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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 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.