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from the queue-the-'Airplane!'-references-in-3,2,1 dept.
Pilotless commercial airliners are about to be tested, but potential passengers are wary:
How comfortable would you feel getting on a pilotless plane? That is the question millions of people may have to ask themselves in the future if they want to jet off on holiday around the world.
As we move closer to a world of driverless cars, which have already been on the road in some US cities and have also been tested in London, remotely controlled planes may be the next automated mode of transport. Plane manufacturer Boeing plans to test them in 2018.
A survey by financial services firm UBS suggests that pilotless aircraft not be too popular, however, with 54% of the 8,000 people questioned saying they would be unlikely to take a pilotless flight. The older age groups were the most resistant with more than half of people aged 45 and above shunning the idea.
Only 17% of those questioned said they would board such a plane, with more young people willing to give them a try and the 25 to 34 age group the most likely to step on board.
[...] Steve Landells, the British Airline Pilots Association's (Balpa) flight safety specialist, said: "We have concerns that in the excitement of this futuristic idea, some may be forgetting the reality of pilotless air travel. Automation in the cockpit is not a new thing - it already supports operations. However, every single day pilots have to intervene when the automatics don't do what they're supposed to. Computers can fail, and often do, and someone is still going to be needed to work that computer."
Fnord666: So how about it soylentils? Would you fly on a pilotless plane?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Justin Case on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:08PM (14 children)
TL;DR: We want to control others' behavior.
Every infant soon learns you can't have everything you want. We live in a sea of autonomous beings each with their own wants, but there must be a system of control so Jimmy doesn't keep taking Timmy's toys.
As we get older, people control each other* through emotions. Frequently this is fear. If you rob the bank, you will be punished.
How do you punish a computer?
When I'm on a plane, I can't control it, but I know the pilot has as much skin in the game as I do. The pilot's fear of dying motivates him to at least make a sincere effort to keep me alive too.
Will a computer, or even a remote pilot, have anywhere near the same sense of investment if my plane goes down?
But I don't care, because I don't fly anymore regardless. Thank you TSA!
* Here is the attraction, for many, of the totalitarian society we are eagerly building: total control of others.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:14PM
Wakeup call:
http://news.aviation-safety.net/2015/03/26/list-of-aircraft-accidents-and-incidents-deliberately-caused-by-pilots/ [aviation-safety.net]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:24PM (2 children)
"The pilot's fear of dying motivates him to at least make a sincere effort to keep me alive too."
Like the European co-pilot who locked his companion out of the cockpit when he used the loo, and then deliberately flew the entire plane into a mountain? Okay.
Or the one where the pilot was trying to straighten up, but the co-pilot was pushing the plane further up into a stall, and they plunged into the ocean killing everyone and nobody knows why they were doing that? Right.
To be honest, you have absolutely no knowledge of how much the pilot cares whatsoever, and even now most incidents are only avoided because there's multiple people up there, or there are automated alarms going off (the latter incident above, the computer was CONSTANTLY announcing the right thing to do and everyone ignored it, the former he must have ignored automated warnings about the deviation and approaching terrain).
The computer doesn't care about itself. All it knows is to do what it's told. When entire nation's militaries are based on the same principle, it shows it pretty much works. About the only problems are hardware faults (e.g. pitot tubes) but in such instances, there's no reason that ANY alert that would normally alert a pilot, or any deviation from expected course, altitude, pitch etc. couldn't be relayed back to Boeing / the airline directly for a human to override command. We don't have latencies anywhere in the world that - with ordinary safe flying distances and tolerances - would impact on an emergency response like that.
I think I'd much rather a computer than a human, in fact. Computer + human who could take over if something went wrong would probably rank slightly higher but not by much. But pretty much, 99.9% of the time, the computer would be doing things. Like it already does for autopilot and even assisted landing nowadays.
