Jetstream Retrofit Illustrates How Close Modern Planes Are To UAVs

cylonlover writes with this Gizmag excerpt: "In April of this year, a BAE Systems Jetstream research aircraft flew from Preston in Lancashire, England, to Inverness, Scotland and back. This 500-mile (805 km) journey wouldn't be worth noting if it weren't for the small detail that its pilot was not on board, but sitting on the ground in Warton, Lancashire and that the plane did most of the flying itself. Even this alteration of a standard commercial prop plane into an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) seems a back page item until you realize that this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."

Comments

Would you ride in one?

[DKlineburg]

That is cool, but would you? Is it more safe if the pilot can't be reached?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Of course not. You'll be on the ground and you'll be watching the picture from the camera behind your window. First class seats will have better resolution. Economy class seats will have black and white picture.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

depends. How many accidents were the result of human error compared to accidents from mechanical failure that even having a pilot wouldn't have saved?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[GrumpySteen]

At this point? No. In the future? Probably.

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.

I don't think we'll see passenger flights without pilots anytime soon, but you might begin seeing flights where you have only a co-pilot on board. It would be a long time before there would be enough evidence that the pilots weren't needed and the majority of the public would trust the systems enough to be willing to fly.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target. At this point all you they can do would be to crash the plane, which can be done without trying to get to the flight deck. But destroying a passenger airliner in flight would get them big headlines and attention. That is basically what the terrorists want.

Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA. Compared to devastation of WW-II Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc, 9/11/2001 does not even qualify as a flea bite. But 9/11 made more headlines and more news than all the impact made by WW-II news in its day in the prized demographics of the terrorists.

The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.

What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[mikerubin]

Would the "majority of the public" have a choice?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uninterruptable power supply, but who will change the fuse, who will push the reset button, or reboot the computer. Shucks folks, my GPS is off by 200 foot, and 50 foot in elevation. There have been drones that have gone down, and remote control aircraft have gotten lost, so whats to say?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[tlambert]

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.

You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident#Capture_of_the_drone

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Economy class seats will have black and white picture.

With advertisements, of course ;-)

Re:Would you ride in one?

[citizenr]

Of course not! It would be like riding in elevator without a lift man.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[second_coming]

Yes, they could choose another airline that keeps pilots as a marketing ploy.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[wvmarle]

Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.

There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.

Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[citizenr]

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.

planes are fly by wire nowadays, there is no need to touch flight sticks, those are just potentiometers with force feedback, plane brain is in the lower decks next to cargo hold.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic common sense -- the first plane that crashes without a pilot will be blamed on remote piloting no matter the source of the crash.

Solar flairs, disrupted communications etc etc would be problematic.

What about discrepancies with instrumentation vs what is seen with the pilot's eyes?

What if interactive action is required -- rebooting of on flight computers, failure in landing gear, damage to flaps, etc etc.

Why would you ever remove the pilot? -- you still need a pilot on the ground to do this -- so it is not saving money? -- so is this for pilot safety only?

What if communications are intercepted/taken over -- banks cannot seem to eliminate electronic bank fraud so we are supposed to put out faith in remotely piloted airliners?

What is more disturbing is that this could be used to a 9/11 (2001) Redux from a 3rd party country who has hostile intentions or allows 3rd party control of the plane in the last few minutes.

This is an interesting experiment but not very practical.

BTW this was accomplished before with the Boeing 720 crash tests in the past.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I been told by people in the know that the "pilots", are there to taxi and to respond when the auto-pilot can't handle something. We all saw how well that worked on the Air France flight from South America.

According to what I saw on Frontline about the incident, there was one maneuver that the pilots needed to make within 20 seconds to gain control of the plane. They did not do this and the fate was sealed. If the auto-pilot had been programmed with this those people would likely be alive today.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[sjames]

Or more likely, the other airlines will go pilotless but stuff some guy in an old uniform to act as a greeter and then sit in the cockpit while trying to look important.Then they'll run the commercials about how much they care about you.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[_Shad0w_]

And how well it worked on US Airways Flight 1549...

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA.

The North Tower, South Tower, the Marriott Hotel (3WTC) and 7WTC were completely destroyed. The U.S. Customs House (6 World Trade Center), 4 World Trade Center, 5 World Trade Center, and both pedestrian bridges connecting buildings were severely damaged....

The Deutsche Bank Building across Liberty Street from the World Trade Center complex was later condemned as uninhabitable because of toxic conditions inside the office tower, and was deconstructed. The Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall at 30 West Broadway was condemned due to extensive damage in the attacks, and is being rebuilt. Other neighboring buildings including 90 West Street and the Verizon Building suffered major damage but have been restored. World Financial Center buildings, One Liberty Plaza, the Millenium Hilton, and 90 Church Street had moderate damage and have since been restored.

The Pentagon was severely damaged by the impact... source

also two Boeing 767 jet airliners ($160 million each) and a Boeing 757 jet airliner ($65 million)

The attacks resulted in the deaths... of 2,977 victims. ...In 2001 dollars, U.S. stocks lost $1.4 trillion in valuation for the week.

Conservative estimates put the final cost between 3 and 5 trillion dollars. Not only was it absolutely something for a country the size and might of the USA, the attacks hurt every country and every person on the planet.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

The single step of going unmanned adds a whole slew of failure points, many of which will have limited redundancy. Aircraft are build to a fairly high quality standard with a lot of configuration management and control over the system. When you make it unmanned you now add a whole bunch of things you have limited control over to your aircraft system. Now instead of having some mechanical levers and gimbals to transmit commands to your quadruple redundant flight control computers, you have to have a data link which is coming in via radio, probably via some sort of satellite link. Even if you have two separate receivers and antenna you now have to include the satellite, the ground transmitters, all the cables, wires, computers, fiber optic links, air-conditioning systems, power cables, power plants, etc. to your failure matrix.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[slew]

planes are fly by wire nowadays

Fly by wires isn't the same as fly by wireless which what it would be if you didn't have pilots (unless they went the way of the old "TOW" missals which were connected by fiberoptic cable).

Given the possibilities of jamming and hacking, I think there is less of a chance of a flight deck issue than other ways of hacking/jamming...

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jbwolfe]

With the current retirement age already at 65, and efforts to raise it again to 67, I think we are already where you suggest- old guys in ice cream suits. When I got hired at age 32, I was excited, but soon realized I would have to do this for a long time (age 60) before I retired. I wondered if my body or mind would give out before then- radiation exposure, embolisms, poor diet, working during WOCL, physical inactivity. As if it hasn't already...

Every pilot starts out with two buckets. One is filled with luck, the other empty of experience. Fill the experience bucket before the luck bucket runs out.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do i still have to get felt up by the equal opportunity types at homoland security?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hardly a new idea. A generation ago it was predicted:

The cockpit of the future will have seats for a man and a dog. The dog's job is to bite the man if he touches anything. The man's job is to feed the dog.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Z00L00K]

And when someone successfully hacks the system and takes over the aircraft?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jbwolfe]

The autopilot was flying the plane. At least until it lost needed data to do so. Then as programed, it relinquished control to the only known entity that could cope- human pilots. The error was in flying into the storm in the first place. Thereafter, with conflicting data, the pilots made numerous further errors which aggravated their distress to the point of stall. In large swept wing aircraft, stall recovery is a long process and requires patience and often thousands of feet of altitude loss, while operating in alternate or direct flight control laws (not particularly easy). The rapid descent and threat of impact with the ground did not foster patience and the flight crew was inadequately trained in stall recovery, making the outcome more certain.

As a result, and to my dismay as an Airbus pilot, Airbus have modified their stall recovery procedure to retard thrust to idle- contrary to every thing pilots are taught from the very first stall.

The final mishap report makes very interesting reading (as do most reports): http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Gr8Apes]

Until the first crash....

Re:Would you ride in one?

[anegg]

I am not a pilot nor am I trained in aviation. My impression of the Air France disaster was that it was caused, in part, by an incorrect mental model of the situation in the mind(s) of the pilot(s). The pilot at the controls was making control inputs that didn't make sense for the situation, but he wasn't an idiot, so he must have not understood the situation. It didn't seem to help matters that the aircraft systems quit warning about a stall when the systems could not make sense of the sensor inputs, then resumed warning about a stall when the sensor inputs started making sense, possibly causing the pilot to think he had just initiated a stall (again) instead of beginning the process of recovering. It seemed like the senior pilot finally figured it out at the end (too late).

Is my understanding possible or am I way off-track?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.

The list prices for a 787-8 is US$206M, and for a A350-800 it's US$245M; a Bombardier CS100 is $62M. For the 787, it costs about $25 per nautical mile to fly.

The cost of pilots is fairly insignificant IMHO.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Of course. What if you tried to plant a bomb into the seat for a passenger on a later flight?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pay extra, yeah.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[AJWM]

Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?

As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.

As OP alluded to, bee stings don't kill people, the anaphylactic shock reaction does.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jbwolfe]

They had attitude information, but no air data (altitude, airspeed, vertical speed). They were also, for a time, making dual and contrary inputs to the flight controls (sticks are independent and dual inputs are added together, one full up and one full down equals zero). Without air data, avoiding stall and recovering was made significantly more difficult.

