Flight Dispatching for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Flight dispatching is the set of tasks related to flight preparation, such as load and balance, meteorology study and briefing, operational flight planning, contingency analysis and planning, etc. The flight dispatcher must be in close contact with the pilot in command in order to verify that the airplane is airworthy, furnishing all kinds of information needed to properly operate the system. The advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating on civil missions will require developing new dispatching processes that take into account the main role of these vehicles: the mission. Traditional aviation focuses on point to point transportation of passengers and/or cargo. However, UAVs usually focus on surveillance applications that require large sets of sensors and complementary avionics to properly develop their assigned task. This paper presents the design of a new dispatching methodology focused for UAV civil applications. The overall process is mission-centric, focusing on all the requirements needed to properly implement the assigned tasks, but also integrating the traditional dispatching requirements of manned aircraft. The proposed dispatching process is built upon a specific UAV mission architecture, the Unmanned Service Architecture (USAL). Based on this architecture a methodology is introduced to characterize the mission objectives, the UAV airframe and its various characteristics, the software services required for managing the flight and the mission, the sensor and computational payload, etc. All these elements are combined together in an iterative dispatching flow. The result of the process is the actual UAV configuration in terms of fuel, electrical system, payload configuration, flight plan, etc; but also detailed flight plan, alternative routes and landing sites, detailed USAL service architecture and even contingency planning.