The Ability of RC Pilots to Maintain Visual Line-of-Sight of their Vehicle

As part of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS) project, efforts on integrating small UAS (sUAS) into the NAS were conducted by a humansystems integration (HSI) team at the NASA Langley Research Center. The objective of this experiment was to determine a sUAS pilot’s ability to safely navigate between and loiter at predefined waypoints. The sUAS pilot flew his vehicle via manual vehicle control inputs while flying Visual Line-of-Sight (VLOS) operations within uncontrolled and controlled airspace. The design of the experiment included three sets of ground control station display configurations, in addition to a hand-held control unit. The three different display configurations were VLOS, VLOS + Primary Flight Display (PFD), and VLOS + PFD + Moving Map (Map). In general, subjects were able to maintain positive control of their vehicle even when they went beyond the prescribed 400 yd lateral visual range. Exceeding the 400 yd lateral distance was more apt to occur with the Map display configuration. Greater altitude deviations were more prevalent in the VLOS display condition. The PFD and Map display configurations do provide sUAS pilots with valuable information that helps them maintain control of their sUA even though this information does increase the possibility of flying BVR.