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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."
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
who would have thought that remote and autonomously controlled airplanes are airplanes!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Would the "majority of the public" have a choice?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No shit. Also: Now the "terrorists" don't even have to be on board, they can just hack the control system remotely.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
And yet automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete while hugely improving the standard of living overall.
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.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
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
So how far does that train fall before it hits the ground if something fails? Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.
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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."
Of course not! It would be like riding in elevator without a lift man.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Because if he crashes then at least he also dies ... so kinda extra incentive not to crash ;)
Yes, they could choose another airline that keeps pilots as a marketing ploy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
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.
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.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
And when someone successfully hacks the system and takes over the aircraft?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
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.
-- Alastair
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.
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.
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.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe