From the Cockpit with Merlin’s regulatory lead Travis Mason

Merlin Labs’ Chief Policy and Regulations Officer Travis Mason works with the company’s engineers and policy experts to ensure the Merlin Pilot program meets quality, safety and regulatory approval requirements of civil aviation agencies globally. The Boston-based autonomous software company began uncrewed test flights for the production variant of its Merlin Pilot in June, becoming the first automated technology developer to enter this phase of the certification process. [caption id="attachment_57146070" align="aligncenter" width="860"] Travis Mason, chief policy and regulatory officer at Merlin. (Courtesy/Merlin)[/caption] To further its research, Merlin this month announced it will collaborate with the Flight Safety Foundation to address human factors in the flight deck and control station automation to enhance aviation safety. Merlin’s automated flight technology is equipped with a glass cockpit, advanced avionics, new sensors, an automated communication system with dual redundancy and autopilot. It began installing the final version of the software in January. Mason sat down with Cargo Facts to discuss Merlin’s next steps as the company further develops its automated flight software and works with the FAA to establish operating protocols for the technology. What follows is an edited version of the conversation. Cargo Facts : How important is military support in driving and innovating your automation technology and how does it contribute to development of automated flight systems for commercial use? Travis Mason: One of the most difficult things is to design technology in a heavily regulated environment. I think the history of the military integrating new forms of technologies into society — the internet being one of them — communicates how important they are as a player in the integration of new technologies. The military is an important customer for us. What we do with them will hopefully bleed into the commercial space in ways that allow us to test our technology, make sure it’s safe and does what we design it to do before it gets into the commercial environment. CF : Does the military pathway enable you to reduce the risk of testing the automated flight systems in commercial airspace? TM: It’s not about lowering the risk tolerance for the customers or in the commercial space. It’s actually about enhancing safety. Partnering with the military allows us to do that on current platforms where, from a commercial perspective, we would not be allowed to based on the current regulatory regime. This allows us to start thinking about ways of enhancing safety on the military side and being able to translate that technology on commercial platforms. CF : Should the FAA be held solely responsible for the financial support and development of infrastructure to support these vehicles, or should other government agencies help shoulder the load? TM: What we need from an infrastructure perspective is a lot less involved than what the eVTOLs and the UAV companies may need, but we support any advancement in the infrastructure, specifically in the air traffic management, that will help enable the safe operation of advanced automated flight systems in the national airspace system. CF : What has been the response from investors and/or potential commercial operators regarding the timeline for complete integration of the automated flight systems? TM: Funding a company that is trying to build new technologies in a regulated environment is a challenge broadly defined. Any company that is capital-intensive at the beginning without any immediate return on revenue is difficult to scale and thrive. The value and the benefit for our company is that we’ve seen a lot of people interested in the process of establishing safer systems in national airspace. If we look at the top news in aviation today, there is interest from a regulatory and public perspective. People want more safety in how they move from point A to point B in the air. We’re working closely with our investors to define and share our story with other investors as we grow this vision, but we don’t see it as a challenge. CF : What are some developments you could share with the FAA to encourage it to accelerate the certification process? TM: What can we do to convince the agency? I think it’s showing up in the conversations we have with them on tough issues like artificial intelligence software assurance. What do we do there to ensure the software is doing what it has been designed to do and how can we test and check those functions? The FAA also is curious about how human factors play into the development and design of these systems and that’s something that we’ve been leaning into as well. The thing that is proof to the agency is not just building technology but working with them to figure out these sorts of challenges. CF : How involved have insurance companies been in the development phase and what are the challenges to establishing coverage? TM: Our challenge is not as involved on the insurance side as the eVTOL and the UAS space. There’s more risk, I think, posed, at least from an experience perspective on those systems. We’ve had some conversations with insurers, but I think those conversations are much easier on our side, at least for the earlier versions of our automated flight system, given that we’re using existing airframes and platforms. That’s another area where we’re thinking smartly about some of the headwinds to integrate this technology — not only speaking the language that insurers are familiar with but operating on platforms they’re also familiar with. CF : What are some of the challenges you see as you continue to evolve the automated flight system? TM: We’re extremely paranoid, so we design knowing the headwinds. We don’t necessarily think too much about the headwinds; we think about the opportunities. There are a couple of areas of opportunity. We see that if we design these systems well, we’ll also do these efforts well. One of them is human factors. How can we ensure that the methods and the standards that support the evolution of these systems or human factors evolve alongside our technologies? We have to consider human factors because it enables these systems to integrate better. Whether we’re looking at the rail or the self-driving car world, when you start offloading some of those functions from a human to a machine, that isn’t an easy solution. You have to think about the workload and, in some cases, the underload that the human will experience operating those systems. So if we design these systems well, we will tackle this challenge extremely well. The 30th Cargo Facts Symposium will take place Oct. 14-16 at the Omni Hotel in San Diego. Gain valuable insights, success strategies and networking opportunities at this special anniversary event. Learn more and register today .

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