Transcript
Shaheen:
Hello everyone thank you for joining us in our pre-recorded drone safety day webinar series. Drone safety day is aimed at promoting safe drone practices and exploring the cool and innovative ways drones are being used across Canada.
My name is Shaheen Chohan and I'm a policy analyst working on the remotely piloted aircraft systems or drone task force at Transport Canada.
Transport Canada is the department of the federal government responsible for regulating and developing transportation policies and programs including those relating to drones.
I'm joined by Nicholas Brodeur, innovation engineer at Bell Textron Canada, a helicopter manufacturer that's developing drones based in Mirabel, Quebec.
Hi Nick thanks for joining us.
Nick:
Hi Shaheen, thank you for having me.
Shaheen:
I guess we'll start off with learning more about what bell is doing, so why don't you tell us about what type of drones Bell is developing.
Nick:
Absolutely, Bell is in the process of developing our future vertical lift systems to address the needs of mobility, be it moving people, cargo and even data and using sustainable technology.
We right now have a family line of the nexus aircraft. The first one being the 6HX which is a six ducted fan hybrid electric air passenger carrying taxi and the 4EX which is a four ducted fan all-electric passenger taxi.
We're also in the process of developing what's called the autonomous pod transport apt which is an all-electric vertical takeoff landing vehicle, a cargo carrying drone essentially.
Shaheen:
Bell textron in Canada located in Mirabel, Quebec as you mentioned is an integral part of these advanced air mobility projects.
Nick:
Myself, I've been involved in drone development and flight operations in Canada and in particular a few years ago we developed a demonstration platform known as Hydra, which was a technology demonstrator to advanced things like distributed propulsion, flight controls and autonomous solutions for unconventional aircraft.
Shaheen:
So I guess my question is why drones? Why not just regular helicopters?
Nick:
Drones provide added benefits that some other vehicles don't have whether it be helicopters or
whether it be ground-based vehicles and one of the main ones I can think of is safety.
They can transport goods, they can transport people and they can do it under conditions that may be difficult or dangerous for manned aircraft for example; assisting in firefighting search and rescue operations, types of conditions where it may be difficult for an aircraft to dispatch - you may be able to dispatch a drone in those conditions.
Another advantage, well it's not an advantage over helicopter but it's an advantage over ground-based infrastructure is accessing the third dimension. Medical deliveries, for example, the drone could overfly a congested area and deliver that up to three times faster than a ground-based vehicle.
And so finally they can also provide air service for remote areas, communities where aircraft are maybe limited in getting in and bringing in critical supplies for the communities there.
Shaheen:
Which we have a lot of remote communities in Canada.
Nick:
Absolutely, yeah.
Shaheen:
So it definitely seems like drones offer a multitude of advantages over traditional aviation. Do you find that there's any misconceptions about drone use?
Nick:
Absolutely, there's definitely a lot of misconceptions. I think about drones, one of the number one that i - that comes to mind is that drone delivery is here today. The truth is happening under very specific and controlled conditions and there's a lot of maturation still of that technology before it becomes mainstream for the public.
Another misconception though is that drones are toys and they don't have the level of robustness that manned aviation does and the truth is I think the technology is there it's just once it gets to the point of maturity we'll be able to execute it to the same level safety is manned aviation.
Shaheen:
Right, makes sense. So previously you mentioned your autonomous pod transport project so maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that.
Nick:
Absolutely, an apt is a family of cargo carrying drones. It is an all-electric biplane tail sitting aircraft so it's a lot to kind of digest but it essentially takes off and lands like a helicopter and then converts onto its side on its wing like an airplane and what that allows it to do is it operates much quieter when it's flying on wing and it'll get you much more range and payload so increases the output from a traditional drone.
Currently it exists in two forms. The first one being apt 20, carries 20 pounds, hence the name f20 it has a gross weight about 55 pounds so that falls under the part nine regulations part 107 in the U.S.
And the other aircraft is called apt 70 and as you probably guessed that's a 70 pound payload and that aircraft has a max gross weight of about 320 pounds.
To date the apt seven aircraft has flown approximately 283 flights altogether and that includes visual beyond visual line of sight.
As I mentioned it's a bit of a research and development phase right now but we've been working with those military and commercial potential clients on their requirements and we can see it's got great use cases in obviously as I mentioned delivery search and rescue, manufacturing ship-to-shore kind of operations and more. So there's a lot of things that can do out there but we aren't kind of carrying out any of those operations as we speak today.
Shaheen:
You've got a wide range going on for sure.
Nick:
Absolutely.
Shaheen:
So it definitely seems like there's a variety of applications across North America, I guess specifically how do you see Bells work contributing to the Canadian market?
Nick:
That's a good question. Bell’s been quite involved in what's in the new unmanned sector that's this industry that's coming out in Canada, and of course the rest of the world, as you mentioned and it's allowed us to create new jobs in Mirabel specific to this application.
We also work closely with local startups, academia, government agencies on these type of projects so it brings a lot of that collaboration together. And what we're really hoping to do here is develop these skills here on Canadian soil and advance those technologies.
We've also been exploring partnerships for in Canada for the use case of apt and that'll help develop the technology as well as the regulations here in Canada.
Shaheen:
So here we are on Drone Safety Day, so I guess I need to ask: what does drone safety mean to Bell?
Nick:
Bell looks at drone safety the same way we looked at manned aviation safety. From a certification standpoint it's all it's usually risk based.
