UAV - Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle
Flight Crew Commercial; Flight Crew Flight Instructor; Flight Crew Instrument; Flight Crew Multiengine
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 100; Flight Crew Total 3300; Flight Crew Type 150
Situational Awareness; Human-Machine Interface
Airspace Violation All Types
Airspace Structure; Human Factors
A scheduled VFR test flight was finalizing the last test points as the aircrew began to initiate practice approaches to verify the automatic land functionality and logic inside the previously scheduled restricted airspace. The recovery phase of the flight required the aircrew to operate the aircraft and implement an amended right hand traffic pattern which runs very close to the restricted airspace boundary. This amended right hand traffic pattern not only offered a larger safety margin; but allowed terrain separation as well; which is why a left hand traffic pattern was not utilized.While executing practice approaches; the aircrew noticed that the autopilot was not intercepting and maintaining the approach localizer/azimuth as briefed. The aircrew felt that the amended traffic pattern could be root cause of the lackluster performance and by widening and squaring the pattern; it could assist the autoland to regaining desired tracking performance. While flying the wider pattern; the aircrew was completely aware that they were operating extremely close to the airspace boundary; but felt they were still operating the landing pattern safely inside the restricted airspace. After downloading and parsing aircraft data; it was determined that an airspace breach occurred while the aircraft was on the downwind turning to base. The data shows that aircraft did cross the restricted boundary by 300 FT (estimate only) on three out of [more than] twenty patterns.
While reviewing post flight data it was determined that a military UAV practicing landings breached the edge of the authorized restricted airspace envelope.