DAYTON — Efforts to demonstrate that unmanned aircraft can be flown safely in airspace used by manned airplanes could get an important boost with test flights scheduled this fall, a conference of unmanned aircraft industry officials was told Tuesday.

The Air Force and the Navy, working with different variations of the Global Hawk remotely piloted plane, plan the test flights to demonstrate that electronic “sense and avoid” technology can allow the unmanned aircraft to “see” an oncoming plane and automatically change course to avoid collisions, said Joe Sciabica, executive director of the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Sciabica and other officials from government and industry addressed a Dayton Development Coalition-organized conference on unmanned aerial systems, which are the unmanned aircraft and their sensor systems. Organizers of the two-day conference, which began Tuesday at Sinclair Community College, hope to make it an annual event.

Community leaders are trying to develop the Dayton region as a nationally recognized center of unmanned aircraft research, training and manufacturing expertise, hoping that it will attract business investment and new jobs. Local universities and colleges already support advanced manufacturing and sensors research, along with training in operation of unmanned aircraft.

The military tests this fall are considered “graduation” flights to demonstrate that the sense-and-avoid technology can move from the research and development phase to production and acquisition by Defense Department agencies in the next few years, Sciabica said.

In the meantime, it is vital that government, business and university researchers keep working together to resolve challenges to the technology, he said. Such collaborations have been ongoing for several years in the Dayton area.

“Partnership is key. It’s critical,” said Sciabica, who operates from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is overseeing the Air Force’s research and development of the sense-and-avoid technology.

The test flights likely will occur in September or October over Lake Ontario near upstate New York, said Andrew White, manager of the sense-and-avoid development program for Defense Research Associates Inc., a Beavercreek company working for the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Researchers are working on both ground-based and airborne sense-and-avoid systems. They are intended to allow the unmanned planes to automatically redirect themselves in midair, without the need for potentially critical delays while remote pilots on the ground spot the oncoming aircraft through the unmanned plane’s sensors and manually change direction.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which has been directed by Congress to accelerate the merging of unmanned aircraft into manned airspace, is monitoring the technology’s development to determine that the integration can be safely done.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.