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Pilotless Planes Could Save Airlines $35 Billion Per Year, But Passengers Aren't Willing To Fly In Them Yet (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Fortune: Autopilot is hardly a rarity in the world of commercial air travel. But when it comes to a fully automated flight, most people say "hard pass," at least for now. The pilotless plane could save airlines as much as $35 billion per year, according to a new survey from UBS, reducing the cost of highly skilled employees ($31 billion), related training ($3 billion), and fuel ($1 billion). The deployment of autonomous technology could result in significant fare cuts, an estimated one-tenth of the total in the U.S. And yet 54% of passengers refuse to board a remote-controlled plane, according to the survey of 8,000 air passengers. That sentiment will change over time, the investment bank notes. By the middle of the century, the majority may be willing. But UBS said passengers won't do it today, even if ticket prices were lower -- a big hurdle to airlines, which the bank estimates could see profits double by using the technology. Much like the automotive industry, most passengers don't realize that there are quite a few autonomous systems already in place on today's aircraft -- including those that land the plane.
Technology can and does fail, due to bugs or intrusion. I want a human as a backup. Backup systems are usually a good thing, especially when you are thousands of feet high.
Table-ized A.I.
The cost of one crash where they were judged negligent could bankrupt just about any airline, so there is more to this than the cost of salaries.
This is the point. Why should it mean increased profit for airlines rather than lower prices for passengers?
I'd have thought the first step would be to relieve the need for a copilot?
Qantas Flight 32.
Autopilot is great when everything goes smoothly. But the moment things go pear shaped, it's not so good. Qantas actually ran the incident in their simulators after the event; pretty much everybody who tried to complete it ended up with a hull loss (aka: the plane crashed.) It was pure luck that they had one of their most experienced flight crew on board, who managed to land the craft with no loss of life.
That's the reason why I'm not comfortable with fully automated (no human pilot on board) flights. Yes, flights these days are mostly automated. But the pilots are trained to the Nth degree to handle matters when things go wrong, and that's why they're paid the big bucks. It's not like trains or automobiles, where if something goes wrong, you can just pull over and get out of the vehicle, after all...
Lower the prices, then slowly raise them back up again while dropping the option for tickets on human piloted planes.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Operate robotic cargo flights for a few years and a couple million takeoffs and landings, and there will be a quantifiable record of their performance in all sorts of conditions.
Pretty hard to argue with going robotic once the record shows computers consistently outperforming human pilots.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
ATC and the tower will be automated too.
We got rid of lighthouse keepers long ago, if there had been an internet back then I'm sure we would have heard plenty of people telling how it would be a terrible idea to replace humans with automated lighthouses.
We humans like to think we are really exceptional thinkers who couldn't possibly be replaced by a machine. We're mostly wrong. Heck, even human trolls were mostly replaced by bots during the last election.
You want to mitigate the risk of an extremely rare type of accident that a machine might not be able to handle, by increasing the risk of more common accidents caused by human error.
You are much more likely to be killed by the pilot than saved by them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC