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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.""
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
A point very important you make. Automation is great for instances where sensor data is accurate and a proscribed course of action can be safely followed. More automation can be useful in such cases. However, it's the edge cases where the pilot's judgement is needed to safely operate an aircraft. The USAir 1549 is an excellent example, as is United Flight 232. Could a remote pilot glide a 767 to a safe landing, and avoid cars on the abandoned runway that the copilot happened to know existed, as happened with Gimli Glider? As with many highly complicated devices, automation is a great tool to help the operator in routine, and some casualty, operations; however when things go not as planned and a new twist is added to the scenario you need judgement, not rote rules, and judgement is sorely lacking in automation and difficult to do if you are thousand of miles away and only know what the sensor data feed tells you.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Good point. Someone should recommend they not use home wifi routers for the mission-critical communications on commercial airliners.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
80% of accidents may be due to pilot error, but probably close to 99% of all would-be crashes due system failures do not turn into an accident because of pilot intervention, and therefore never make it into the accident statistics. Take the pilots out, and you'll see at least an order of magnitude more crashes unless technology improves drastically.
I'm a pilot, I've never had a crash (like the vast majority of pilots), but I've had several situations where automation failed (either completely shutting off or doing something unexpected and dangerous) and a crash would have resulted if we hadn't taken over.
In fact, there are lots of crashes that are attributed to pilot error not because the pilots were the only cause for the accident, but because some system failure occurred that should have been handled safely by a well-trained pilot and somehow wasn't. We are expected to handle these problems, so if we don't, it's our fault (and rightly so).
Take Air France 447 for example, airspeed sensors iced up, autopilot disconnected, other flight crews in the past had had the same problem but handled it well, these pilots got confused and crashed. Probably goes into the statistics as pilot error, but without pilots the plane would have crashed anyway. Every time, including on those flights where the crew did handle the situation correctly (even with inadequate procedures for this particular failure at the time) and landed safely.
Another example, the Turkish Airlines flight that crashed short of the runway in Amsterdam. The plane was flying on autopilot, yet it's "pilot error" because the pilots should have immediately reacted when the autothrottles pulled the throttles back to idle and the airspeed decayed rapidly. Caused by a malfunctioning radio altimeter which let the automation think the plane was low above the runway and it was therefore safe to pull the throttles back for touchdown. There's a reason why we have an initial training and a yearly recurrent training for automatic landings. Haven't had the training? Manual landings only.
So no, automation is not safer than human pilots. Not by a long shot, at least not yet. And given the slow pace of technological advancement in aviation, it will be a very long time before it will be.
Take military drones, for example. Their mission is not exactly complicated: in relatively nice weather, take off, fly a predetermined route, drop some bombs, fly back and land. There aren't nearly as many drones as airliners flying around, yet drones crashes happen all the time, it's not even news.
This is such an ignorant post I can't believe it. It appears you've never actually had an airplane's controls in your hands.
1) Fly-by-wire isn't what you think it is. It simply means there are no mechanical linkages.
2) Airbus' computer-over-human approach is no panacea and it has resulted in numerous near-disasters, one of the most recent ones.
3) Even Airbus isn't religious about this approach. Read up on Alternate Law and Direct Law.
4) Had Sully not maneuvered USAirways 1549, it'd have landed in the middle of housing.
5) Water landings require you to do a flare & float to stall just feet above the water level to minimize airspeed. If he had not done this, the airplane could have easily smashed itself apart, since an A320 power-off glide rate of descent is around 1500 fpm. Water isn't soft at these kinds of speeds you know.