However, they did recognize stall. They just failed to execute a proper recovery. They needed to hold the nose down for much longer to build airspeed before pulling up again. They ended up in stall after stall and ran out of time.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[timeOday]

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing."

Flying is the ultimate in trusting technology, even before the autopilot. You are suspended in the air by nothing but the reliability of the engines to keep you from dropping 30,000 feet into the middle of the Pacific ocean, thousands of miles from any help. The fact that we amazingly no longer even perceive this as "technology" just shows how trustworthy technology can become, over many decades.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jklovanc]

That is an unsubstantiated claim by Iran. It is equally as possible that there was a glitch in the system and the drone auto landed. If Iran had the ability to capture drones electronically there would be a lot of drones being captured. It is an attempt by Iran to embarrass the US and it worked pretty well.

By the way, please check you link before posting Here is the correct one.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Tastecicles]

you mean like now when the cockpit is hermetically sealed from the passenger cabin?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Tastecicles]

hm, yes, let me think: Gatwick to Murcia one way, pilotless: £29 or with human at the yoke: £499.

It's a no-brainer. Unless of course, you don't fly.

I'd rather take the Tunnel and drive for 44 hours, actually.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Tastecicles]

it takes 8 years to qualify for commercial jet right seat (navigator), and that's full-time and intensive from single engine prop VFR to qualifying on emergency landing in a 747 box simulator and everything in between. It isn't cheap, either. Probably a million or so a year for one pilot or navigator. Airlines part-subsidise this cost in a lot of cases with the proviso that the pilot then flies for that airline for the next twenty years.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[icebike]

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.

The reason we have pilots is that these systems fail or fuckup all the time, but because we have pilots, its not an issue. The pilot takes over and sets things right, and none of these incidents are even reported. There is not a bit of paperwork filed when a pilot has to assume control of a take off or an approach due to any circumstance what so ever.

Remember that even THIS flight had a pilot.

The systems you mention work fine in "the clean room" of a totally controlled environment, and they fail with the first flock of birds, or revised instructions from approach control.

Until there are three redundant systems programmed by different companies installed on each plane, with redundant comm links and redundant remote pilots its not good enough for passenger travel. Military drone losses are a secret. Nobody knows about them unless somebody manages to capture one.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[lightknight]

Nonsense. You are suspended in air by those wings, which, in the event of engine failure, are still typically operational.

Now remove those wings, strap on a pair of more powerful engines, and ask pilots how they would feel about an engine failure.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Takeoff only. The pilot is needed for takeoff. Or at least that was the case in 1996 when I took an Avionics (Aviation Electronics) class in college. The automatic landing systems provided for a smoother touchdown than most pilots could do. I still like the idea of a trained pilot as backup (just like the pilots systems are all powered by electricity and the co-pilots are all hydraulic/pneumatic, so they do exactly the same things, completely redundantly with no system crossing the other system). If the satellite system gets borked, the pilot does what pilots do. I don't know why they don't let either the pilot or co-pilot take nods on long haul flights either. I know that the critical time is 30 minutes (less than 30 and you can wake up non-groggy, more than 30 and you need 6 hours to feel non-groggy). 30 minutes for one, both awake for 30, 30 minutes for the other, both up for 30, repeat. Even stretching, and meditating for 30 can provide one heck of a break. I'm getting older, but I really like to get out and stretch after driving the car for 90 minutes. Even a 10 minute stretch and pee break makes you good again for at least an hour or two (I recently went on an 1700 mile road trip, with split so that we only travel about 425 miles per day. With lunch and coffee breaks, it still means being in the car for about 8 hours (60-70 miles per hour).

Re:Would you ride in one?

[amorsen]

They did not realize that they were making contrary inputs. And I do not agree that they recognized the stall. The pilot in control kept pulling back at the stick for most of the fall, and no sane pilot would do that if he knew he was in a stall.

The Airbus way of not making the physical sticks move in concert must have contributed to the confusion. The mishap report does not dare say that.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

TOW used metallic wire, not fiber-optic cable.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[fredgiblet]

Indeed. The extremely thin skin that people have developed over the past few decades is very frustrating, as is the reliance on a media ecosystem dedicated to sensationalizing to make money.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[fredgiblet]

The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.

What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.

Similar thing with the school shooting IMO, I expect that if we stopped having a media circus after each one and turning the shitbags into celebrities we'd see a marked decrease. Instead we just keep making bigger deals and probably inspiring more people to go out in a blaze of "glory".

Re:Would you ride in one?

[michelcolman]

That's a common misconception. Yes, more accidents are due to human error than due to equipment failure. But those statistics don't take into account the number of cases where equipment failed and would have led to a crash if it hadn't been for the pilots taking over. There's a few orders of magnitude more of those. They end up being just minor mishaps, nothing bad happened, the passengers didn't even notice, it's not a crash so it doesn't make the charts. But it would have if the pilots hadn't done their job.

When equipment fails (autopilots, for example, fail quite regularly), pilots can normally handle the situation and nothing bad happens. When pilots mess up, it's usually some gross judgemental error that the airplane's systems can't do anything about. So yes, there may be more accidents due to pilot error than due to equipment failure, but you'd have a *lot* more crashes if you took the pilots out.

I'm a pilot, and I've already experienced several equipment malfunctions that would have led to a crash if we hadn't done our job. That's certainly more than the number of crashes I've caused (none).

Re:Would you ride in one?

[michelcolman]

No civilian aircraft currently in service (or planned in the near future) is able to take off automatically. There have been tests, and it's certainly technically possible, but the decision to continue or abort a take-off is considered too important to leave to a machine. At least for now. Every single take-off is performed manually.

Automatic landings are possible, and are often performed in low visibility conditions, but they are actually more work for the pilots than a manual landing. They have to constantly monitor the autopilots and be ready to take over immediately if anything goes wrong (which does happen from time to time). Special training and regular simulator trainings are required for a pilot to be qualified for automatic landings.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume that the cost of the flight crew is that much a portion of the cost of a flight. Assuming that the average flight deck crewman makes 100K USD a year, that's 200K per year for two crewman. The average crew makes three flights a day (some longer range ones may make only one, and some commuter airlines will make 5 or 6) they fly about 20 days a month, or 60 flights a month. 12 months makes 720 flights a year. 200K/720 = roughly $277 a flight for the pilot and copilot. That's no more than a factor of 2 off. Divide that cost by most aircraft being in the 120 seat range, and that's roughly less than $3 a seat for the cost of flight crew. It is arguable that the cost of insurance for an airline to go crewless for a flight will more than offset that cost in the short run. Long term, things may change. But, its definitely not going to be more than a few dollars difference on your ticket for the cost of a flight crew, and that's a few dollars I will GLADLY pay these days.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[michelcolman]

That's weird, somehow it only took me two and a half years to get to the right seat of a jet. Just over a year of ATPL theory, 6 months of intensive VFR/IFR/twin engine training, and then onto the type rating. I know it's different in the states, where they require a couple of thousand hours flying in aeroclubs and cheesy cargo operations before even considering you for a jet, but many European companies have ab initio programs that take a lot less time.

Getting an IFR licence is around $100000, a type rating on a jet is about $200000. Give or take a bit.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[michelcolman]

When the autopilot can't handle something, the pilots usually (almost always) handle the situation correctly. There may be a crash due to human error from time to time, but there would be a lot more if the pilots weren't there to fix things (which they do manage to do in the vast majority of cases). Not long ago there was an incident very similar to the Rio accident, with incorrect airspeed indications leading to the aircraft flight control systems automatically initiating a nose dive and even overriding the pilots' inputs. They would certainly have crashed if the pilots hadn't switched off the air data computers to switch the flight controls to a more basic law where some of the "protections" were disabled. Without that action, the plane would have continued to dive because it thought (incorrectly, this time) that it was stalling. The pilots' common sense and technical knowledge saved the day. But of course this incident, like so many others, won't go into the statistics of crashes caused by humans versus technical failures, because no actual crash occurred.

As a side note, pilots are not just there to take over when the autopilot can't handle something. The autopilot still needs inputs to tell it what to do, it's very good at following orders extremely precisely but it's otherwise surprisingly stupid and it can't react to any unexpected situations by itself. It basically does grunt work and leaves the strategic decisions to the pilots.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[nospam007]

"I'm a pilot, and I've already experienced several equipment malfunctions that would have led to a crash if we hadn't done our job. That's certainly more than the number of crashes I've caused (none)."

I there's no you, nobody can get forced to fly into buildings, land in Cuba etc.
No risk of food poisoning or alcohol or heart attack or ...
You're an interested party, we can't just believe whatever anecdotes you tell us.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[nospam007]

"If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow."

On long flights, there will be several pilots on different shifts instead of 1 tired one, if a pilot keels over for any of 500 reasons, they'll have replacements ready to take over in a second. And on arrival in Rio, the pilot in the US just drives home instead of being stuck there in a noisy hotel with a bad mattress to get fresh for the flight back and trying to get sleep with 5 or 6 drinks.
They'll argue it's more secure and therefore are sorry but they'll have to charge extra for the additional security.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

The pilot is probably a very small part of the ticket price. The big costs are the plane and maintenance, fuel, airport fees, and the opportunity cost of not using the plane for a different route.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[uncqual]

Agreed, except for:

Why would you ever remove the pilot? -- you still need a pilot on the ground to do this -- so it is not saving money?

