document ‘CAP 722 –Unmanned Air Vehicle Operation in UK Airspace – Guidance’, (which can be accessed via the CAA website — http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP722.pdf). The document itemises the top-level military and civil regulations which impact upon the operation of UAVs in the UK. One of the items listed within the document is ‘Civil Certification’ of UAVs. This particular aspect is the responsibility of the Design and Production Standards Division, (D&PSD), of the CAA Safety Regulation Group. The purpose of this paper is to present and explain the current position of D&PSD regarding the appropriate design standards to be applied for the civil certification of the airworthiness of UAVs.

This paper presents the CAA position that UAVs should be granted permission to fly by qualifying for certificates of airworthiness, by demonstration of compliance with defined airworthiness standards comparable to, and derived from, those applied to manned aircraft. The paper also presents a method for determining, to a first approximation, the level of airworthiness standards which should be applied to any particular design of UAV by reference to the existing codes of airworthiness requirements for manned aircraft.

Passive imaging using mm-waves offers very significant advantages in scientific and military surveillance. However, the relatively long wavelengths mean that for the resolutions that are typically sought, the input aperture of the imager needs to be quite large; typically in excess of one metre. Deployment of conventional dish antennae of these dimensions on small aircraft is highly problematic. The use of snapshot synthetic aperture interferometric radiometry (SAIR) offers an attractive route to integrating a two-dimensional antenna array into the structure of an aircraft so that the transverse effective dimensions of the antenna can be almost as large as the aircraft. We report here a study into the feasibility of deployment of a SAIR on unmanned airborne vehicles and the achievable performance parameters. Critical considerations are the achievement of acceptable sensitivity and angular resolution from a SAIR that does not require excessive complexity. It is shown that traditional approaches based on fully sampling the spatial frequencies in the scene are unable to simultaneously meet all of these criteria, but that a SAIR based on thinned sampling of the spatial frequencies shows promise.

The use of large numbers of unmanned air vehicles in a given air space presents a challenge for conventional air traffic control methods. Flocking (or schooling, swarming or herding) in nature arises when mobile organisms find benefit in living at high densities. The present paper applies rules of flocking (cohesion, alignment, separation, and migration) to the problem of managing the flight of a number of autonomous unmanned air vehicles. A six-degree of freedom aerodynamic model of an existing UAV is used to simulate the flocking flight vehicles. It is found that application of the cohesion and alignment rules is sufficient to generate true flocking behaviour in that the flight vehicle density is increased and the flock members converge on a common heading. Increasing rule strength reduces the time taken to achieve flocking behaviour. However increasing rule strength too far leads to oscillatory or unstable flight paths. It is found that flock behaviour can be adequately described using the time histories of two statistical parameters: the mean radius between flock members and the standard deviation of the flock members’ heading angles.

At a time when a great deal of research on UCAVs is aimed at maximising their autonomy it should not be forgotten that human operators will, ultimately, remain ‘in control’ to some degree. The decision-sharing relationship between the operator and the UCAV depends on political constraints as well as the intelligence of the UCAV system. This in turn dictates the amount and type of information to be exchanged and the way in which it is communicated with the operator.

Operational flexibility is a key military driver and in order to achieve it, a variable autonomy command interface, combined with information fusion and intelligent decision-support systems, will be required. To be effective the operator will need to work in concert with the UCAV system rather than act simply as a command source and an information sink. The implications of this ‘partnership’ for command and monitoring requirements and in particular for weapons release authorisation, are discussed in this paper.

The aerodynamic characteristics of five planar flying wing plan-forms suitable for micro air vehicles (MAVs) are investigated via a series of wind-tunnel tests. The external boundary of the five plan-forms result from slender carbon fibre (CF) struts under various degrees of buckling. The maximum lift/drag ratios were similar for all the (quite different) shapes but the stall characteristics were found to be markedly different. Results are presented of cross-plane traverses detailing the wake vector field and turbulence characteristics for two of the planforms at conditions close to stall. A MAV, based on mylar-covered buckled CF struts, is described. The MAV utilises elevon control based on modified commercially available micro radio control systems.