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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, 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.