Study: Automation of transport aircraft by 2050

For nearly 10 years, the French Air and Space Academy (AAE) has launched studies to identify the major risks facing air transport by 2050, with maintaining flight safety remaining a primary objective.

The analysis was entrusted to its Civil Aeronautics Commission (CAC) comprising members of the Academy (AAE) and experts invited by the AAE.

As a first step, the AAE focused on defining the major societal challenges that air transport is likely to face in the near future. The Academy’s dossier n°38, published in 2013, answers the question “How will we fly in 2050?”: it gives a vision and proposes recommendations of an institutional and industrial nature.

The analysis was then extended by a reflection taking into account past history and future trends on more specific topics deemed likely to further improve the efficiency of this sector over the same horizon. Among these topics, automation and connectivity emerged as the most important and were retained:

• automation, based on the observation that it has already played a significant role in improving performance and safety, and that its extension could still contribute to this, provided that the specific possibilities and limits of human intervention capacity are taken into account;
• connectivity, due to its essential role as a link, must be able to meet the needs of reliability, performance and security of data transmission.

This volume publishes the elements that led to the development of dossier N°42 “More automatic, connected aviation by 2050” published by the AAE