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One of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and all this automation still caused a devastating crash. How are we supposed to trust autonomous c

One of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and all this automation still caused a devastating crash. How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground.

lgbr 8y ago
> How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground. Easy: air travel is still safer than car travel by orders of magnitude. Treating an incident like this one is an avoidable tragedy with lessons to learn is important, and thankfully this is changing for car crashes slowly [1], but a single failure of an autonomous system does not mean that it's not at all viable, because the alternative, purely human driving, is clearly a lot worse. 1: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident
adetrest 8y ago
This happened in Indonesia. SE Asian domestic airlines have abysmal safety records, and most of them are on blacklists that prevents them from flying anywhere else for that reason.
anjc 8y ago
Exactly this. People are blaming the pilot, Lion Air, SE Asia, but ultimately a Boeing aircraft decided that it was very important to pitch down and dive into the sea. How many backup sensors and alternate systems have to fail/pass before this course of action is taken? Does the angle of attack sensor not check what a backup sensor is saying, and then what the altimeter is saying, airspeed sensor, and on and on. If a single sensor failing can make this happen then the sensor shouldn't exist.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  Sensors fail daily on hundreds of planes. Virtually everything down to radios is able to be switched off at the circuit breaker level. The responsibility is on the pilot to identify and switch off anything malfunctioning.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Yes, it's truly a case of inadequate engineering IMO. If an automated system designed to prevent crashes (stalls, as I understand it) merely changes the failure mode into something harder to detect and correct manually, it's a poorly designed system. A sibling comment mentioned that the sensors fail constantly. Seems that it might be possible to operate such a system with a significant number of critical inputs in a degraded state which could lead to unknown effects IMO. In many ways, automated driving is much more complex than successfully piloting an aircraft in regulated airspace.
- unionemployee 8y ago
  The previous flight had PIC stick shaker activation for the entire flight. PIC gave control to SIC. PIC realized the trim would stop moving with the STAB TRIM switches to CUTOUT. Flew the rest of the flight with manual trim and no autopilot, stopping at FL280 for RVSM.

lgbr 8y ago

> How are we supposed to trust autonomous cars when the smartest engineers on the planet can't automate the condition of not diving a plane into the ground. Easy: air travel is still safer than car travel by orders of magnitude. Treating an incident like this one is an avoidable tragedy with lessons to learn is important, and thankfully this is changing for car crashes slowly [1], but a single failure of an autonomous system does not mean that it's not at all viable, because the alternative, purely human driving, is clearly a lot worse. 1: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident

adetrest 8y ago

This happened in Indonesia. SE Asian domestic airlines have abysmal safety records, and most of them are on blacklists that prevents them from flying anywhere else for that reason.

anjc 8y ago

Exactly this. People are blaming the pilot, Lion Air, SE Asia, but ultimately a Boeing aircraft decided that it was very important to pitch down and dive into the sea. How many backup sensors and alternate systems have to fail/pass before this course of action is taken? Does the angle of attack sensor not check what a backup sensor is saying, and then what the altimeter is saying, airspeed sensor, and on and on. If a single sensor failing can make this happen then the sensor shouldn't exist.

A2017U1 8y ago
Sensors fail daily on hundreds of planes. Virtually everything down to radios is able to be switched off at the circuit breaker level. The responsibility is on the pilot to identify and switch off anything malfunctioning.
linuxftw 8y ago
Yes, it's truly a case of inadequate engineering IMO. If an automated system designed to prevent crashes (stalls, as I understand it) merely changes the failure mode into something harder to detect and correct manually, it's a poorly designed system. A sibling comment mentioned that the sensors fail constantly. Seems that it might be possible to operate such a system with a significant number of critical inputs in a degraded state which could lead to unknown effects IMO. In many ways, automated driving is much more complex than successfully piloting an aircraft in regulated airspace.
unionemployee 8y ago
The previous flight had PIC stick shaker activation for the entire flight. PIC gave control to SIC. PIC realized the trim would stop moving with the STAB TRIM switches to CUTOUT. Flew the rest of the flight with manual trim and no autopilot, stopping at FL280 for RVSM.