Virtual Pilot Lands Qantas Jet

An anonymous reader writes "Australian airline Qantas has successfully tested an automated landing where both the pilot and the control tower didn't talk to each other. The plane was being piloted by a "Virtual Pilot" located in the control tower."

Comments

Is this really big news?

[kabocox]

I know the mil. has had auto landing and take off tech for years according to popular science. I know com. airlines have autopilot on most big planes. I just figured that it there was more of a political reason than a tech. reason why pilots haven't been entirely automated. I'd rather have a trained human "flying" my aircraft, but it may be faster/safer/cheaper to have a computer do it. The big reason that I've heard that we will always need pilots is if anything happened midair the pilot could either fix it fly around it recongizing that the incoming data from his instruments couldn't possibly be true.

Actually, I've always wanted an autopilot for my car. I'd feel alot safer if there was a dependable/safe/cheap autopilot for cars. Most car accidents are caused by human error. I'd love to prevent human error from my car.

Re:Is this really big news?

[SuperBanana]

I just figured that it there was more of a political reason than a tech. reason why pilots haven't been entirely automated.

In the case of landings, it's called "weather", or more specifically, "wind". My father flew single-engine planes and you had to have lightning fast reflexes on windy days. It's better in a jumbo because of their mass, but they get tossed around a decent amount too.

Pilots are in the cockpit because planes are complicated. Planes can, and often do, suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring improvisation or "best effort" solutions. Instruments do regularly fail requiring again, educated guessing or getting the information in other ways; GPS fails? Pilot whips out the charts and uses the ADF to navigate by VHF beacons. Avionics fail? Well, landmark time. The pilot can handle it- the computer goes "beep" and prints out "service code #432565, call Boeing". You rave about autopilots, but we've had a string of problems with both autopilots and some control systems- most infamously the Airbus disaster where the plane gave the pilot the wrong altitude AND refused to let him apply full power to save the plane from crashing.

We have this redundant setup whereby the actions of the pilot in command are confirmed by the copilot. And if one kicks the bucket entirely, the other one is fully capable of taking over. They've even often got a guy just to handle watching over the plane(engineer) in many cases.

Most major incidences in the last 10 years of US commercial airflight were due to mechanical failure. Not pilot error. The very last fucking thing we need to do is put more machines into the equation when we've proven we can't handle building them correctly in the first place.

Re:What about the pilot jobs?

[pwagland]

We really have to think of alternate economic systems the more stories like this come up. An automated car doesn't really displace jobs--but this really could.

I think you say that without realising how many taxi drivers there are in the world. I would be prepared to bet that the number of taxi drivers compared to the number of qualified superliner pilots would be quite large...

Food for thought.