8 ms·

They can’t do computer based stabilization?

lisper 8y ago
Auto-hover technology does exist, but it's not common. Also the pilot has to be able to do it manually in case the autopilot fails, and so most pilots will elect to do it manually at least some of the time just to stay in practice.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Isn’t AFCS with hold position capability pretty much standard these days?
  - lisper 8y ago
    No. https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_pilots_how_common_is_afcs_nowadays/e4lrcay/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_p...
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Perhaps the smart thing would be to practice in situations where an error does not cause someone else to get electrocuted.
  - lisper 8y ago
    A fair point, but you wouldn't get electrocuted in this case. You'd die when the helicopter crashed. (Not that that makes a lot of difference.) More to the point, helicopters and power lines have both been around a lot longer than helicopter autohover technology, and aviation is an inherently conservative enterprise. Even if these sorts of repairs are being done using autohover today (I don't know) they were surely flown manually in the past. UPDATE: I asked this question on /r/flying and got this response from an actual helicopter pilot: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_pilots_how_common_is_afcs_nowadays/e4lrcay/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_p... "In a low energy state like an OGE hover, and especially when doing dangerous work like utility (as in the video), live hoists, etc we are almost always handflying. You would be surprised at how few helicopters out there are even capable of auto-hovering. We have an IAHAAS system on the Pave Hawk which in theory can do things like auto hover, auto land, maintain radalt and baro altitudes, even fly zero vis approaches etc. but we don't trust it. I have personally seen it do some sketchy things like virtually departing us from controlled flight during a steady hover for literally no reason."
- derefr 8y ago
  What does it mean for an autopilot to fail, in this case? We're not talking about an automatic guidance system, like in fixed-wing aircraft. We're talking about a thing that translates high-level commands on the stick to low-level commands to the motors, like a car's automatic transmission. Cars with automatic transmission don't have a "backup manual transmission" for when the automatic transmission fails. The automatic transmission doesn't fail.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Not having a backup doesn’t not mean that no failure is possible, that is a very odd thing to say. Automatic transmissions fail all the time, and then the car stops moving. Ok for cars but serious problem for flight so these aircraft have multiple automatic and manual redundancies. Helicopter autopilots are indeed full guidance systems like fixed wing aircraft, but they can hold the craft in hover position because it's just another flying position possible for helicopters, but it is still actively flying.
    - derefr 8y ago
      I misspoke. What I meant is, the ASIC controlling the automatic transmission—the thing that makes it "an automatic transmission"—doesn't fail. It's just a simple bit of solid-state electronics. It'll probably outlive the car. Other parts of the automatic transmission system fail, sure, but those parts are the same parts that are in a manual transmission. (Because, after all, in modern cars, a manual transmission's control system still ends up as signals sent to an electronic gearbox.) So, like I said—in modern cars, where you've just got an electronic gearbox anyway, there's no sense in having both the ASIC issuing control-commands to the electronic gearbox, and a backup manual stick for issuing the same commands. If there's any fault in the system, it's far, far more likely to come from the stick's mechanism breaking down and issuing spurious commands, than from the ASIC breaking down and issuing spurious commands. And more likely than either is the gearbox getting messed up because it's sitting in a hot, dirty engine compartment.
      - tjohns 8y ago
tormeh 8y ago
The pilot has to be there anyway, right? So where's the profit in fixing this? And so it doesn't get done..
- nomadiccoder 8y ago
  The profit can be in reducing errors, being better than human control, etc. which can reduce time spent on the line
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    At the cost of turning every automation problem into a worst case disaster. Until the technology is good enough for taking the pilot away, it's not a gain.
    - pathseeker 8y ago
      >Until the technology is good enough for taking the pilot away, it's not a gain. If that were true modern airlines wouldn't have autopilot.
      - chrischen 8y ago
        Modern anything wouldn’t have anything.
      - marcosdumay 8y ago
        Airplane pilots have plenty of time for fixing any problem that may appear mid-flight. It's because of this that airplanes don't have autopilots landing or taking them off. And by the way, there's an ongoing discussion on airplane groups about all the new failure modes created by the autopilot-pilot interface. It creates plenty of problems.
- modells 8y ago
  There's no inherently intractable reason aircraft "need" human pilots when autopilots are faster, better and make fewer errors. At this stage, an aircraft guider would be able to instruct the aircraft as to what's needed. At some point in the future, AI/ML/DL will replace that role entirely such that the lineman communicates with the aircraft directly. Then, as a further iteration (40-100 years), the lineman is also replaced by robotics on a drone-like platform.
zokier 8y ago
It is possible, and done in some cases. Check out Bell 525 for example
taneq 8y ago
They can. I remember a field trip back in university (maybe even high school, it was years ago) to an emergency response center. They had a medevac helicopter with auto-hover, where the pilot could just hit 'position hold' and it would hover there while they winched someone to safety. I'd imagine the reason a DJI drone's capabilities are so much greater than those of a helicopter carrying passengers is that the former can fall out of the sky every now and then and it's no big deal. The latter has to pass a whole lot of rigorous FAA (or equivalent) testing.
- exikyut 8y ago
  > I'd imagine the reason a DJI drone's capabilities are so much greater than those of a helicopter carrying passengers is that the former can fall out of the sky every now and then and it's no big deal. The latter has to pass a whole lot of rigorous FAA (or equivalent) testing. This reminded me of another comment I read recently, and I was actually able to remember where I read it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723107 > Hi- I used to work in regulated pharma and I want to be clear: " The core problem is that the FDA-approved devices are optimized not for getting the best result, but for ensuring the manufacturer can't be blamed if something goes wrong" is a misleading statement. The reason everything is regulated is that sometimes things do go wrong, and it's necessary to have root cause attribution so the problem can be remedied and a fix deployed, and, if somebody did something illegal or dumb, they can be sanctioned. (The quoted part of this comment, itself from a previous comment, is the part I found relevant, but I quoted the whole thing (reply and all) because I found the whole thing interesting.) I think I can naively say with confidence that aviation and medical certification are very similarly rigorous. So, it sounds to me that the autohover functionality you describe was perhaps the equivalent of Tesla "Autopilot" (which really amounts to auto-steer). The context of doing rescue lifesaving over sea is indeed very stringent, but at the same time, it's not going to be the end of the world if the helicopter moves around a bit, because it's in the open air. And if the situation is dire - strong crosswinds, or someone in critical condition - the pilot's training probably instructs them not to use it. In this situation, letting the controls go for 2-3 seconds (as per the other comments here) is going to mean an unrecoverable crash, and perhaps a rotor blade might cut one of the cables and then you have 220kV waving everywhere, hitting other power lines, touching the ground..... no. You just find the best pilots that can hover Really Well™, and pay them metric stupid amounts of money so they don't go anywhere else. Now I'm wondering if the pilots hold hovering competitions, in the same way people in the military frequently do target practice.

