Investments in unmanned aircraft focus on ground operators.

• Author: Jean, Grace
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

CURRENT AND FUTURE PURCHASES OF unmanned aircraft increasingly are taking into account grounds troops' demand for timely intelligence in a user-friendly format. Consequently, the military services are turning more attention and funding to the devices used to program and operate the aircraft, officials assert.

The use of unmanned aircraft in combat is rising at an unprecedented pace. The Pentagon budgeted $1.7 billion for unmanned systems purchases in 2007, and expects to be spending nearly $3 billion a year by the middle of the next decade.

Typically, 90 percent of the dollars spent on unmanned systems are invested directly into the platform while only 10 percent goes to the command and control system, says Mark Bigham, business development director at the Raytheon Company.

"It's basically an afterthought," he says.

The lack of user-friendly standards for current ground control stations not only make it harder for operators to fly UAVs, but also results in mishaps. One of the biggest contributing factors to crashes and failures in UAVs stems from human error, according to a Federal Aviation Administration study. "Human factors issues were present in 21 percent (Shadow) to 67 percent (Predator) of the accidents," says the FAA.

The study implicates poorly designed user interfaces on ground control stations as a cause for human error. "The design of the user interfaces of these systems are, for the most part, not based on previously established aviation display concepts. Part of the cause for this is that the developers of these system interfaces are not primarily aircraft manufacturers."

Ground control stations typically are not ergonomically designed, and when combined with the long hours required in combat duty, they can contribute to operators' health problems, such as deep vein thrombosis, says Bigham.

In 2006 alone, operators at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., flew nearly 51,000 combat hours in Predator unmanned vehicles.

"They are really stressed out at a high level of performance right now," says Brig. Gen. Kevin Henabray, mobilization assistant for Air Force strategic planning.

To alleviate some of those problems, Raytheon has developed a "universal control station" that can operate up to eight dissimilar unmanned aerial platforms.

The system immerses operators in an airplane cockpit environment with videogame-like displays and controls. In current ground control systems, operators rely on video transmitted from on-board cameras, which...