I'd rather change the way we fly (highly prescribed routes, all flying at prescribed heights, miles apart, with no deviation allowed, alerts the second ANYTHING veers off course or experiences any problem, longer runways, automated taxiing on rails if it came to it, a "failsafe" like fly North at 10,000 feet that is industry standard and everything gets out of its way when it happens, etc.) and totally rewrite the way air traffic is controlled so that a computer finds it "easy", than have stupendously highly-paid humans who are prone to failure and do the same monotonous job day in, day out on the case on a "flexible" system.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @03:01PM
Yeah, those two cases are definitely a thing. But at least play the game in an honest way and put against that the thousands of flights that go flawlessly. Because if you're acting up in this way, you make about as much sense as climate change deniers or creationists screaming "teach the controversy" because there's this one paper here in this fringe 'journal' that supports your point of view against thousands and more that counter it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:36PM
That brings up the kind of interesting point that in the old days jetliners had bomber sized crews with a flight engineer and a navigator and radio operator and all that. Now we're downsized down to one pilot and a backup/trainee pilot.
The point of this, is they shed all the jobs except stick and rudder man, and hoped the stick and rudder man adsorbed enough engineering to keep modern systems online, which double in complexity every five years or whatever.
My brilliant/insane idea is to claim a really experienced sysadmin/engineer would result in a lower death rate than a stick and rudder man. Get rid of the pilot... replaced with a on-board sysadmin.
I have seen professionally, sysadmins and techs freeze up. Probably not the right stuff to be a jetliner sysadmin. Presumably many years of stick and rudder time filter out pilots who freeze up, so many years of linux box sysadmin work would filter out jetliner-sysadmins who freeze up. I have liquid helium for blood and do not freeze up and this is not unusual, but it will have to be filtered for.
If you thought that idea wasn't strange enough, give the sysadmin a concealed carry permit and some training and stick him and his laptop in some random seat. Don't even tell the stewardesses.
Obviously this would be the end of "no laptops in flight" policy.
Its actually pretty easy to fly a plane, its very hard to be a pilot. Sort of like its very easy to drive a car especially video game style, but its very hard to be a safe driver. In that way, it might take 25 years for a stick and rudder man to have enough wisdom to land a jetliner in a hurricane completely manually, but if I were the sysadmin / flight engineer on board, the whole point is if the autopilot failed I'd fix the damn thing or write my own in a very small perl script, eliminating the need for a stick and rudder man with 25 years experience, or I'd divert to perfect weather airport where anyone with more than 5 hours of MS flight simulator experience could land a jetliner. I've landed jetliners in simulation before, several times, successfully, and its tricky to keep ahead of the plane with is faster than hell compared to a 172 which I have flown in meatspace, but its not "that" hard. You're not paying a jetliner captain for 5000 hours of experience to land on a milk run in perfect conditions with a perfect plane, you're paying him to land a plane during a tech disaster, but the whole point is putting a sysadmin on board would result in a perfect plane such that any idiot could land it and you don't need the idiot landing it to have 5000 hours of experience... although this turns into a meta problem in that I have 21 years or approximately 42000 hours of linux programming and admin experience since my first linux related job in 96, or going all the way back to 1981 when I started... um even more hous. So possibly a 50K hour sysadmin might not be a major salary savings over a 5K hour stick and rudder man. Hmm.
Well at any rate I'm just saying that jetliners used to have large varied crews, recently pared down to stick and rudder men, and when discussing getting rid of stick and rudder men, it might be worth considering bringing back the position of flight engineer.
Another alternative, weird as it probably sounds, instead of a sysadmin, each plane has a live-aboard A+P mechanic... that's interesting conceptually. Like nuclear submarines there would probably be high turnover, high pay, and an "A" and "B" crew schedule.
On the third hand, rather than having the copilot be the sorcerers apprentice, have a plain old pilot and a flight engineer with separate career paths. FEs do nothing but fix planes in flight, and pilots do nothing most of the time except train for manual landings endlessly which is fairly easy and cheap.
I would also put the FE in charge legally as PIC. The stick and rudder man is merely a meatspace backup for the technological systems and won't have enough experience with the systems to make rational engineering decisions, so put the FE in charge of the plane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:40PM (1 child)
Bash the hell out of it. It won't improve it, but you sure feel better afterwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:56AM
Does zsh work, too? :-)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:55PM (6 children)
True, and some day there will be people who put their actual wealth and freedom on the line by putting products into the marketplace that may jeopardize others (see: the Chinese industrialist who committed suicide after realizing what he had done by putting lead into children's toy paint)
However, until that time what we have is the free market, caveat emptor, regulations strangle progress so just get rid of them all. It's this dysfunctional model that TFA indicates is costing us an additional $35 per passenger per trip for the costs of training, paying, and carrying airline pilots.
We _could_ trust a group of engineers to get autopilots and automated air traffic control right, if we _would_ make their employers (and, by proxy, themselves) liable for damages caused by screwups - not just $10K/death settlements, but actual damages for loss caused by deaths and injuries attributable to design, implementation and maintenance flaws. The processes for development and validation of reliable systems exist, they're more costly than "ship it, ship it, ship it yesterday," but at today's level of technology, an automated system _could_ be safer.
Instead, we put our faith and trust into the hands of a couple of aging, alcoholic philanderers (no, doesn't apply to all or even most pilots, but the stereotypes aren't based on nothing...); because we figure they want to live as much as we do. Unfortunately, that's not always the case: http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=82910&page=1 [go.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:43PM (5 children)
You talking about pilots, electrical engineers, programmers, priests, politicians, business execs, soylent news posters, or all of the above?
Just sayin you might end up with the "same people" merely took slightly different life paths. You're not gonna get superman merely because you fire all the ATP cert holders...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:10PM (4 children)
I (meaning, my prejudices) would say that airline pilots have more alcoholics and philanderers per-capita than all the other groups, far more than engineers, programmers, and by extension of those: soylent news posters. However, it's far more important for the role of airline pilot to be mentally sharp and un-distracted. Sully took something like 30 seconds to make his decision and ditch in the river, and he did that by short-cutting the trained procedures and making some snap judgements. The monday morning quarterbacks landed his plane at a couple of airports, but only by making absolute snap judgements that would have been considered rash and reckless had anything gone wrong, things they would never have had time to think through or foresee.
My point being: engineers, programmers, business execs, and anyone else involved in the development of an auto-pilot, auto-ATC system (priests?) can have fuzzier thinking, slower reaction times, bigger distractions, and still make a solid, more reliable than humans, system because they can use processes to check, recheck, and constantly monitor the end product performance.
The trick is in getting the business execs to sign up for the liability of truly getting it right, and they're all too drunk and distracted with their affairs to bother with that noise: business as usual is good, why change it?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:51AM (1 child)
There are scalability issues in that what you're asking for is pretty common, look at combat infantrymen who live thru a war... and you only need 1 in 100K or so to become pilots so it shouldn't be hard to find them. There's a lot of dangerous "instant reaction" blue collar jobs where its amazing anyone lives thru it, but they certainly do.
Eh I donno about that, but assuming thats correct, there is a minor detail that you're talking about functional, not-unemployed former airline pilots, so there's also the unique skillset of being a functioning addict which is much harder than being a non-functioning addict, so they have a certain skill at keeping just barely out of trouble which might translate surprisingly well to flying. Flying being throwing yourself at the ground while avoiding hitting it, or whatever.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:42PM
Scalability is what corrective and preventative action loops and all that other design control quality crap is about.
I call crap because regulations are forcing it on classes of systems which contain small simple products that don't significantly benefit from the processes. As you scale up the complexity and level of concern, those processes ensure high reliability - at a cost, but it's an up-front design time cost instead of a post-accident litigation and reparations cost.
Yes, it's more efficient to pull ex-military pilots into commercial service and hope for the best, up to a point. We probably passed that point in the mid 1990s.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday August 10 2017, @02:08PM (1 child)
...because if you want to travel around the world meeting strange women in exotic bars, and you aren't interested in spending time at home with the family, airline pilot seems like a pretty good fit for that lifestyle. If we replace the pilots with sysadmins, do you really think we won't end up with sysadmins doing the same things?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:59PM
Nope, except that if we replace pilots with sysadmins, the sysadmins won't be spending all their time in airport lounges and travelling the world - they'll be running things from home.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:53AM
The need to punish is because humans have desires which may actually be harmful to others. Computers, at least the ones we can currently build, don't have any desires, harmful or otherwise, therefore punishment would be pointless.
Or said differently, where there's no will, you don't need fear to control it.