It seems like it could save a fair percentage of the money spent on pilots.

With this approach, pilots could work from anywhere in the world (think "flight centers" instead of "call centers" based in India) on regular shifts from fixed locations.

A pilot and two copilots would not be required for long flights -- there could be one pilot per plane for 100 planes and a couple extras on standby if one of the first 100 croaks or needs assistance.

Pilots could work a standard 8 hour workday (albeit, some would be stuck on graveyard shifts) which addresses many pilot fatigue problems (which can contribute to crashes). Pilots can be relieved by other pilots for coffee breaks and lunch.

As well, there would be no need to house pilots on layovers and compensate them for time when they are not flying.

Indeed, it's not clear that when in boring cruising phases on autopilot, that a one-to-one ratio of pilot to plane is really required. Perhaps a pool of eleven "cruise certified" (vs. "takeoff/landing certified") pilots could handle twenty such planes at any instant in time with one pilot designated as standby to take over the "good" plane if one of the pilot's planes begins to have problems requiring full attention.

However, I'm picking the flight with on-board pilots and co-pilots until it's been proven by real-life experience and analysis that remote piloted flights are safer. If this happened, I think I'd rather have an on-board pilot to respond to the situation!

Re:Would you ride in one?

[blippo]

I agree

I'm a programmer, and know a little about AI.

On the surface, it's much easier to build a self-flying machine than a robotic car or even a vacuum cleaner.

The space were you can fly is more or less well known, there are a number of accurate and independent positioning systems available,
the traffic is controlled so nothing should show up in front of the aircraft. The runways are equipped with ILS systems that guides the plane on
a perfect glide slope. The most problematic part might actually be to taxi from the runway and to park, as it's a visual process.
(Doesn't always work even today, I was once in a plane that got pushed into a light pole when leaving heathrow. It tooks some time to sort out, but at least
I can say that I have been in a airplane accident and walked away...)

However, it's a mistake to use these facts to conclude that's it's possible to build an autonomous airplane that's safe enough.

There are algorithms for obstacle avoidance, so it would be possible avoid most of the things that seems to be on a collision course,
  and yes there are fuzzy or neural network based algorithms that seems to be able to adapt to damaged control surfaces and possibly
also missing or erroneous sensor data.

But to handle the sheer number of thing that can go wrong in complicated way, or even figure out that something has gone wrong,
requires more sophistication than we can currently create.

Things that are obvious to a human are surprisingly often extremely complicated to automate, like categorizing things,
detecting shapes, stand on one leg (or two) but stuff that we tend to think is hard normally isn't, like sudoku, long division, geometric calculations etc.
Even chess is just "semi-hard" though beating the best human players requires both clever algorithms and a significant amount of computation, .

We will build these machines, but I'm not flying with them until they are smarter than me.
,
I am certain that that day will come, eventually. Possibly in my own lifetime, and when that happens I think we will have much more interesting topics to discuss on slashdot than airplanes...

Re:Would you ride in one?

[isorox]

Indeed. The extremely thin skin that people have developed over the past few decades is very frustrating, as is the reliance on a media ecosystem dedicated to sensationalizing to make money.

Land of the wimp, home of the scared

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Sabriel]

If there's a reinforced door, it's likely nobody can get forced into anything.
If there's food poisoning / drunk / heart attack, that's what a copilot is for.
Yes, a pilot is an interested party - interested in staying alive, too.

Now let's add a remote control device, remove the pilot, and imagine that instead of a bunch of terrorists having to coordinate physically hijacking a half-dozen planes (and now also having to get through reinforced doors to reach the cabin), you've got a bunch of terrorists getting their hands on a zero-day that can hijack as many as they can reach by radio.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Sabriel]

On the other hand, if a zero-day for remoting a popular airline's planes ever does turn up in the wrong hands, it won't be pretty.

FEMA: "Say again, how many planes are crashing?"
ATC: "All of them."

Re:Would you ride in one?

[BBTaeKwonDo]

Well, one pilot recognized the stall (the left-seater, IIRC) and pushed the stick forward. The right-seater, the most junior member of the aircrew, was the one pulling back. The problem was that the right-seater wasn't communicating what he was doing, and the left-seater didn't say, "pilot's airplane" or do anything else that established that he was the one in control.

The senior pilot, who was on rest when the incident began, also recognized the stall and got the junior pilot to finally say that he was pulling back, but by then they were too low to recover.

Agree about the sticks moving in concert - when there is a disagreement, the pilots should know about it.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't make that much difference to the price. The majoriy of your ticket price is fuel. The majority of the remainder is flight capital. The majority of the remainder of that is maintenance. The pilot hardly factors into it.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jklovanc]

Which is why, as in the test, there will most probably be a human pilot on board for just such an emergency.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unmanned flight is coming whether we like it or not.

The pilot will always be there, but he'll likely be reduced to a estop operator. Wireless transmissions are against physics: it's faster to react if you're on board vs off board.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

hm, yes, let me think: Gatwick to Murcia one way, pilotless: £29 or with human at the yoke: £499.

Just checked; current low price is 145.99 GBP; current high price is 2,613.72 GBP.

Added to that, I find these days that very little of the cost of the "flight" is actually the cost of the flight. Airport improvement fees, carbon tax, airport rental fees, fuel tax (yes, as well as the carbon tax), security fees, etc. make up the bulk of most of my tickets these days. The cost of paying a pilot and copilot to do the flying amidst all this is pretty much irrelevant. Low price would probably shift from 145.99 GBP to 142.99 GBP. That'd still be enough to fill the plane though, I bet. Especially if they can sell the "cockpit" seats for a premium ;)

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jeremyp]

So we have a bunch of pilots sitting in an office building somewhere controlling all the flights. The terrorists' target is no longer the cockpit on the actual plane but the building the pilots are in, or the comms link between the two. The difference is that taking over or destroying the building (which would be admittedly difficult) allows the terrorists to take over hundreds of planes.

We can reduce the risk by distributing the pilots in pairs in small offices all over the country. Even better, put them in mobile offices. Even better, put them in mobile offices attached to the front of aeroplanes.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jeremyp]

Gatwick to Murcia, tomorrow on Easyjet: £105 and that's with two humans at the yokes. What percentage of that £105 do you think goes into the pilots' salaries?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jeremyp]

And if a pilotless airliner has "a glitch in the system" and auto-lands in the Pacific, or the Alps?

Re:Would you ride in one?

[jklovanc]

I never said it was a good thing; just that the report of hacking a drone was, in all probability, false and a political ploy.

I doubt very much if we will ever get passenger airliners without pilots on board. Even in the test they just moved the pilot from the aircraft to the land. Recon drones are different in that they can be made much smaller and more efficient without a pilot on board. In a passenger aircraft the weight of the aircrew and instruments does not add much to the weight of the aircraft and that is compensated for by the added safety of an on-board pilot.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[Tastecicles]

I think a lot depends on the fuel efficiency of the flight - passenger miles per gallon, which is different on every flight. Other variables also affect the profit margin in real ways, such as tail winds/head winds, cargo weight, etc.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[MarbleMunkey]

We can reduce the risk by distributing the pilots in pairs in small offices all over the country. Even better, put them in mobile offices. Even better, put them in mobile offices attached to the front of aeroplanes.

Even better, put them in the front of different aeroplanes!

Re:Would you ride in one?

[X0563511]

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

It does cost to implement, but building in redundancy or even just failover controls shoves that failure rate way down.

I'll point out the FADECs in the F16 - there are two of them and they normally run in parallel. However, if one fails the other can fly the plane safely, just with reduced performance characteristics. That's in a tiny jet - you have plenty of space on the kind of platforms we are thinking about.

Re:Would you ride in one?

[blippo]

It has nothing to do with redundant systems.

If something goes "outside of the box", the world as the autopilot sees it, it won't notice, or misinterpret the information, and will happily crash without ever noticing that something when wrong.

This may happen with humans too - especially with bad feedback from the airplane, like what happened with the flight AF447, that basically fell out of the sky because the pilots didn't get the full picture of what was going on, [ and because they didn't follow their training, but in their defense, the logic of when the stall warning is deactivated seems a bit counter-intuitive, and perhaps also how much indication the pilot get that he is in fact flying in direct-law mode.]

Currently it's not within our reach to create strong AI that can match humans, and I think it's out of our reach to create a machine that would have done the right things in the AF447 accident. Perhaps it would be possible for a machine to fly safely if someone does the analysis that "well it looks as if the airspeed indicators are gone, probably just ice, please start the "lost airspeed indicator program, high altitude, severe storm" mode.

Today we can only build a machine that merely notices the speeds doesn't match up - *for some reason or another* , and give control to a human, so he or she can figure out what's really happening.

Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if we just can get them computer controlled, we can get rid of pilots - at least for airlines.

It WILL happen one day - a day not too far away.

Actual piloting will be for private aircraft.

Re:Computers

[some old guy]

Until the first robo-Airbus slams into a mountain due to a minor hardware failure, program bug, or solar storm.

That's why automated mass transit trains still have operators on board and GPS-navigated ships still have deck officers.

Re: Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in Copenhagen we have had unmanned automated metro in operation since 2002. And no, there is no train steward ready to take over.

Re:Computers

[bigtrike]

The fully automatic modes have to be much better than humans before people will accept them. If you ride in the front train of a Chicago CTA train, you can hear the overspeed warning beeping from the operator cabin about every 10 seconds. If the operator ignores it, the train will automatically shut down to prevent the train from derailing.

Re:Computers

[Tastecicles]

the monorail at Gatwick doesn't have a driver, it is entirely automated. You can in fact, stand at either end and look out the front or rear window (either is changeable depending on the direction of travel). The control pod is under the deck at the North end of the car.

Re:Computers

[lightknight]

Hmm...I prefer a top of the line human and AI pilots, personally. So they can cover each other's weaknesses.

Re:Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why automated mass transit trains still have operators on board and GPS-navigated ships still have deck officers.

Not in many places. Mass transit trains in Kuala Lumpur havent had drivers for quite some time.

Re:Computers

[Trogre]

Really? How does it cope with unexpected obstructions on the track?

Re:Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

either:

1. It runs them over, they shouldn't have been there (And most airport monorails are elevated, it's practically impossible to stand on the tracks).

2. It has RADAR or SONAR, it applies the breaks and, hopefully, comes to a stop before hitting the obstruction.

Re: Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in Copenhagen we have had unmanned automated metro in operation since 2002.

In Vancouver, we have had unmanned automated transit since 1986.

Re:Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kinda wrong about this. Singapore has had automated trains used for high-volume commuter routes since 2003.
As far as I am aware there have not been any significant issues with the trains.

Having lived in Singapore myself, people accept this model just fine (but a lot don't actually seem to realise the trains are in fact automated)

'The North East Line (NEL), the first line operated by SBS Transit, opened on 20 June 2003, one of the first fully automated heavy rail lines in the world' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_%28Singapore%29

Re:Computers

[Tastecicles]

you mean like birds? Sensors and a bloody loud horn.

who would have thought!

[gl4ss]

who would have thought that remote and autonomously controlled airplanes are airplanes!

Not for me

[NobleSavage]

I like the pilot IN the plane!

Re:Not for me

[Mike Frett]

Nobody has said anything yet but, one reason an Aircraft is saved from a crash is because the Pilot is actually in the Aircraft. With no Pilot, there is less incentive to save an Aircraft, or any man-made machine for that matter. The Pilot has a 100% survival rate. And you all know this.

Software is eating the world

[xchaotic6081]

It happens in every area, not just planes - self-driving Google cars, robots manufacturing Macbooks in US, 3d printers building houses etc. The good part is everything will be cheap(er), from transport to entertainment, even housing. The bad part is a lot of 'average' people - taxi drivers, accountants, even lawyers will lose their jobs. And if we change nothing, the money is going to capital owners, not the people that lost those jobs. So it will be cheaper from today's perspective, but not more affordable to all those people who lost their menial jobs, as they will no longer have the jobs and no disposable income either. This is not only bad for them, but bad for the whole economy.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor lawyers. Yes, I can see a deluge of tears being shed for them.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Intrepid imaginaut]

And yet automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete while hugely improving the standard of living overall.

Re:Software is eating the world

[PPH]

Cheaper? How so? They still have to pay the pilot, whether she is siting on the ground or not.

I guess it could get cheaper if they can have one pilot supervising a dozen flights. Over mid-ocean, there's not much to do. So stagger the flight times and have them land/take off another plane elsewhere. Rotating shifts could be an advantage on long flights. At the end of eight hours, hand over the controls to a ground center where the pilots are wide awake on local time.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.

As yes, that magical "They'll just go on and do something else."

Like what?

That was back in the days when folks were able to go from one manual labor job to another manual labor job like running assembling stuff; or loading the machine while another person operates it, or down the line to move out product.

As we automate more, there are less jobs for people. If you can 5,000 workers at a plant and replace with robots, not all of them are even needed to repair those robots. You just need a small fraction of them.

Right now, the only industry where I see an increasing demand of workers on at all skill levels is medical. And a LOT of people realize this. In a few years, we will be seeing a glut of medical workers from nurses assistants all the way up to doctors - because people have smelled the coffee and realize that's pretty much the best way to go to keep a middle class life.

There's a glut of people in IT AND software engineering - all those businessmen bitching in the media are full of shit or they're looking for the Purple Unicorns.

When my company has openings for software engineers: BSCS (required!), C#.NET, SQL, and the rest varies with position - we get over a hundred resumes - all qualified.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaper because you don't have to pay for hotel rooms or food for the flight crew, cheaper because you don't have to cancel flights because the only aircrew left in town just went over their 8 hour max because of the weather ground hold, cheaper because people are willing to work for less when they get to be at their own bed each night.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

This is **exactly** how military UAV flights are controlled. The vehicle goes autonomously to and from the target, and a human pilot only takes over at the drop zone. In the military you have one pilot controlling over 20 aircraft. I can't see why similar numbers couldn't be realized with commercial flights

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

They were carriage drivers. Before income tax, there were no spreadsheets and even tabulators were dreadfully expensive so corporations had to hire a hell of a lot of accountants just to run the adding machines.

Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.

Sadly but typically, the ones most willing to dismiss the 'short term pain' are the ones who won't feel any of it (or who don't believe they will). Consider, to me, you getting your testicles caught in a vice is just a little short term pain and perhaps a minor disability (can't be too bad, he'll be back to work in a month). To you, it might not look like a worthwhile risk.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

You also get to take out the controls from the cockpit and replace that space with paying customers. I wonder what kind of premium people would be willing to pay to get front-row seats. Probably more than they pay in coach. I also imagine that seats are less expensive and lighter than the panels that are currently in cockpits. Eventually you won't even need a pilot on the ground at all anyway.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Kjella]

Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.

But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "cashing out" in time instead, but on some level I think doing productive work is healthy and 40 hours a week is hardly that much.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Tastecicles]

tell that to the father who can't feed his family or keep a roof over his family because his boss just replaced him with a fucking robot.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Tastecicles]

because 20 packed airliners is 8,000 passengers.

And you want to put those lives into the hands of ONE fucking gamer geek who thinks he's playing MSFS?

No, you don't get to hit ESC and start over.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Except that hasn't happened. Unemployment rates bear no correlation whatsoever to industrialisation or ongoing automation.

Re:Software is eating the world

[amorsen]

One of the problems with working less than full time is that many modern jobs have a good-sized portion of fixed overhead -- just keeping up with what is going on, staying current, attending meetings and so on can take up a significant fraction of your work week. If you cut a day out of your week, the fixed overhead gets proportionally larger...

Another problem is that there are fixed overheads associated with having employees. Just finding and hiring the right ones (and getting rid of the wrongly chosen ones) is a challenge, and having to deal with 20% extra employees means extra costs for the company. Companies are often reluctant to let their employees cut hours.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Tastecicles]

CNet respectfully disagrees. FTFA: Each robot will cost around three times the annual salary of a human worker at Foxconn to produce. So a robot that doesn't need time off, or paying, or a holiday, or medical insurance, or a lunch break, only has to last three years to be a viable replacement for a human worker who has to feed his family and keep the roof over their heads. Result: Foxconn develops a completely obedient workforce, human workforce which is prone to sabotage, strike, medical emergency, needs a break every now and again etc., is left in the gutter. QED.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Tastecicles]

that single example alone disproves the Luddite Fallacy.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Every time there is an advancement in technology we end up being able to produce more for less cost. This has been going on since the time of your luddites (1817) and probably earlier. If what you're saying was true, we'd be able to graph a rising unemployment rate to correlate with advancing industrialisation. This, again, hasn't happened. Instead what's happened is standards of living have improved and unemployment has fluctuated up and down due to a wide variety of factors, but generally remaining low in industrialised countries. Wealth has become progressively less important as the cost of goods and services decrease, and this is important. Technology is the inflation which eats into the gap between rich and poor.

A CNET doom prophecy means nothing against the historical reality.

Re:Software is eating the world

[camperdave]

What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.

They didn't exist, that's what they did. Before taxis, there were zero automobiles. Before income tax, accountants had more of an inventory management role, making marks on clay tablets to keep track of how much grain was in the bins. Also,in case it has escaped your notice, the population of the planet has doubled in the past 50 years. There's more competiton for jobs than there has ever been.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

The choices are accept a shorter week so others can also have a job, try to sweep back progress and destroy the robots, or cheerfully pay more taxes so others can go on the dole and stay there.

When unions were demanding the 8 hour day and the 5 day week, employers moaned nearly in unison that they could never be profitable that way and that the country would be plunged into poverty.

Re:Software is eating the world

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tell that to the buggy-whip manufacturer who can't feed his family or keep a roof over ..."

