Automagic No-Fly-Zone Enforcement

An anonymous reader writes "SoftWalls is the name of an aviation project at UC-Berkeley that's developing a system for commercial airliners that establishes and enforces no-fly zones. Basically, through GPS, if a plane begins to enter a no-fly zone (eg, around a mountain, or over Lower Manhattan), an alarm goes off in the cockpit. If ignored, the system actively removes control of the plane away from the pilot and co-pilot to steer the plane out of the no-fly zone. The technology is intended as both an accident prevention technique and a deterrent to terrorists planning to ram a building. ABCNews recently profiled the project (with video) and also rode along with a working prototype built by Honeywell that successfully kept a Beechcraft from hitting a mountain."

Comments

Re:The real question is ...

[BlackHawk]

• (but at no point in my post did I say the pilot should not be able to fly his plane)

No you didn't, in those words. But yes, you did, by supporting the idea put forward in the main article. Any system that purposely puts active control of the aircraft into the "hands" of someone who is not in the cockpit of a manned aircraft (I am not talking about RPVs here) is interfering with the pilot's ability to fly his plane. Period. No amount of argumentation you will put forward about safety factors, commercial vs. non-commercial aviation (like that matters a bit; an aircraft flies, whether it's commercial or not, according to the laws of physics) will change that fact. If a system is in place that takes control of the aircraft from the pilot, then that system is making it so that the pilot cannot fly the plane.

• I will give you the point that the computer may not make the right descion and there should be a way to take control away from the computer.

So let me get this straight: you agree that computers may not make the right decision, and that the pilot should be able to fly the plane, but that this proposal to place a computer-controlled overide of the pilot is a good thing. So long as the pilot can overide the computer overiding him.

And you think this is somehow superior to things as they are?