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Correct. The autopilot is fully capable of landing the plane entirely automatically (once you tell it to, and if you're approaching an ILS autoland runway), bu

Correct. The autopilot is fully capable of landing the plane entirely automatically (once you tell it to, and if you're approaching an ILS autoland runway), but often times that's reserved for extremely poor weather or such, and pilots will land manually. They'll still tune the ILS so they have their localiser and glideslope information on their flight display, but they'll follow that manually rather than telling the autopilot to. This varies by airline. On Boeing airliners there's also the (delivery) option for a pilot awareness monitor. If you don't make any inputs (change from weather to terrain radar or vice versa, change the range of information displayed on your navigation display, toggle whether airports or VORs are displayed, etc) for a short period of time (I believe it's 10 minutes), it will generate an EICAS warning. This is attention-grabbing yellow text on a screen that the pilots are supposed to be monitoring. If you don't action that (by hitting the warning reset switch or making any input) you get a very loud very red alarm.

tialaramex 9y ago
Note that alertness checks are (somewhat) effective in commercial aviation because the industry AND the pilots accept them as normal. A big ship will have BNWAS, which is supposed to alert everybody else in crew quarters (e.g. officers asleep) if the officer on the bridge (who should be actively controlling it) doesn't do anything for a prolonged period and doesn't respond to a local warning alarm. When there's an accident investigation with suspicious circumstances like a collision in an otherwise empty region in the middle of a calm dark night, almost invariably either the BNWAS was "mistakenly" switched off, or its mandatory logging was "mistakenly" erased or turns out never to have been enabled at all. Why? Because the alarm is annoying and there's no acceptance by owners, masters or crews that it's keeping them alive and so they must use it, so they switch it off, muffle the alarms or otherwise disable it and then, inevitably, someone falls asleep and an accident happens. Similar tech in private cars would, I think we have to assume, end up just like BNWAS on big freighters, disabled because it was annoying. Sometimes nobody would survive the accident to cover up the fact it was disabled, but that's cold comfort.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Yep. The problem is that if I have to basically drive anyway then, aside from some safety and convenience systems (lane departure warning, automatic braking, maybe adaptive cruise control, etc.), why would I really want a nominally autonomous driving system. If I have to drive and can't read or watch videos (and certainly can't summon a robo-taxi), what good is it?
  - rhino369 9y ago
    I agree 100%. "Autopilot" that I still have to stay 100% focused on is probably worse than just driving myself.

tialaramex 9y ago

Note that alertness checks are (somewhat) effective in commercial aviation because the industry AND the pilots accept them as normal. A big ship will have BNWAS, which is supposed to alert everybody else in crew quarters (e.g. officers asleep) if the officer on the bridge (who should be actively controlling it) doesn't do anything for a prolonged period and doesn't respond to a local warning alarm. When there's an accident investigation with suspicious circumstances like a collision in an otherwise empty region in the middle of a calm dark night, almost invariably either the BNWAS was "mistakenly" switched off, or its mandatory logging was "mistakenly" erased or turns out never to have been enabled at all. Why? Because the alarm is annoying and there's no acceptance by owners, masters or crews that it's keeping them alive and so they must use it, so they switch it off, muffle the alarms or otherwise disable it and then, inevitably, someone falls asleep and an accident happens. Similar tech in private cars would, I think we have to assume, end up just like BNWAS on big freighters, disabled because it was annoying. Sometimes nobody would survive the accident to cover up the fact it was disabled, but that's cold comfort.

ghaff 9y ago
Yep. The problem is that if I have to basically drive anyway then, aside from some safety and convenience systems (lane departure warning, automatic braking, maybe adaptive cruise control, etc.), why would I really want a nominally autonomous driving system. If I have to drive and can't read or watch videos (and certainly can't summon a robo-taxi), what good is it?
- rhino369 9y ago
  I agree 100%. "Autopilot" that I still have to stay 100% focused on is probably worse than just driving myself.