Would you rather a complete stagnation of progress? Maybe those buggy-whip makers found something more productive and more profitable to do than make buggy-whips once auto-mobiles started become more common place that horses and carts...

Re:Software is eating the world

[gl4ss]

automation and motorization decreases famine. fact, not correlation.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

There are also more jobs in non-subsistence farming work than there has ever been.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

Consider, to me, you getting your testicles caught in a vice is just a little short term pain and perhaps a minor disability (can't be too bad, he'll be back to work in a month). To you, it might not look like a worthwhile risk.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing this pain. It will take a lot of time and money to retrain people and it will put a strain on our safety net, perhaps even straining our ability to keep civil society. But at the end of the day, it is my contention that having fewer people involved with meeting basic needs can only lead to a more advanced society, as we have more resources to devote to science, art, and culture. People will always have something to do, even if - as you mention - it takes threat of revolution to accomplish this.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

The choices are accept a shorter week so others can also have a job, try to sweep back progress and destroy the robots, or cheerfully pay more taxes so others can go on the dole and stay there.

The economy is not zero-sum. It may seem like it in the short-term, but in the long term higher productivity leads to higher wealth.

Now, we do have a wealth imbalance that we need to deal with, but that is a somewhat separate issue. I mean, they are related, but we need to deal with income and wealth imbalance whether or not we get productivity improvements.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

Like what?

I don't claim to be so smart. I'm just betting that history repeats itself.

That was back in the days when folks were able to go from one manual labor job to another manual labor job like running assembling stuff; or loading the machine while another person operates it, or down the line to move out product.

Indeed, there might be an entire "lost generation" of people who cannot be retrained to operate in an automated economy. But someone born into an automated economy obviously won't adapt to handle factory work.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

Revolutions are a messy thing and in general, pain is bad. It seems that a few steps taken sooner rather than later could make for a much nicer transition. Thus it is entirely appropriate to be concerned about it, consider what steps could be taken, and to urge action now.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

and to urge action now.

But what kind of action? I don't claim to be smart enough to know what comes next. I just have an optimistic outlook for the long-term, based on past technological changes. I fear our "action" will have to be limited to fighting fires until the transition is over, unless someone smarter than me figures out a way to preemptively prepare people for jobs that don't yet exist.

We need to do something about wealth/income inequality, but that has to happen no matter what your opinion on automation is.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

Some economists that actually seem to know what they're doing suggest implementing the basic income so that job loss is less harmful (but not entirely harmless).

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

I've read about the basic income. I'm skeptical, though, since people do respond to financial incentives. Personally, I think we need to rethink the way we treat corporations, perhaps in a way that helps correct wealth inequality - but that's my own little pet peeve.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

People do respond to financial incentives, that's why you still have the option to take a job and have more than the minimum that the basic income offers. I suspect most who are able will respond to the financial incentives and take a job.

Note that that job might pay less than it would now since it's just for additional income rather than family survival. It also means that even with most workplace regulations repealed, there will be less dirty tricks by employers since quitting is more of an option.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

I meant more the less-obvious incentives. Just off the top of my head, I'm betting that the easiest way for people to improve their living standards will be to vote for a politician who will give them a "raise". Thus we get into a situation similar to what we have today with Social Security and Medicare, but on a much larger scale.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

We would have to nail it down fairly tight, but it's really no different than now where we have forces on one side trying to vote taxes on the wealthy and corporate taxes down and on the other trying to vote minimum wage up. I'm sure we can count on the 1% to apply plenty of back pressure against raising the basic income.

Since nothing will fully stop that process and any proposed solution will face exactly the same political abuses from both sides, I don't see it as a reason not to move forward. It might help to tie it to economic indicators that actually reflect reality in order to reduce excuses to change it at all.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

The difference is that 100% of the voting population would be getting the same government benefit. No politician would ever campaign on the platform of lowering the benefit - I'd bet the only real debate would be how much to increase it.

Any attempt to "lock it down" would just be a law, and all laws require a simple majority to change.

I think at this point I still favor a safety net with a goal towards minimizing the number of people collecting a check from the government.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

The problem with the safety net is that it isn't terribly safe and does nothing to address wealth disparity. Sure, no polititian would campaign on a reduce the income plan, but no politician campaigned on the nudie scanner platform either.

Nobody likes paying income tax, but I note it's not down to zero yet, even for people who barely make the house payment.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

but no politician campaigned on the nudie scanner platform either.

But nobody likes the nudie scanners, so they are going away. A significant majority would love the big checks, which would never go away.

Nobody likes paying income tax, but I note it's not down to zero yet, even for people who barely make the house payment.

Income tax is down to zero for most of the population. But I'm glad you brought up taxes, because we consistently spend more than we pull in - and I feel that is directly tied to the phenomenon we are discussing: everyone wants a check, no one wants to pay.

I do share your concern about wealth inequality - I think it is very dangerous. That said, I think there may be ways to improve that situation without resorting to cash payouts. For instance, I would like to see free Associates-degree-level education; as we leave the manual labor economy behind, we should expand compulsory education. Along the same lines, we could pick up more of the child care tab. Get the schools back on their feet in urban areas would remove the need for private schools, and the more affordable urban lifestyle becomes much more attractive to younger families. Giving an incentive to the middle class in this country to buy and maintain two cars and a suburban house just so they can send their kids to a decent school is simply bad policy. Encourage re-investment in businesses by abolishing corporate taxes and jacking up the capital gains and dividend rates. Close most loopholes in the tax code.

Re:Software is eating the world

[amorsen]

The choices are accept a shorter week so others can also have a job, try to sweep back progress and destroy the robots, or cheerfully pay more taxes so others can go on the dole and stay there.

How about the Karl Marx option of working the same and getting more TV's, more phones, more cars and so on? If the super-rich are anything to go by, the limit to consumption per person is an extremely high bar. Productivity growth will not make a significant proportion of population hit that limit any time soon.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

But the nudie scanners aren't going away, they're being altered for another hefty pricetag rather than going away as so many want. The groping isn't going away even though only a very few want to be groped.

If income tax is gone, why does everyone's paycheck still show a deduction? Originally, it was meant to apply only to the very wealthy but it bracket crept on down.

The basic income isn't just about wealth equality (though it helps that). It also allows us to abolish minimum wage, social security, welfare, food stamps, etc since it becomes the safety net. It offers would-be entrepreneurs a way to feed their family while they get a business bootstrapped on a shoestring (including helping them to afford hiring people). It gives those wanting to further their education a decent way to do so without having to invent the 48 hour day.

I do expect that it will cause some inflation. Even that is good to an extent. It will help balance trade without destroying the middle and lower class, ESPECIALLY if we control our dependence on foreign oil.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

Perhaps if we could get rid of that unemployment thing.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

The groping isn't going away even though only a very few want to be groped.

Don't confuse the attitude around here with the actual popular opinion on airport security.

If income tax is gone, why does everyone's paycheck still show a deduction?

Perhaps you mean the Social Security and Medicare payroll deduction? Don't you remember Mitt Romney's infamous 47% jab? That was in relation to income tax. I made an error and typed "most" when I meant "half".

The basic income isn't just about wealth equality (though it helps that). It also allows us to abolish minimum wage, social security, welfare, food stamps, etc since it becomes the safety net. It offers would-be entrepreneurs a way to feed their family while they get a business bootstrapped on a shoestring (including helping them to afford hiring people). It gives those wanting to further their education a decent way to do so without having to invent the 48 hour day.

I agree it would do all of those things - I just fear that the tradeoffs might be too great.

I do expect that it will cause some inflation.

Yes, I expect that it would do to housing what Stafford Loans have done to college education.

ESPECIALLY if we control our dependence on foreign oil.

I think I like the idea of a carbon tax to accomplish that.

Re:Software is eating the world

[amorsen]

Unemployment does not exist because consumers want to consume less. There is plenty of meaningful work which is not getting done, despite many people being eager to do it.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

I don't see why it would affect housing so disproportionately. Housing is just one of many things people would spend the money on. Stafford Loans are spent only on college education. Meanwhile, there's still quite a few empty houses out there to cushion the effects of introducing the program.

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

Not once the robots take over.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

In the short term, sure there are plenty of empty houses. In the long term, all of those kids living at home with mom and dad would be able to get some independence, and I imagine that would make rents increase.

Not that it's the end of the world, but once prices increase, there would be more demands for more free money since the cost of living goes up. And the cycle continues.

I didn't mention food because that market is so distorted that I doubt supply and demand even exists anymore :)

Re:Software is eating the world

[sjames]

Not that it's the end of the world, but once prices increase, there would be more demands for more free money since the cost of living goes up. And the cycle continues.

The increased prices would translate into increased tax revenue to pay for increased basic income payments.

Re:Software is eating the world

[MightyYar]

Ron Paul would strongly disapprove :)

Won't get on a plane where...

[Anonymous Coward]

the pilot doesn't have as much to lose as I do.

If the plane were to get into trouble, somehow I don't think a remote pilot (who's safe on the ground in an underground bunker) will fell the same urgency to get the plane safely landed as I or a pilot, that is in the plane, would.

