Boeing Studies Planes Without Pilots, Plans Experiments Next Year (seattletimes.com)

"Boeing has begun researching the possibility of commercial-passenger jets that will fly without pilots, using artificial intelligence guiding automated controls to make decisions in flight," reports Seattle Times. The company is planning experimental flights, without passengers, for next year. From the report: "The basic building blocks of the technology are clearly available," said Mike Sinnett, former chief systems engineer on the 787 Dreamliner and now vice president at Boeing responsible for innovative future technologies, at a briefing before the Paris Air Show. "There's going to be a transition from the requirement to have a skilled aviator operate the airplane to having a system that operates the vehicle autonomously, if we can do that with the same level of safety," Sinnett said. Sinnett said Boeing's research is driven by the pilot shortage worldwide that is only going to become more acute. In the next two decades, Boeing forecasts a demand for about 40,000 new commercial jets, roughly doubling the world fleet.

Comments

Cargo

[JBMcB]

I would think this would be a near no-brainer for cargo flights. Probably less so for passenger flights.

I would consider flying a robo-flight if they installed an authentic HAL 9000 eye on the cockpit door, if for no other reason just to see it.

Computer checks pilot

[aberglas]

If you have a pilot at all, they need to actually fly the plane, or they will deskill. No half-smart AutoThrotle that can cause crashes like the Air Asia one.

And then we need a smart AI system to monitor the pilot and warn them if they are doing something stupid. Like trying to land the plane miles short of the runway.

If the pilot does not respond the autopilot can disconnect the controls.

It used to be said that you need a pilot and a dog. The pilot to feed the dog, and the dog to bite the pilot if they touch the controls. But the Autopilot can the job of the dog as well. Maybe electric wires in the seat.

[AutoThrotle -- when flying a small plane, one constantly monitors air speed on descent. But large planes have autothrotles that are like cruise control and do this for the pilot. But if they autothrotle is set to the wrong mode, then nothing is monitoring the air speeed. which has led to several crashes.]

Re:Computer checks pilot

[dknj]

which has led to several crashes

citation needed

Re:Computer checks pilot

[fustakrakich]

citation found!

Re:Computer checks pilot

[Jeremi]

citation found!

You call that a citation? This is a citation.

Re:Computer checks pilot

[4im]

Nothing like the AI disconnecting the controls from a pilot who is still trying to fly a plane. But the AI decided it knows better.

Ever tried to indent in Word when it has decided you don't want to do that?

No need for AI for something like this to happen, it already happened. See The untold story of QF72.

I think the very idea of an autonomous, civilian plane is ridiculous at this time. I only need to imagine one of those freighter 747s flying over here each and every day, manipulated into crashing into town. The damage could go much further than even 9/11. The only context in which the autonomous plane might make sense is in a military context - and I do believe drones are already close enough to this.

Hudson River

[xbytor]

Let me know when these AIs can land a plane on the Hudson River after a massive bird strike.

Re:Hudson River

[Ichijo]

Or a missing wing!

Re:Hudson River

[aaarrrgggh]

How does computer land plane back at airport without power for said computer? You can say "batteries" but that is a failure mode you also need to address.

Also, the "smart" part about landing was to do it near where the ferries are stationed so you have a chance at rescue. There isn't really a lot of empirical data on forces as you land on water...

As graceful as the landing looks in the videos, I am sure a computer would have been able to manage air speed and angle of attack better, it is the unforeseen secondary issues that really made the difference though.

Re:Hudson River

[aberglas]

And I might add that the root cause was that the pilots did not see the large flock even though the weather was good. A very simple computer based vision system would have picked them up in plenty of time to avoid. As would a good set of pilot eyes that were actually looking out the window.

(No, the planes do not fly so fast that vision is useless. They are flying at about 100m/s, and it is easy to see a LARGE flock of geese at 1000m, just look up in the sky sometime.

Re:Hudson River

[postbigbang]

Or a busy airport pushes planes out with a low ceiling on climb. Some nameless fool is using a RaspberryPi3 and doing pirate radio that nulls out the vision system. Engines fail, maybe both. The plane is overloaded with fuel to begin with, for a long flight. Suddenly the options are thin.

Siri? What do we do now? Several tugs and ferries are on the water landing zone, and that unpleasant silence of no thrust is pounding in whose ears? No ears.

It will take a very, very long time before AI can replace human pilots, fallible as they are. What happens when the ILS goes down in the middle of a windy thunderstorm? I've had wind push the tail so hard that we were landing sideways, but lived to tell about it. Feel free to search on windy landings, especially one made of a day at DUS to decide just how much you trust a Boeing program on the rudder pedals.

So many industries are pushing to get rid of transportation drivers because of their supposed costs that it's almost a mantra among the MBAs in transportation companies, who have nickled and dimed us to death. Those pesky pilot unions, always wanting more..... yet many pilots get paid less than bus drivers. It's all about playing to the greed of airlines, who loathe the next political disaster that craters their stock.... and their pension funding (looking at you, United).

Re:meh

[aristotle-dude]

maybe automated-trains should be a proven tech first.