Systems, structures they need to be designed to a level of robustness to meet reliability targets for critical systems on the aircraft.
A drone is no different in that aspect especially if you want to do a higher risk operation such as over an urban community.
Nick:
So how does Bell ensure safety in the drones that you develop?
Shaheen:
So safety in our drone development starts from the conceptual design. We look at how the human machine interaction is, the battery safety we also look at system design to incorporate safety.
We apply our standard quality assurance best practices and we also develop some of our own methods for things like materials or systems that don't exist yet. So how we can test them and keep them safe for the user. Right now the user being Bell.
We also work closely with our flight safety officer and we have internal play safety officers and we see how we can align with our internal policies and standards.
Shaheen:
Bell has an objective of mission called mission zero. Zero incidents. Zero accidents. And drones are no exception it definitely sounds like you have a very rigorous safety program.
Nick:
Absolutely.
Shaheen:
How do you work with operators to develop safe operational procedures?
Nick:
For the moment Bell is operating our drones under an experimental context so we're not working directly with operators at the moment but we have used that stage to go and create our standard operating procedures, our maintenance manuals and our training manuals.
Everything in parallel so we're ready to go once these things are I guess released into the wild. So we based a lot of that on manned aviation procedures. We've also done a lot of work with our helicopter pilots and then we've tailored it more to drones. We've also worked closely with Transport Canada and their guidelines using the operational risk assessment, for example, to ensure the integrity of our flight test operations.
Shaheen:
Does Bell also mitigate operational risk with aircraft features?
Nick:
Absolutely, Bell designs a lot of mitigating features risk mitigating features into the aircraft itself you may see other products out there that opt for a parachute for example.
We don't believe that's the safest way to control a descent to the ground so instead we focus our design on safety reliability and power available - emergency power available.
This we achieved through a high level of system and component level testing and we've also put a lot of emphasis on the safety of our methodology, safety methodology behind our flight control computer.
That includes things functions like containment emergency protocols alternate landing zones and recovery land landings to name a few.
And this as I mentioned before extends beyond just the operation. We look at how the payload will be handled by an operator unloading load in the aircraft being safe from the rotors and how they will either change batteries or charge batteries, again it has to be safe for everybody to use.
Shaheen:
So it seems like a lot of your safety features are taken from traditional aviation. So how does your designing and development process for drones also incorporate traditional aviation?
Nick:
We incorporate a lot of the traditional aviation features that we know very well - airframe design, wings, rotors, things like that we're very good at doing that.
Some areas we've seen challenges are really on the miniaturization we call it system size weight and power swap as it's known.
So that's taking a lot of those important components and bringing them down the size while maintaining the reliability and integrity and consuming less electrical power because everything's electrical so there's a lot we've seen a lot of challenge in that.
So that's everything from the electric integrated electric propulsion systems right down to the energy management and storage. All this while trying to minimize weight and striving to meet the reliability figures that make aviation as safe as it is today.
The other part of the equation is the autonomy side. A lot is driven by new technology such as detecting void which will be a pretty integral part of the puzzle. So Bell is working with partners to test these types of technologies on the app vehicle.
Another thing that's also in motion that i'm happy to see in the Canadian industry and it's worldwide as well is the development of drone standards. So a lot like standard council working with other industries to standardize procedures they're working to standardize things like drone testing procedures, airborne equipment qualification, operating procedures, maintenance standards to name a few. And so i think this will really help lead to a uniform type of drone standard that will help when meeting the regulators standards they put forth the future.
Shaheen:
So a critical component of drone safety is conducting flight tests. How do flight tests inform your manufacturing and development process?
Nick:
So we manage our test campaigns through our manned aviation flight test campaigns so we follow a lot of the same types of protocols that we do with manned helicopters obviously there's areas where you can be flexible since there's not a human on board the aircraft and again it's a very tightly controlled environment for the flight test campaign.
That being said we closely track issues and fixes along the way and then we have implemented a very stringent configuration management policy which we do on manned aviation as well.
When that configuration comes out of the flight test campaign it's well defined, we know what it is and that's something that you would then hand off to manufacturing to go and produce.
Anything that changes thereafter would have to have engineering buy-off to ensure that it still meets the intent of the original qualification campaign.
Shaheen:
So when can we expect the autonomous pod transport program to get off the ground?
Nick:
We do see commercial operations in the near future. We're flying right now we're making great progress in our flight test campaigns so it should be within the next few years we start to see a more real commercial and military application of these drones.
Shaheen:
So that's it for our questions for Bell Textron. Thanks Nick for being here we appreciate you joining us.
Nick:
it's my pleasure Shaheen.
Shaheen:
We hope you found this webinar helpful, fly safe and have fun.
The other webinars in our drone safety day pre-recorded webinar series will provide an overview of drone safety basics and explore the cool and innovative ways drones are being used in first responder operations across Canada. Be sure to check them out as well.
Got questions about safe drone operations or something you may have seen or heard during our webinars? Tune in to Transport Canada's twitter chat to be held on November 13th at 1pm. We'll have a group of drone experts available on hand to answer any burning questions you may have - live.
Drone safety is everyone's responsibility. To celebrate Drone Safety Day tell us what drone safety means to you, share a photo post or story to your social media platforms with the hashtag dronesafetyday and check out Transport Canada's twitter facebook and instagram to see what drone safety means to other Canadians.