UH-60 Black Hawk Helicopter Achieves Pilotless Flight

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A US Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter recently conducted a fully autonomous flight without a “pilot,” a significant development advancing the curve in ongoing work to architect aircraft with increasingly more sophisticated levels of autonomy.

The Black Hawk took off from a runway at Fort Campbell, Ky, and performed a 30-min mission including pedal turns, maneuvers and various autonomous adaptations to specific mission environments, finishing with what developers called a “perfect landing.”

US Army UH-60 Black Hawk Helicopter – Pilotless Flight

The first-of-its-kind unmanned or “Optionally Piloted” Black Hawk flight emerges as a result of a coordinated program between Lockheed Martin, its Sikorsky subsidiary and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency using breakthrough hardware and computer algorithms to enable autonomous flight. The DARPA program, called Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) draws upon advanced computer automation and sensors to gather data, organize it and adapt as needed to specific mission demands by performing procedural functions without needing human intervention.

“With ALIAS, the Army will have much more operational flexibility,” Stuart Young, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said in a DARPA statement. “This includes the ability to operate aircraft at all times of the day or night, with and without pilots, and in a variety of difficult conditions, such as contested, congested, and degraded visual environments.”

This breakthrough could well be described as a long sought after culmination of years of research, experimentation and breakthroughs with AI and computer automation to achieve previously unanticipated levels of in-flight autonomy. 

Course correcting programs such as “fly-by-wire” have existed to a certain extent, and the Army envisioned measures of autonomy years ago during the inception of its Future Vertical Lift program, this development represents the beginning of a new frontier in military aviation.