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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 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.