Auto-hover technology does exist, but it's not common. Also the pilot has to be able to do it manually in case the autopilot fails, and so most pilots will elect to do it manually at least some of the time just to stay in practice.

dogma1138 8y ago
Isn’t AFCS with hold position capability pretty much standard these days?
- lisper 8y ago
  No. https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_pilots_how_common_is_afcs_nowadays/e4lrcay/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_p...
tinus_hn 8y ago
Perhaps the smart thing would be to practice in situations where an error does not cause someone else to get electrocuted.
- lisper 8y ago
  A fair point, but you wouldn't get electrocuted in this case. You'd die when the helicopter crashed. (Not that that makes a lot of difference.) More to the point, helicopters and power lines have both been around a lot longer than helicopter autohover technology, and aviation is an inherently conservative enterprise. Even if these sorts of repairs are being done using autohover today (I don't know) they were surely flown manually in the past. UPDATE: I asked this question on /r/flying and got this response from an actual helicopter pilot: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_pilots_how_common_is_afcs_nowadays/e4lrcay/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/998c8b/helicopter_p... "In a low energy state like an OGE hover, and especially when doing dangerous work like utility (as in the video), live hoists, etc we are almost always handflying. You would be surprised at how few helicopters out there are even capable of auto-hovering. We have an IAHAAS system on the Pave Hawk which in theory can do things like auto hover, auto land, maintain radalt and baro altitudes, even fly zero vis approaches etc. but we don't trust it. I have personally seen it do some sketchy things like virtually departing us from controlled flight during a steady hover for literally no reason."
derefr 8y ago
What does it mean for an autopilot to fail, in this case? We're not talking about an automatic guidance system, like in fixed-wing aircraft. We're talking about a thing that translates high-level commands on the stick to low-level commands to the motors, like a car's automatic transmission. Cars with automatic transmission don't have a "backup manual transmission" for when the automatic transmission fails. The automatic transmission doesn't fail.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Not having a backup doesn’t not mean that no failure is possible, that is a very odd thing to say. Automatic transmissions fail all the time, and then the car stops moving. Ok for cars but serious problem for flight so these aircraft have multiple automatic and manual redundancies. Helicopter autopilots are indeed full guidance systems like fixed wing aircraft, but they can hold the craft in hover position because it's just another flying position possible for helicopters, but it is still actively flying.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I misspoke. What I meant is, the ASIC controlling the automatic transmission—the thing that makes it "an automatic transmission"—doesn't fail. It's just a simple bit of solid-state electronics. It'll probably outlive the car. Other parts of the automatic transmission system fail, sure, but those parts are the same parts that are in a manual transmission. (Because, after all, in modern cars, a manual transmission's control system still ends up as signals sent to an electronic gearbox.) So, like I said—in modern cars, where you've just got an electronic gearbox anyway, there's no sense in having both the ASIC issuing control-commands to the electronic gearbox, and a backup manual stick for issuing the same commands. If there's any fault in the system, it's far, far more likely to come from the stick's mechanism breaking down and issuing spurious commands, than from the ASIC breaking down and issuing spurious commands. And more likely than either is the gearbox getting messed up because it's sitting in a hot, dirty engine compartment.
    - tjohns 8y ago

