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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.
"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....
You're not doing anything wrong, right? You should have nothing to hide.
Eventually, commercial planes will be unpiloted - pilots are expensive. I'm guessing this will be a good test of that eventuality.
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!
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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!
If we had a current generation of Sully Sullenberger pilots, I'd agree with you.
However, he made the correct point that most pilots are not given the training they need to perform as he did. I'd take a computer over a human that overrides the airplane & causes it to crash. See Flight 3407
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.