Vancouver has been living in the future since 1986. The Skytrain system is the longest automated train system in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Electriccal Fires et. al.

[Geodesy99]

See http://www.skybrary.aero/index... "I ... can feel myself ... going ... Dave"

The pilot of an aircraft has many legal, emergency, and crew leadership duties which go beyond the actual piloting of the aircraft.

Being a pilot has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.

The pilot shortage is a red herring, like any other occupation, if you pay people commensurate to their educational investment, skills, knowledge, experience, and continue their training. The airlines have had a pretty good ride up until now because they piggy-backed on the military as a pipeline.

May be closer than you think

[Sycraft-fu]

While I'm not ready to go all in on AI controlled planes yet (or let's call them something else like Expert Systems, they aren't real AIs) I think starting to test is very valid. We are able to design systems with very good decision making capabilities these days. It is conceivable that we will soon be able to make them on par with humans, even for extreme cases like 1549.

It is certainly an area worth putting R&D in to.

Re:Edge cases are hard

[Kjella]

It's always easy to automate most of a problem, but edge cases tend to be really hard to solve. Yes, the autopilot can fly the plane 99.9% of the time, but the pilots are there for the 0.1% when it can't.

Well, from what I understand they hand over full control to the pilots given sufficient failure because they're there and supposed to be experts, but in many cases it could have continued and in many cases pulled through. Or the damage is so extensive the pilots can't control the plane or don't understand the situation themselves. Or the pilots don't know what to do in these error conditions and don't know how to fly either. For example Air France 447.

According to the final report, the accident resulted from the following succession of major events:

• temporary inconsistency between the measured
• speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law;
• the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path;
• the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information;
• the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path;
• the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall;
• the crew failed to recognize that the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall.

If they'd just let the computer carry on from a best guess air speed based on thrust, altitude and angle of attack, they'd have been fine:

At 02:10:34, after displaying incorrectly for half a minute, the left-side instruments recorded a sharp rise in airspeed to 223 knots (413 km/h; 257 mph), as did the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS) 33 seconds later(the right-side instruments are not recorded by the recorder). The icing event had lasted for just over a minute.

Every time shit like this happens, we improve the safety systems. And so every time the pilots become less and less accustomed to actually handling anything other than normal mode. Which is when we don't need them.

Re:Doomed from the get go

[Obfuscant]

Pilot error is one of the most common reasons for crashes.

Pilot error is one of the most common results from NTSB investigations, but that doesn't mean pilot error was actually the cause. PE is what the NTSB hangs things on unless they can find good evidence of something else -- because the manufacturers of any hardware or software blamed for a crash have lawyers who make good money defending them, while the dead pilot cannot pay anyone to defend him.

Heinlein hit this nail on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

I will never fly on a plane if the pilot isn't also on-board with me. He may not be able to as good a job as the computer and may cost more than a ground-based drone pilot, but in an emergency I know he'll do his damndest to try to save both our lives.

Re: meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Airbus A320 pilot and also a software programmer, albeit not a good one. In any case, you are wrong. Airbus does let you override the computer. In fact, the computer is quite dumb. It only has protections such as bank angle limits. It's still easy to mess up. Even the ECAM (electronic diagnostics and problem resolutions), is still dumb. For example, it can lead you to disconnect two IDGs if blindly followed. Would you want to be over the ocean without electricity?

I love the A320/321 but don't place too much faith on how smart these systems are. They only automate the most benign of tasks.

The Airbus A320 is safer than a 737 but it still requires quite a bit, if not more, knowledge.

Re:Doomed from the get go

[dgatwood]

I can counter that with a suicidal pilot [wikipedia.org] - something that machines don't yet aspire to.

Give them enough time around airline passengers and they will.... :-D

Re: Edge cases are hard

[dgatwood]

That depends on how the computer is programmed. One could presumably change the failure mode so that it continues without changing anything until it gets valid data, which would have probably prevented the disaster. Or one could make the failure mode be an emergency descent, which would at least have avoided the stall, in all likelihood, and maybe avoided the crash, too. And a computer could ostensibly use other data like GPS to determine its ground speed and altitude, and use that data as a crude estimation of air speed in the absence of proper data, which is something a person isn't likely to think to do in such a crisis, much less be able to do the computation properly.

In other words, it's hard to say what the computer could or could not have done. A computer might have done much worse, but if they anticipated the situation when constructing the training data, it would probably have done much better. Either way, once the model is trained on such a scenario, it would almost certainly do better.

Progress!

[Archtech]

Oh good. In the past there have been incidents when the computers apparently took over an aircraft and locked out the pilots.

http://www.smh.com.au/good-wee...

Now there won't be any pilots to be locked out, so the aircraft can just destroy itself in its own preferred way.

Re:Checklists and prepared-for emergencies.

[Archtech]

So in the "normal" cases you get a bit better, but in the exceptional cases, things get a bit worse.

That remark reminded me vividly of Frank Herbert's comment (in "The Dragon in the Sea"/"Under Pressure") that "there is no such thing as a small accident on a submarine". I suspect that "a bit worse" is a huge understatement (except in the sense that each of us can only die once).