It's just human nature: the remote pilot might have other things on his mind like is it quittin' time and time to get home to the wife and a beer or answering that latest text message from his girlfried..

In other words, no fuckin' way would I ever get on a plane that was remotely controllered.

Re:Won't get on a plane where...

[taiwanjohn]

No shit. Also: Now the "terrorists" don't even have to be on board, they can just hack the control system remotely.

Re:Won't get on a plane where...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they do that already though? Don't most commercial airliners already have a "remote control mode" ever since 9/11? (Because we think it would be safer to have that.)

Re:Won't get on a plane where...

[taiwanjohn]

I didn't know that. Thanks. I feel safer already.

Fuck No

[Anonymous Coward]

That is cool, but would you? Is it more safe if the pilot can't be reached?

There is no greater motivator to avoid crashes than having the driver up front and first to die.

There is no way I'm getting on a plane that is controlled by somebody in a ground based armchair, sucking on Slurm, and not facing any personal risk. If the driver doesn't have skin in the game, I'm not riding.

Pilots are a must for passenger aircraft. I'm not sure about cargo, but I'm leaning toward requiring pilots there too. Especially if they are to share airspace with passenger aircraft.

Re:Fuck No

[MightyYar]

You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.

Re:Fuck No

[swalve]

A large percentage of people make stupider decisions when adrenalin and fear are involved.

Re:Fuck No

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have very little faith in your fellow humans. I think it would be a rare person who wouldn't be motivated to save the lives of hundreds of people who were entrusted in his care. When you get on that plane, you are already trusting the work of the people who build and maintain the plane, and those people don't stand to die in the crash. By your own admission that means you should not be willing to fly ever, unless the pilot built the plane himself. This motivation business is entirely a red herring.

The only thing that matters is the price per life saved of putting pilots on planes. If that price becomes, say, 100 million dollars, then you'd be much better off just accepting the risk and then spending those resources on better health care or better safety systems in your car or something like that. Even if you are the sort who cannot accept those kinds of calculations, there will come a point where having pilots will only make matters worse. At that point, it's not even about economics, it's just about not being the moron who risks his life on piloted planes for no good reason. What should keep passengers safe is not the heroics of individual pilots or other people - if you get to the point where individual heroics are needed or even at all relevant, something has already gone terribly wrong. What keeps passengers safe is the complex system of all the people and machines involved. Focusing on just the pilot and ignoring all the rest is not useful to keeping passengers safe.

Re:Fuck No

[RevWaldo]

One thing I wondered after 9/11 and the addition of 'reinforced cockpit doors' is whether pilots actually need access to the cabin at all. Imagine they have a separate entrance onto the plane, and are completely sealed off from the cabin once in flight. (They get all the other basic necessities of life - food, coffee, restroom, etc. - already with them up front.) Additionally, unless officials on the ground feel they need to know, the pilots have no clue what's going on in the cabin - no CCTV feed, no intercom, no cell phones, no nothing. Terrorists could be threatening to slaughter the passengers like sheep, but the pilots aren't informed. So despite the risk to the passengers, the terrorist could never get control of the plane, making an attack on a plane pointless in the first place.

Good idea? Bad idea?

.

Re:Fuck No

[jbwolfe]

You must have very little faith in your fellow humans. I think it would be a rare person who wouldn't be motivated to save the lives of hundreds of people who were entrusted in his care.

OTOH, the unthinkable has happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

This is an example of why having pilots pass through TSA security is unneeded- a constant irritation for me. A proper in-depth background check is all that is necessary, accompanied by ongoing review.

Re:Fuck No

[jbwolfe]

Great idea. Its called secondary barriers. And currently, ALPA is exerting great effort on the legislative front to mandate installation in commercial aircraft. IATA and Airlines for America (A4A) (is that not the stupidest name you ever heard?), are busy fighting this. Like most safety features, it costs money, which eats into profits. Gotta keep those ticket prices at historic lows...

Terrorists could be threatening to slaughter the passengers like sheep, but the pilots aren't informed.

Sorry to inform you, you are on your own back there. You will have to go postal on them yourselves. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will get that door open if there is any threat in the cabin. But just in case a bad guy (or any uninvited person for that matter) gets into the cockpit, he may well be looking down the barrel of an H&K as a hollow point exits at supersonic speed. Next time you get a chance, note the warning placards posted on the cockpit doors.

Re:Fuck No

[LynnwoodRooster]

You must have very little faith in your fellow humans. I think it would be a rare person who wouldn't be motivated to save the lives of hundreds of people who were entrusted in his care.

OTOH, the unthinkable has happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

This is an example of why having pilots pass through TSA security is unneeded- a constant irritation for me. A proper in-depth background check is all that is necessary, accompanied by ongoing review.

You, too, can do what pilots do. I do. It's called TS PreCheck, and as a result, I show up at the airport (LAX usually), walk to an at-most 2 person line, drop my bag and cell phone on the belt, and walk through a metal detector. Security takes less than a minute, even if I have to wait for one other person in the lane. No removal of shoes, or taking off my coat, or taking my laptop out of my bag, etc. Just walk through a metal detector like back in the 90s...

I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about this, nor use it. I guess one thing to be thankful for is that I never have to wait for security, and I can arrive at the airport ~30 minutes before my flight starts to board, and am always at my gate just before boarding starts...

Re:Fuck No

[jbwolfe]

Indeed, there's something even better than that for me: Known Crewmember checkpoints. However, not all airports have these. TSA PreCheck is for passengers/ticketholders. I'm speaking as a badged, background-checked, finger-printed pilot that is annoyed by the fact that I must pass through security screening to make sure my nail clippers are legal, and I'm not carrying pepper spray. Were I to wish ill to my passengers, I would not need a weapon. Some pilots enroll as an FFDO and carry weapons just to avoid this annoyance.

BTW, just saying "I don't need a weapon" to a TSA agent will require additional screening and perhaps result in arrest. It has happened.

Re:Fuck No

[denobug]

You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.

Pilots can refuse the instructions by the tower by announcing their inability of compliance. Ultimately the pilots have the final say on the plane, not the ground controller.

Re:Fuck No

[demonlapin]

The restroom is a bit of a problem - flight crews currently use the ones at the front of the plane. The aisles are blocked with drink carts by the flight attendants while this happens.

Re:Fuck No

[LynnwoodRooster]

I personally don't understand half the rules. I just recently returned from China, on American Airlines (heading back in another 10 days). Got bumped to first class. Ordered the chicken for dinner. Got the meal, a 4.5" long serrated metal knife, a solid metal butter knife, and two metal forks. Why should I worry about carrying on a knife when I can just book a first class ticket and have the airline hand them to me?

Re:Fuck No

[drinkypoo]

I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about this, nor use it.

You have to preregister and pay a fee, and there was talk of doing away with the system altogether which had a chilling effect. Anyway, why should you have to pay extra not to be sexually abused?

Re:Fuck No

[lightknight]

Hehe, yes, let us remove minds from the areas closest to where they might do good, and keep them further and further away.

Re:Fuck No

[Anonymous Coward]

Pilots won't want this either. The ones I've talked to love the perk of being able to travel for free (whether or not they are flying, as they also get to ride free on standby and transfers). Sitting on the ground playing Flight Simulator for real takes a lot of the satisfaction out of the job.

Re:Fuck No

[gl4ss]

shitty idea. there is plenty of good reasons to detour from original flight plan.. sickness etc.

Re:Fuck No

[MightyYar]

Show me where controller error caused an air crash and I'll wager I can find 10 instances of pilot error or non-recoverable equipment failure causing the same.

Re:Fuck No

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens if there is a medical emergency on board and the plane needs to divert and land immediately? Would the flight attendants have to radio to the ground, and the ground radios back to the pilots?

Re:Fuck No

[salnikov]

This just reinforces GP point - controller's error can be corrected by pilot, meaning that controller has to screw up pretty badly so that no one can correct it. Pilot errors may be harder to correct. Pilot, like captain of the ship, has ultimate responsibility for what happens to the plane, with the remote piloting this responsibility is hard to exercise.

Re:Fuck No

[MightyYar]

Controller error makes the news.

This kind of technology has been around for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

9/11 was an inside job.

This is really an extension of WWII technology.

[roarkarchitect]

There is nothing really unique about this - the concept has been around since WWII. It just wasn't reliable. Read about Operation Aphrodite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite

Tangent - SAGE

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you all probably know of a lot more examples of machine-controlled airplanes, but I recently came across one through an acquaintance who worked in the SAGE program in the 1950's. The program directed interceptors to threats like bombers. Ground personnel monitoring a CRT scope of assets and radar targets would use some kind of light-based pointing device to touch an interceptor and a target to have a 58,000-tube, building-sized, 3 megawatt IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer to calculate the best route for intercept. Pilots then begrudgingly gave control to DaLi (Data Link) which fed the vectors to an autopilot.

Apples and oranges...

[Gription]

So how far does that train fall before it hits the ground if something fails? Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.

- - - - -

You take the human systems out of the plane and you aren't just dealing with the failures you observed with the previous system. You have changed the system so you are changing the possible failure points.
One simple example: "Portable EMP generator."

Re:Apples and oranges...

