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FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation
coondoggie writes "Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu (an independent subsidiary of Boeing) and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction, and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft."
Only now they're not quite so goddamn funny.
Dog is my co-pilot.
But..but...why would our government want to spy on its own citizens???
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"Why are you so against this military hardware used against our enemies? It's not like the government will be flying these things over its own citizens."
Fast forward a few years....
UPS and FedEx and other air cargo type things I could see as a huge advantage.
Eventually refining the confidence and quality of the AI to the point where it could haul actual passengers. I'd bet that they mean time between failures of machines could out pace that of human error fairly quickly so it'd actually be safer.
Remember the Elevator had the same type of history. There was a time when an attendant was there to push the button for you as a way to reassure everyone that it was safe. Eventually people learned they could push the button on their own.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
This isn't the FAA building and deploying UAV's on any kind of scale. This is the FAA trying to figure out how to safely integrate UAV's into the national aerospace system (NAS). Personally, as a pilot, while I distrust the FAA to some extent, as the agency charged with ensuring safety of all operators in the NAS, they are the right agency to be performing this study.
When some other agency says they're going to start launching UAV's in the NAS, the FAA needs to have ammunition to enforce safety measures to ensure that the UAV's not pose an undue hazard to other aircraft and that the UAV operators respond accordingly to instructions from air traffic control.
Merde, il pleut encore!
Already happens: http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thing is, military drones have no people on board. Passenger jets would have people on board.
Why would they do it? it's all about saving money, it's not in the interests of passengers.
OTOH "when your rear is in the hot seat and death is riding you", people tend to act erratically (there were some catastrophes essentialy due to humans arguing with the machine...). And we can't be certain if knowing that you will surely survive any catastrophe is not actually at least as strong deterrent & motivation - after all, you know you will face the consequences if that was your fault.
One that hath name thou can not otter
So, do you think Sully would have pulled off a perfect water landing if he had been miles away from the cockpit? If the pilot's life isn't at risk, I just don't think he's going to have the same drive to handle an emergency. He's not going to have all the visual, auditory, and tactile, information a human in the pilot's seat is going to have either. Sometimes you need the reflexes of a well trained human being whose life is on the line.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And we can't be certain if knowing that you will surely survive any catastrophe is not actually at least as strong deterrent & motivation - after all, you know you will face the consequences if that was your fault.
And what about the possibility of the remote pilot ditching and making a run for it? At least with the local pilot they'd need to parachute out of the plane. In this case, Jim takes a coffee break and never comes back.
So, do you think Sully would have pulled off a perfect water landing if he had been miles away from the cockpit?
I don't see why not. I don't know if I'd be under any more or less stress to handle an emergency if my life is on the line or if its hundreds of passengers.
And essentially, some of the mistakes that might cause emergencies will be reduced by a drone that doesn't forget things. And for the record, no human has ever had faster REFLEXES than a modern computer, we've just had the gift of INSIGHT. The only reason we can outsmart a computer in various fields is being able to do what it does not expect. Usually a pilot in the sky is best for situations where your target is also human so you need to be able to have someone who can continue another person's train of thought based on one action (Like fighter pilots watching how enemy pilots fly, and Rescue teams saving victims). It's the unexpected elements of humans that require another human to assist.
In the case of a commercial airliner needing to make an emergency landing, I don't see why a computer couldn't handle it, should proper emergency protocols be handled. The only problem I see arising is instrumentation error, which a few cameras in the cockpit could fix.
"The third and by far most complex step (ERAM Release 1) is the replacement of the Host Computer System with new software and hardware ... national deployment begins in FY 2009 and concludes in FY 2011"
That's all well and good except for the part about it not lasting more than 6 days when they tried to use it in production. They may be *trying* to replace the old system. Whether they're succeeding at replacing it is a whole other question.