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Planes Without Pilots
HughPickens.com writes: John Markoff writes in the NY Times that in the aftermath of the co-pilot crashing a Germanwings plane into a mountain, aviation experts are beginning to wonder if human pilots are really necessary aboard commercial planes. Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit and government agencies are already experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators. NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher, managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to "beam" into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse. "Could we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today's systems?" asks Cummings. "The answer is yes."
Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, "It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations." The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: "A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble." Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own," says Amy Pritchett. "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.""
Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, "It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations." The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: "A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble." Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own," says Amy Pritchett. "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.""
A pilot saves all passengers by emergeny landing in the Hudson river, and everybody prÃzises the virtues of human pilots. A pilot Mills himself and 149 passengers and crew, and promptly we should geht rid of human pilots.
Anyone want to guarantee 100% perfect security for ANY wireless communication? Because if we have remotely piloted airliners (either because there's no pilot, or the pilot is suicidal) someone WILL hack into it.
Or 100% reliability for starters: it's 2015 and yet still you can easily lose your WiFi connection while sitting only 3 feet away from the access point.
Mod parent very negative.
1) "Pilot error" much of the time means, "A committee of a dozen or more people, spending days to months looking over the evidence, employing a cadre of technical experts and judging with hindsight what should have been done, has concluded that the single person or pair of people should in the few seconds/minutes available have made a different decision which may have led to a better outcome".
In the absence of pilots, this would just be "programmer error" as software doesn't have the benefit of hindsight either;
2) It's Boeing selling fly-by-wire.
No, pilot error means that they didn't do what they were supposed to do in a given predefined situation. And even many of the others were human error, on the ground side. Actual hardware faults as a whole are a very small minority of plane crashes.
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
You wouldn't NEED to hack into it (although it is certainly a legitimate vector). Less technical "terrorists" could simply use enough force to take over a tower or control center and send commands from an authorized terminal (likely with an authorized ID gotten by the "rubber hose" method). You would then be able to proceed to down any planes in the control area of that tower. I think I would rather have the smarts controlling the plane (whether it be computer or pilot controlled) on the plane with outside access limited to when it is requested by at least a couple of members of the flight crew.
someone WILL hack into it.
It's worse than that - all they need to do is jam it which would be trivially easy to do. For example if you put powerful transmitters into a van, parked it somewhere on the approach path to a busy airport and turned it on you would suddenly have craft who were on approach lose all control and by the time authorities tracked down the van and shut it off who knows how many planes would have crashed.
Remote control planes with passengers on are a stupendously bad idea. There is no way I'm flying on a plane which is not under the control of someone onboard whose life also depends on the plane landing safely. Even with such a strong motivation as that we have seen disaster happen - how much more likely will it be if the pilots are sitting remotely and have even less at stake? Suddenly things like disgruntled employees crashing planes becomes imaginable.
What sensor suite would that be? Even military systems find it inordinately difficult to discriminate between ground targets amongst ground clutter, and thats with human guidance.
Currently an aircraft cannot find and airport and land without external input, be it GPS, ILS or other such systems - and thats to a well defined landing point. A computer would have to identify a safe location to ditch, make decisions based on available data and extrapolated data, and then actually perform the ditching.
Another point to make about the Hudson ditching was that it was only successful because the pilot specifically skipped a load of stuff in the checklist and told the co-pilot to fire up the APU, because he knew there wasn't going to be enough electrical power from the engines and RAT to give him full command authority - he would lose things like flaps and spoilers, meaning his options would be much more limited. If he hadn't done that, chances are he wouldn't have made it even to the Hudson.
But it was. It kept the plane stable within the flight envelope so it wouldn't stall at low speed it flew, limiting the angle of attack to a safe one even when the pilot used his side stick for maximum nose pitch up. It helped to lessen the pilot's workload during the landing.
You can read it all up in the NTSB report of the accident:
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigat...
For example this:
or this:
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Same for the Air Canada flight that ran out of fuel halfway to its destination. It had Boeing's new "glass cockpit" with computer screens for everything, and guess what? When the engines died for lack of fuel, so did the computers. The crew were left with a handful of the most basic instruments; something like artificial horizon, airspeed, and altimeter.
As I recall, the pilot landed that one safely because the plane had a mechanical backup system (an air turbine) that gave him minimal hydraulic power—and also because he was an experienced glider pilot who probably got more miles out of his starting altitude than most professionals (or computer systems) could have.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.