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From Wikipedia's "Autopilot" page: >In 1947 a US Air Force C-54 made a transatlantic flight, including takeoff and landing, completely under the control of an

by mrob 7y ago

From Wikipedia's "Autopilot" page: >In 1947 a US Air Force C-54 made a transatlantic flight, including takeoff and landing, completely under the control of an autopilot. Airplane autopilots are already at the fully autonomous stage. They have the advantage of air traffic control removing obstacles from their path, but IMO this just means ATC is part of the autopilot system. An autopilot is something that gets you from point A to point B with no input from the pilot/driver, and if it's not capable of doing that reliably then it's not an autopilot.

kolinko 7y ago
Er, you made a jump from „there were some flights that were done 100% on Autopilot” to „airplane autopilots are completely reliable”.
- mrob 7y ago
  Airplane autopilots require human intervention only in rare emergency scenarios. Tesla's "autopilot" requires human intervention as standard. I don't think it deserves the name.
  - w0utert 7y ago
    Define ‘rare’... I remember reading plane autopilot ‘disengagements’ aren’t actually rare or uncommon but happen 1000s of times every day worldwide. Also, this is completely ignoring that a) autopilot doesn’t work at all without lots of infrastructure on the ground (try landing on autopilot when the airport ILS is down or absent, for example), and b) there’s a non-trivial set of flight conditions in which autopilot cannot be used at all. People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars, the technologicalies share almost no similarities whatsoever. Plane autopilot doesn’t do any object recognition, AI, machine learning, adapting to the environment, etc. At the very best it will tell you when there’s another plane flying too close (based on an explicit location sent from the other plane or the ground), or when you almost run into the ground. That’s it. Everything else the autopilot does is just setting the flight controls to follow a preset path, and ensure the plane stays within the flight envelope.
    - notahacker 7y ago
      > People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars Agreed, but it's Tesla doing that for marketing purposes that's the cause of these comparisons, not the people objecting to Tesla doing that for marketing purposes. Aircraft autopilot systems are relatively simple systems with a lot of instrument support and redundancy that relieve pilots of the need to hold a yoke in normal flight (with the latter bit being what the public tends to focus on). Tesla offers extremely complex software which makes more decisions based on less straightforward inputs and relies entirely on the driver holding the controls at all times in case it makes a bad decision.
    - close04 7y ago
      I think a normal person’s interpretation of the “autopilot” term even when it comes to planes has nothing to do with the technicalities but rather an overview of what it can do: fly the plane for hours with little to no intervention. A plane never needs to avoid lane dividers though. And when the plane’s AP disengages, pilots have more than fractions of seconds to avoid a crash and possibly death. I think this is what people expect from AP now, because that’s how it’s marketed: to do the heavy lifting 90+% of the time and when it fails and disengages It should give plenty of time to react. Going forward AP will start to mean more and more “fully self driving”. Because that’s what some manufacturers claim it can do short of pesky legislation. So no supervision, no disengagement, just “piloting automatically”. And everyone pretty much has similar expectations from “automatically”.
  - dmitrygr 7y ago
    Airplane autopilots require human intervention only in rare emergency scenarios That is not even remotely true. Pilots must babysit the autopilot and do. When flying on autopilot you still constantly check instruments to make sure that the plane is going where it should, how it should, as fast as it should. They sometimes have faults, and they have caused crashes. Pilot training is VERY clear that AP can never be relied on. Eg: If you tell your AP to climb at 2000 ft/min, many will happily stall you trying to maintain that climb well above where your engine(s) provide(s) enough power to do so; if you tell your AP to descend to 3000 ft over sea level, most will happily fly you into a mountain that is in your way and rises to 4000 feet above sea level (in a better-equipped plane, TAWS will beep at you to tell you about this, but most APs will press on); if you tell your AP to maintain altitude, many will happily overspeed the aircraft in a large updraft, nosing down to avoid the climb.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    I think a good comparison here is TCAS [0] - installed on every airliner today, it's a system that could be summarized as 'you're going to hit another plane, do XYZ NOW to avoid death'. It doesn't take the actions for you - just tells you what to do, even if the aircraft was operating under autopilot at the time. And yet autopilot on cars is expected to intervene in those cases and far more. (Of course, cars are often in those situations far more often, which is partly why the expectations are different) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
You mean it had collision detection and avoidance?

