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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: 2) by edIII on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:58PM (10 children)
I think your crazy. You're depending on systems that, quite frankly, haven't been tested in today's cybersecurity atmosphere. Somewhat related question; Do you trust SystemD? That Linux computer may hold up just fine, but are you absolutely sure that no bugs exist at all that could seriously compromise uptime when you need it, and that no flaws exist that will crash the system? Remember, we are not talking a personal computer here, but systems that are responsible for keeping people alive during its uptime.
You need to remember where you are. 5 miles up, going over 500mph, with no fucking pilot. It's not the ground with 2D travel where the worst thing that may happen is careening into another car at 70mph, or graceful failure just pulling you over to a complete stop. Just what graceful failure exists in a plane during flight?
Yes, you have some software running it all, but what are the redundancies? What methods and processes are in place to provide graceful failure during flight? During landing? How is it secured, both physically and electronically? What about the software repositories? How is it upgraded? Are there two competing systems checking each other? Is it possible to slip malware into the upgrade path? Could one of these planes be taken down by someone with sophistication and a moment or two of access to the datacenters responsible, or the plane itself?
This ain't the fucking Federation either. We're run by avaricious Ferengi trying to cut costs everywhere. How would you feel dying because parts of the project were outsourced to India, and the communication between teams was shit, and there ended up being a fatal flight control bug in it? That's not hyperbole either. We have an aging aircraft fleet, a President who wants to kill all regulations and state institutions responsible for safety through those regulations, a toxic corporate culture of profit-at-all-costs, and a world where progressively even people here are giving up saying security is impossible. Still, you are okay with flying in one of their machines with no human being at all?
You are far more brave than I. Please go ahead of me, and I'll wait like a Luddite for 15 million miles worth of perfect flying and no articles on Soylent about cybersecurity breaches and/or malfunctions with these miracle planes.
I'll tell you one thing that would get me there. Add the following safety factor and I'll consider it. THREE read-only flight control systems that compete with each other to DECIDE on what to do. A FOURTH flight monitoring system that does nothing but evaluate human safety while being a read-only system wholly isolated from the flight computers with its own dedicated sensor net while still having access to the main sensor net that the three other ones use.
The very moment the three flight control systems can't agree on what to do next, meaning mutually exclusive actions or ones that are not within 1% of consensus, it initiates emergency procedures to use the parachute system to land the plane safely. If the fourth flight monitoring system determines, on its own, that human life is in danger, it will direct the plane to land at the nearest airport and notify the authorities. That determination could be because of flight malfunctions, or at the direction of the Air Marshal.
Are there still Air Marshal's on every plane? If you have absolutely nobody up there, not even a captain in charge, I'm never getting in it. If there is no captain or co-pilot, then they have the money to have an armed security guard on each flight. That person would have the authentication credentials to interact with the fourth system to initiate emergency landing protocols.
You guys think just because you got rid of the pilots, that all negative human influences just stopped. Far, far, far from it :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:56PM (3 children)
I generally agree with the exception that I'm not aware of any "recent" jet engines that can operate without computer control and there's many post 1970 military aircraft that are essentially unflyable without aerodynamic computers. So automation can do quite a bit. You might be impressed with cruise missile performance, or maybe not. Cruise missiles are an interesting analogy.
Those tech examples were rolled out using little micro-steps of mechanical assistance like trim tabs and 1950s mechanical linkages and 1000 tiny little steps later you have something like a B-2 which flys solely by beating the air into submission via gigaflops of computation. Heat convection off the CPU heatsinks seems to be how B-2 flies.
Most of the assumptions about the failure of pilotless planes seem to revolve around taking one giant leap instead of 1000 microsteps and I suspect the movement will in fact fail unless it embraces 1000 tiny steps toward pilotless.
I suspect the first successful pilotless plane will not be version 0.00001 released by outsourced Indian Java coders running on arduinos and ras-pi but will be version 999 where a bit is finally flipped and the machine takes over completely and the pilot sits there bored.
The biggest problem with computer control of planes instead of humans is there's like 10K planes in the air at any given time and the balance of autonomous (possibly virus infected) vs centrally controlled drones (possibly MITM attack) means the next 9/11 will literally be 10K planes at the same time not just a couple, and the attack will be launched from anywhere on the planet. So country X in the middle east did 9/11 so we attacked countries Y and Z in the middle east as retaliation, but the 10K plane attack will be carried out by any random country on the planet before we bomb NK, Iran, and Syria or WTF we've already decided to bomb.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday August 09 2017, @10:58PM (2 children)
And they're generally fitted with a seat that allows you to (more or less) safely leave the aircraft.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:53AM (1 child)
And that seat function is very rarely used...
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:44PM
...but still more often than the restraint function of the seatbelts in my car.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday August 09 2017, @11:09PM (2 children)
Anyone who understands how computers work should be asking these questions. But perhaps you haven't yet fully explored the risk.
When not if self flying planes or self driving cars software is corrupted -- by a hack, or a malicious map update, or just a screwy GPS signal -- it won't be one plane or car crashing... it will be all of them. Simultaneously.
I think I'll take some time off while everyone else is cleaning up that mess.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday August 10 2017, @01:12AM
LOL.
You're right. Skynet didn't drop one bomb, or two, to drive her point home. She dropped them ALL.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:00PM
Agree and extend your remarks with two paths
One is the firmware on every deployed lidar shuts down at noon UTC on aug 15 2017 unless it can access a cryptographic update server in NK or something. So nuke NK or even merely shut off its inet access and every self driving car in the world crashes at noon aug 15 UTC. If you want to nuke NK as some neocon-types want to do, then you gotta replace or at least re-firmware-flash every lidar on every self driving car in the entire world, first. Thats an interesting geopolitical strategy.
The other axis is there's an unintentional bug where the firmware of the lidar locks up on some obscure timestamp because that bit pattern was used to indicate an error condition OR the I2C/SPI/CAN bus was never tested with more than 24 consecutive zeros due to some engineering error and some weird timestamp has 26 zeros so every lidar on the planet crashes at the same time. Whoops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:18AM
I don't know the relevant regulations, but I'm taking a guess: There are a lot of redundancies.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:09PM (1 child)
Modern planes and fly-by-wire -- they rely on computers to fly now. Hell I rented a car a few months back, the handbrake was electronic, and just next to the 'powered by microsoft' button. I was very comforted.
We're run by avaricious Ferengi trying to cut costs everywhere. How would you feel dying because parts of the project were outsourced to India
The Ferengi aren't stupid enough to kill their customers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:57PM
So, worse than Ferengi. Got it ;)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.