[demonlapin]

Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.

Until it slams into another train while coasting to a stop...

And no, having it automatically stop isn't a perfect solution, either, because then it becomes the target rather than the projectile.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[Gription]

Until it slams into another train while coasting to a stop...
. . .

Because when coasting it is magically going to hit another train that it would miss if it was still going full speed?
... but maybe if it was going 88 miles per hour!!!

Re:Apples and oranges...

[Tastecicles]

the Gatwick monorail stands about 50 feet off the ground.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[demonlapin]

If you turn it off, it doesn't know if there's a train in front of it or not.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[Gription]

So once again I have to point out the obvious bit where if the train is coasting to a stop it CAN NOT hit a train that wasn't there before it started coasting.
And once again you are showing that an accident when a train is coasting will be less then an accident from the exact same situation when the train was nicely powered and failed to slow down before the big crunch.


(There actually is a possibility of an "accident" from depowering a really long train at the wrong time. The forces can derail a train where it is going around a switchback type corner. It isn't going to be the catastrophic loss of life like from flipping the off switch of an airliner at 30,000 feet but technically it is an accident.)

Re:Apples and oranges...

[demonlapin]

If it's powered, it has a connection to the train monitoring system that tells it there's a stopped train ahead. If it's not, it doesn't.

I don't see the point

[rossdee]

I don't see the point of a remotely piloted passenger plane.

UAFVG's are useful in military situations, but not for civilian use.

(OK maybe remotely piloted C130 for chasing hurricanes, or other dangerous weather, or dropping supplies to Antarctic stations.)

Re:I don't see the point

[mounthood]

Unlimited replacement pilots.
Pilots don't have to travel.
Local pilots who know an area can assist or take over.
AI can be integrated, or even replace the pilots without much of a change. ...

Re:I don't see the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to be the beta tester though. No way I'm getting into one of these airplanes unless there has been at least 10 years of successful operation before.

Re:I don't see the point

[jbwolfe]

Your points mentioned above are valid except I'd argue this one is not fully considered:

AI can be integrated, or even replace the pilots without much of a change. ...

The abstraction of real time data given to a remote pilot is a real cost to be considered, given that many aspects of flight are dynamic and unpredictable. For example: routing through weather, mountain wave, multiple system failures, OCF (out of control flight), avoidance of traffic, sequence and separation, wake turbulence, are just a few issues that are diminished by remote piloting. And AI would need to come a long way to even approach the capacity humans possess to react to these types of variables.

While drones have been operating for quite some time, they have lost quite a few to exactly these issues.

How is this new?

[Richard_at_work]

The US Airforce has been flying older jets via remote control for decades as part of the drone conversion programme to allow for air to air and surface to air missile testing and training - currently they are on the early F-16s after expending the F-4 inventory.

The pilot is my insurance

[YoungManKlaus]

Because if he crashes then at least he also dies ... so kinda extra incentive not to crash ;)

Re:The pilot is my insurance

[Bios_Hakr]

If the plane crashes due to pilot error, then the pilot will never be charged with a crime.

With a UAV, you can immediately test the pilot for drugs/alcohol or any other condition that altered his mental capacity.

If the plane broke, then it sucks to be on the plane. But if the pilot screwed up, then his peers will get to see him charged with manslaughter and dragged through the legal system. Ultimately leaving him a broken shell of a man. Probably in jail.

3 or 4 of those and the other pilots will either become very clever or stop screwing up.

Re:The pilot is my insurance

[YoungManKlaus]

Still, no better incentive not to screw up then being the first one who touches ground when you nosedive a mountain :D

Re:The pilot is my insurance

[YoungManKlaus]

PS: also what do I give a fuck if the pilot is prosecuted when I am probably dead by then? My personal goal is not having the plain crash and not justice if it actually did.

Wrong question

[Anonymous Coward]

That is cool, but would you? Is it more safe if the pilot can't be reached?

The right question is: is it more safe if the pilot isn't afraid for his/her own survival?

The Miracle on the Hudson likely wouldn't have been, if the pilot hasn't been sitting in the front of the plane.

The Odd Man Hypothesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain#Odd-Man_Hypothesis was a fictional plot device, not supported by research.

But when one of them does crash...

[macraig]

... so much for the captain of the ship going down with it, eh?

Unless these remote pilots are sitting in full simulators that force them to share the terror of passengers during an uncontrolled descent - if you know you're going to live regardless what happens to the plane and its contents - then it removes just a bit of visceral motivation to avoid it happening, doesn't it?

Business Case Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but only if they're as well built as they are now. If this is flying over your house, do you want it to be just as safe as a manned aircraft? Absolutely. So, will it require design and manufacturing to aerospace standards? Will it require specially trained maintainers just like airplanes? Will it require specially trained operators? Now here's where it gets more expensive instead of less expensive. Will they be more or less complex than manned airplanes? More complex, since you have to add the complexity of the communications between the ground station and the aircraft. Those communications links will have to be as robust as the data buses in fly by wire manned aircraft. All of the sudden, this is now more complex and more expensive than manned aircraft. It's not at all surprising that Global Hawk has an oh my god price tag. The only thing it doesn't have that a manned aircraft does is seats. It's still got pressurization and environmental controls.

1903, Kitty Hawk and all that stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on /. can't you get some basic facts right?

The Wright Brothers flew at 'Kill Devil Hills' and not Kitty Hawk. Kitty Hawk was where the nearest Post Office was located. Here the news was sent to the outside world.

As A Limey, even I know this bit of American History so why hot the /. editors whi I would imagine reside on the western side of the Pond.

As a regular flyer and have been involved with the aircraft industry for 40+ years and currently working in an Airport I have to say that I for one wouldn't get on a plane without two guys/gals up front. What happens when the Taliban/other bad guys jam the sigan from the ground then? The plane is flying without a pilot. End result, a crash.
I am sure the likes of SleazyJet and RyanAir would be interested in this technology, especially the latter Air Line.
IF RyanAir could fly a plane where everyone was standing and packed in like a Northern Line Train in the Rush Hour I'm sure they would. Taking the Pilot/Co-pilot away reduces the unpaying load of the aircraft. This means more passengers.!

There is no way I'd fly with SleayJet or RyanAir anyway.

Re:1903, Kitty Hawk and all that stuff

[Tastecicles]

Sleazyjet, RyanScare (have you ever been on a RyanScare into Luton?? It's like a fucking shuttle landing! Let's not even go there with Monarch into Gatport Airwick...)

Re:1903, Kitty Hawk and all that stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

RyanAir flies those takeoff profiles because it saves fuel to ascend quickly. The landings are because they hire fresh pilots.

Airlines will love this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then the airlines will be able to employ "pilots" that are sitting in a room in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, where the supply of labor is plentiful and the wages of pilots substantially less.

Re:Airlines will love this.

[jbwolfe]

Believe me when I say this is already happening. These constant competitive pressures to reduce costs resulted in Colgan 3407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407, where inexperience and fatigue resulted in lost lives. And another example is Qantas' efforts to start an Asian subsidiary to subvert Australian pilot jobs as a cost saving measure.

I would hope the flying public considers safety rather than only seek the lowest price.

Re:Airlines will love this.

[real-modo]

Not just airlines.

Everyone immediately leaps to talking about passenger aircraft, but this is going to see large-scale use in air freight first. Passenger craft...perhaps, maybe, one day.

This adds quite a bit to the profitability of freight--or, once the market has done its work, reduced the cost of air freight. Take out the air crew and associated life support systems, and you can add another 300-500 kilos of freight to the manifest.

FedEx, DHL, etc. are going to be all over this, if they can get the idea to fly with regulators.

And what's the point?

[jbwolfe]

As an example, consider AF447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447. While the outcome of this mishap was largely due to mistakes by the pilots prior to penetrating the weather and afterward by misapplication of controls during stall, it is highly doubtful that a remote pilot could ever have effected a recovery, even if he was not responsible for getting into this situation in the first place. The abstraction of kenesthetic data might someday be improved enough to make a recovery like this possible, but What's the point?

Going to all this trouble to remove, that is move, the pilot from the cockpit to a remote location gains what exactly while eliminating all that is made possible by manning the flight with trained and experienced flightcrew.

Re:And what's the point?

[kumanopuusan]

Pilots could work normal shifts and you could change your flight crew in the middle of the Pacific if they were tired or in case of a medical emergency. For some reason, the people that we depend upon the most to be alert and make important decisions, like doctors and pilots, don't seem to get enough sleep.

Rubbish

[MiG82au]

"...this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."
What hyperbolic bullshit. Not only have standard piloted planes been remotely controlled for decades (as opposed to specially designed UAVs), but I'd say that reliable flight in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) was a bigger revolution.
This is merely a small stepping stone to remote flight that's reliable enough for regular public transport. It's not a fucking revolution. But noooooo, we need page clicks.

Captain Obvious

[fnj]

Captain Obvious is annoyed that you woke him up to tell him the blindingly obvious news that pilots are going the way of the buggy whip - just like automobile drivers and ditch diggers.