tormeh 8y ago

The pilot has to be there anyway, right? So where's the profit in fixing this? And so it doesn't get done..

nomadiccoder 8y ago
The profit can be in reducing errors, being better than human control, etc. which can reduce time spent on the line
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  At the cost of turning every automation problem into a worst case disaster. Until the technology is good enough for taking the pilot away, it's not a gain.
  - pathseeker 8y ago
    >Until the technology is good enough for taking the pilot away, it's not a gain. If that were true modern airlines wouldn't have autopilot.
    - chrischen 8y ago
      Modern anything wouldn’t have anything.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Airplane pilots have plenty of time for fixing any problem that may appear mid-flight. It's because of this that airplanes don't have autopilots landing or taking them off. And by the way, there's an ongoing discussion on airplane groups about all the new failure modes created by the autopilot-pilot interface. It creates plenty of problems.
modells 8y ago
There's no inherently intractable reason aircraft "need" human pilots when autopilots are faster, better and make fewer errors. At this stage, an aircraft guider would be able to instruct the aircraft as to what's needed. At some point in the future, AI/ML/DL will replace that role entirely such that the lineman communicates with the aircraft directly. Then, as a further iteration (40-100 years), the lineman is also replaced by robotics on a drone-like platform.

zokier 8y ago

It is possible, and done in some cases. Check out Bell 525 for example

taneq 8y ago

They can. I remember a field trip back in university (maybe even high school, it was years ago) to an emergency response center. They had a medevac helicopter with auto-hover, where the pilot could just hit 'position hold' and it would hover there while they winched someone to safety. I'd imagine the reason a DJI drone's capabilities are so much greater than those of a helicopter carrying passengers is that the former can fall out of the sky every now and then and it's no big deal. The latter has to pass a whole lot of rigorous FAA (or equivalent) testing.

exikyut 8y ago
> I'd imagine the reason a DJI drone's capabilities are so much greater than those of a helicopter carrying passengers is that the former can fall out of the sky every now and then and it's no big deal. The latter has to pass a whole lot of rigorous FAA (or equivalent) testing. This reminded me of another comment I read recently, and I was actually able to remember where I read it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723107 > Hi- I used to work in regulated pharma and I want to be clear: " The core problem is that the FDA-approved devices are optimized not for getting the best result, but for ensuring the manufacturer can't be blamed if something goes wrong" is a misleading statement. The reason everything is regulated is that sometimes things do go wrong, and it's necessary to have root cause attribution so the problem can be remedied and a fix deployed, and, if somebody did something illegal or dumb, they can be sanctioned. (The quoted part of this comment, itself from a previous comment, is the part I found relevant, but I quoted the whole thing (reply and all) because I found the whole thing interesting.) I think I can naively say with confidence that aviation and medical certification are very similarly rigorous. So, it sounds to me that the autohover functionality you describe was perhaps the equivalent of Tesla "Autopilot" (which really amounts to auto-steer). The context of doing rescue lifesaving over sea is indeed very stringent, but at the same time, it's not going to be the end of the world if the helicopter moves around a bit, because it's in the open air. And if the situation is dire - strong crosswinds, or someone in critical condition - the pilot's training probably instructs them not to use it. In this situation, letting the controls go for 2-3 seconds (as per the other comments here) is going to mean an unrecoverable crash, and perhaps a rotor blade might cut one of the cables and then you have 220kV waving everywhere, hitting other power lines, touching the ground..... no. You just find the best pilots that can hover Really Well™, and pay them metric stupid amounts of money so they don't go anywhere else. Now I'm wondering if the pilots hold hovering competitions, in the same way people in the military frequently do target practice.