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Planes are a good argument for the opposite. Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so
by mandevil 9y ago
Planes are a good argument for the opposite.
Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why?
Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene right this second, not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.)
So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?
- smileysteve 9y agoBecause you reference AF447; Autopilot systems also added additional sensors (satellite assisted speed) for the system to have redundancies.