Captain Obvious also has some further thoughts for you. It's not just the pilots who are going away. Why should business travelers and even the general public want to fly about from place to place when there are cell phones? Hmmm? Already you can see as well as hear anybody anywhere in the world with a reasonably recent cell phone. Do you really think they won't be adding touch, taste, and smell via direct nerve stimulation? Why do you have to waste time and limited and expensive energy to go see your mother or go on a date? This way you won't catch a cold from your mother sneezing, and you can have a date with anybody, be adventurous, you can't get herpes or worse. Travel accidents, illnesses, and threatening confrontations are so old fashioned.

In fact, why get out of bed at all? Most jobs are obsolete anyway, and I wouldn't be so sure that IT and corporate officer jobs can't be automated too. Your robotic equipment can keep you nourished in bed and stimulate your nerves to keep your muscles toned and inject medicaments to keep clots from forming.

Why go to the trouble of seeking new experiences or exploring in the flesh? Robotic explorers make ever so much more sense. You can always catch the omni-sense documentary of the exploration.

Re:Captain Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You overlooked our education system. There will always be a need for somebody to orhastrate the destruction of our ability to think.
And teachers are always flying somewhere to and from vacations or conferences.

Union Busting

[Anonymous Coward]

Already the American carriers are stumbling all over each other to be the first to implement this in order to break the Pilot's Union.

A next feature will be to replace the Cabin Crew, read Cabin Officers Union, with smartphone enabled vending machines for drinks, sandwiches and toiletries.

Not to worry though as each flight will have a SysAdmin, 30k per year and no benefits, on board for in-flight code debugging so that Microsoft's latest malware doesn't scramble the hydraulic and flight control computers.

Re:Union Busting

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't be the Amercian Carriers who do this first. It will be SleazyJet (EasyJet) or RyanAir.

RyanAir already want to have flight with everyone standing and to charge for using the toilet. Removing the Pilot is the next step.
What RyanAir does, SleazyJet is sure to follow.

Purpose of a Pilot

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of a modern airliner pilot is not to fly the airplane from takeoff to landing with all things in their normal state, albeit, that is what a typical pilot does on a typical day. The purpose of a pilot is to fly the airplane safely to the ground when stuff goes wrong either due to some system failure, a severe wind shear, or some other unexpected input. Even on the most advanced commercial airplanes today (Boeing 787, Airbus A380, etc.) there are certain failure modes where the autopilot is unavailable and the basic flight control laws revert to a degraded "Cessna 172" state. To be fair, that is also when an average pilot is most likely to screw up and either not respond or respond inappropriately. So to say we can get rid of pilots because the airplane has an autopilot and an autoland system misses the point of having a pilot in the airplane.

Target identification...

[niftymitch]

A big pile of stink now begins. It is now impossible to disambiguate a "drone" from other aircrafts.

This may represent a new realization of risk for the paranoid.

Wilbur?

[Zawahiri]

But Orville was the first to fly.

Re:Wilbur?

[Deadstick]

Wilbur made the first attempt but failed. Orville succeeded on his turn.

Why Travel on Business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple. There is a whole lot of stuff that can't be done remotely.
I travel to the Middle East every two weeks for my Job. I have face to face meetings that in 30 minutes get more done and settled than days on conference/video calls.
When you need to work closely with the people on the ground, using a mobile phone/video phone really does not cut it.
Then there is all the system testing/commissioning.
In the Industry where I work, safety is No 1 priority. After all we don't want planes falling out of the sky now do we.

Even with the best remote access there is nothing even remotely close to watching the systems in action first-hand. Seeing the problems and fixing them in times a lot shorter than those companies that rely soley on remote access as well.

When you can install the hardware and commission it from 2000 miles away, I'll be well retired thankfully.

Gustave Whitehead?

[WoodburyMan]

Don't mean since Gustave Whitehead first took flight? Not the Wright Bros? http://foxct.com/2013/06/09/ct-declares-bridgeport-man-beat-wright-brothers/ http://www.livescience.com/37846-wright-brothers-gustave-whitehead.html

Re:Gustave Whitehead?

[camperdave]

Everybody knows that the Wrights were not the first to fly heavier than air craft

Flying's easy and there's plenty of space up there

[sberge]

Just came back from today's Sunday trip over Berlin in a small two-seater airplane, and saw a total of maybe 5 or 6 other airplanes. Traffic control was done by a single person as far as I could tell. The cars below on the other hand, were about 10^5 times more numerous, and all at exactly the same height, 0 ft above GND, a height known to be shared with numerous fixed obstacles, bikers, children and drunkards.

An autonomous airplane is in many ways a much easier task than an autonomous car. All obstacles are for all intents and purposes point-shaped and flying under current "instrument flight rules", a pilot is not even responsible for avoiding them, if I've understood the rules correctly. All you need to do is to follow orders from air traffic controllers. The problem is that these orders are dispatched by voice, so if this were to scale one would have to devise a machine-to-machine protocol for that and automate the task of air traffic control.

Your typical smart phone has enough sensors built in for flying. The radio hardware is capable of interacting with secondary radar and instrument landing systems, the gyro/accelerometers are good enough for controlling attitude and GPS is good enough for navigation. Some phones even have the barometer which you will need to deal with pressure altitude, which is necessary under current rules. The camera is good enough for taxiing, take-off and landing. The processing power is more than ample to process the inputs and provide control inputs. The only thing lacking is the ability to interact with air traffic control and tower. And a few servos for the control inputs.

Cool... but...

[Thumper_SVX]

This is a cool demo and all, but I find it highly unlikely any travelers will ever set foot on a plane where the pilot isn't also on-board. Simply put; radio tech is not perfect and in the event of a systems failure of some description you need a decision-making human being to make the final decision about a resolution. There's also the point of "accepted risk", where the pilot has just as much "skin in the game" as you do as a traveler.

The worst flight I have ever been on was one where the pilot made a pretty lousy decision to proceed into a line of thunderstorms... to the extent that after a forced return to St. Louis due to the stresses the plane had encountered, it was grounded. I don't know how bad it actually was, but I swear the plane was sideways a few times. Anyway, the only thing that kept my mind focused on something other than the potential for a rather untimely demise was the thought that the pilot had as little desire to die as I did and would be doing every damned thing he could to put the plane down in as close to one piece as possible... even if rather hard.

Had I been in the same situation in a plane with no on-board pilot you'd better believe that they'd need to hose out the seat before using it again.

... on concrete

[SmallFurryCreature]

Last time I checked, concrete didn't fall apart when you turn off the power. What next, you are afraid that when your car stalls, the bridge it is on is going to collapse?

Either you are to stupid to be funny or you are just to stupid period.

It is more complex then that

[SmallFurryCreature]

We already got a deskjob in the air travel industry, it is called air traffic control. And despite the ease of staffing it, the ease of having regular, short shifts so that staff can be available, in redundant numbers for emergencies and well rested, air traffic control is routinely understaffed and overworked.

Do you think remote pilots would be immune from the eternal pressures of cost cutting (on functional staff, never on executive wages). If one remote pilot can monitor one remote flight, why not two. of course only during the quiet times during Atlantic crossings. Soon trainees will be monitoring dozens of flights, alone because the handful of remaining trained pilots are doing non-stop landings during 12 hour shifts with no breaks. Don't like it, we can outsource you now to any corner of the planet boy so just take it.

That is to say nothing of the inevitable super center that will spring up and then power down as the 1 power cable is cut by a guy with a shovel and it turns out the backup power budget was spent on bonuses. It happened before it will happen again. And that critical infrastructure update? Delayed until the system collapse. You wouldn't think airports would delay replacing an aging radar because taking it down would close down the airport for a just a few hours, but it has happened. Now your safety no longer depends on essential but still optional equipment, your life hangs by a radio tower people can protest against for years and whose delay makes some managers budget look good.

It ain't the tech I am worried about, it is the humans. Don't believe me? COUNT the number of pilots in a UAV setup. 1 pilot. Airlines got two for a reason. Cost cutting right there.

$1M? no way

[Anonymous Coward]

Private Pilot Airplane is 40-50 hrs of flight time at maybe $100/hr - call it $5k
Commercial Pilot with Instrument Rating is maybe 100-150 hrs more, some in more expensive planes - maybe as much as $20k total.
MultiEngine maybe another $2-3k.
So, maybe 30k to get to where you can legally fly for a small commuter airline/charter.

Getting ATP (Air Transport Pilot) and Type Ratings is maybe 20k more, depending on the kind of plane, which tends to be a bit more pricey (e.g. renting a 737 costs a bunch).
In fact, check here http://www.mullers.net/mike/Training%20Cost/ and it looks like the type rating runs 10k for most planes.

union time

[slashmydots]

Get ready for the pilot's union to throw a fit and get in the way of progress and efficiency and customer interest with pilotless flights. Hurray for unions!

yet another excuse to vitualize

[PJ6]

Eventually airlines will make the case for multitasking pilots, since they're idle a lot of the time. There will also be desire to seamlessly shift control of planes in trouble to those with the most emergency maneuver experience.

There will literally be a pilot "cloud" (pun intended), and then all we'd have to do is wait for a hiccup to send all the aircraft falling out of the sky at once.