by mrob 7y ago

kolinko 7y ago

Er, you made a jump from „there were some flights that were done 100% on Autopilot” to „airplane autopilots are completely reliable”.

mrob 7y ago
Airplane autopilots require human intervention only in rare emergency scenarios. Tesla's "autopilot" requires human intervention as standard. I don't think it deserves the name.
- w0utert 7y ago
  Define ‘rare’... I remember reading plane autopilot ‘disengagements’ aren’t actually rare or uncommon but happen 1000s of times every day worldwide. Also, this is completely ignoring that a) autopilot doesn’t work at all without lots of infrastructure on the ground (try landing on autopilot when the airport ILS is down or absent, for example), and b) there’s a non-trivial set of flight conditions in which autopilot cannot be used at all. People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars, the technologicalies share almost no similarities whatsoever. Plane autopilot doesn’t do any object recognition, AI, machine learning, adapting to the environment, etc. At the very best it will tell you when there’s another plane flying too close (based on an explicit location sent from the other plane or the ground), or when you almost run into the ground. That’s it. Everything else the autopilot does is just setting the flight controls to follow a preset path, and ensure the plane stays within the flight envelope.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    > People really should stop comparing plane autopilot to autonomous cars Agreed, but it's Tesla doing that for marketing purposes that's the cause of these comparisons, not the people objecting to Tesla doing that for marketing purposes. Aircraft autopilot systems are relatively simple systems with a lot of instrument support and redundancy that relieve pilots of the need to hold a yoke in normal flight (with the latter bit being what the public tends to focus on). Tesla offers extremely complex software which makes more decisions based on less straightforward inputs and relies entirely on the driver holding the controls at all times in case it makes a bad decision.
  - close04 7y ago
    I think a normal person’s interpretation of the “autopilot” term even when it comes to planes has nothing to do with the technicalities but rather an overview of what it can do: fly the plane for hours with little to no intervention. A plane never needs to avoid lane dividers though. And when the plane’s AP disengages, pilots have more than fractions of seconds to avoid a crash and possibly death. I think this is what people expect from AP now, because that’s how it’s marketed: to do the heavy lifting 90+% of the time and when it fails and disengages It should give plenty of time to react. Going forward AP will start to mean more and more “fully self driving”. Because that’s what some manufacturers claim it can do short of pesky legislation. So no supervision, no disengagement, just “piloting automatically”. And everyone pretty much has similar expectations from “automatically”.
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  Airplane autopilots require human intervention only in rare emergency scenarios That is not even remotely true. Pilots must babysit the autopilot and do. When flying on autopilot you still constantly check instruments to make sure that the plane is going where it should, how it should, as fast as it should. They sometimes have faults, and they have caused crashes. Pilot training is VERY clear that AP can never be relied on. Eg: If you tell your AP to climb at 2000 ft/min, many will happily stall you trying to maintain that climb well above where your engine(s) provide(s) enough power to do so; if you tell your AP to descend to 3000 ft over sea level, most will happily fly you into a mountain that is in your way and rises to 4000 feet above sea level (in a better-equipped plane, TAWS will beep at you to tell you about this, but most APs will press on); if you tell your AP to maintain altitude, many will happily overspeed the aircraft in a large updraft, nosing down to avoid the climb.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  I think a good comparison here is TCAS [0] - installed on every airliner today, it's a system that could be summarized as 'you're going to hit another plane, do XYZ NOW to avoid death'. It doesn't take the actions for you - just tells you what to do, even if the aircraft was operating under autopilot at the time. And yet autopilot on cars is expected to intervene in those cases and far more. (Of course, cars are often in those situations far more often, which is partly why the expectations are different) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

You mean it had collision detection and avoidance?