2025 Agenda

Small unmanned or uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) have been developed into valuable instruments for various applications. It has been established in various publications, that small, uncrewed aircraft systems can constitute an effective tool to support conventional crewed flight and ground inspection operations. For this, UAS can be used to measure and evaluate radio signals from aviation radio navigation aids or to inspect runway lighting and visual landing aids like PAPI installations with optical sensors.

The institution represented by the author has developed an uncrewed aircraft system to support the flight and ground inspection of aviation navigation aids. In order to allow for a versatile application of the UAS in flight inspection, the payload can be flexibly modified according to the signal under inspection. Typical payloads consist of receivers and antennas for the measurement of instrument landing system (ILS) localizer and glide slope signals, or cameras for the inspection and calibration of visual landing aids.

This presentation presents technical considerations and scenarios for the application of small, uncrewed aircraft systems in flight and ground inspection tasks. A small, uncrewed flight inspection aircraft system for calibrating radio signals of ILS and VOR, and visual indications of PAPI installations is introduced. Flight results are presented and discussed. For this, the uncrewed measurement results are compared to conventional, crewed flight inspection results.