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The article sort of disses traditional landing guidance systems but misses the point of these. Specifically that such instrument approaches are used because one

The article sort of disses traditional landing guidance systems but misses the point of these. Specifically that such instrument approaches are used because one can’t see the runway at all. Thus a system that relies on cameras to land is academically interesting but not all that practical. Also with the advent of GPS-WAAS based LPV approaches one doesn’t need equipment on the field and a high precision 3D approach path can be created anywhere. As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft a pilot friend of mine said to ask actual pilots if they’d get on board a fully self flying aircraft and you’d be hard pressed to find one. As he put it, the automation on planes is amazing and a big help but it does mess up and when it does the automation can crap out big time. For the foreseeable future there’s still no replacement for a qualified pilot at the controls ready to take over. Finally there’s a lot of debate in the aviation community that too much automation actually decreases safety because pilots not flying enough manually lose skills. See the SFO accident with the Asiana airliner that crashed for no other reason than the ILS was down so they couldn’t fly with the autopilot. They crashed short of the runway on a simply manual landing in perfect weather because they couldn’t fly the plane properly! The landing in the article was a really cool experiment though.

sokoloff 7y ago
I'd fly hundreds of domestic flights on an un-fixed 737 Max before I'd fly a single flight on a pilot-less airplane at this point in the state of technology.
- bdavis__ 7y ago
  s/hundreds/thousands/ same for self driving cars. software quality is too low.
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    They weren't suppose to take "move fast and break things" literally! (It's really weird how "literally" has two literally opposite meanings.)
    - ribasushi 7y ago
      Entertaining 1 minute on "literally" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ImRMJX68s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ImRMJX68s
  - tamaharbor 7y ago
    Would you trust Alexa to land your plane or drive your car?
dehrmann 7y ago
> As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft My fear, is that AI would generally work, but do worse than humans in failure scenarios. Flying is inherently higher-risk than cars because cars can (almost) always just stop moving and be safe. > They crashed short of the runway on a simply manual landing in perfect weather because they couldn’t fly the plane properly! This. It was a clear day, but they couldn't read the visual approach indicators and didn't have the sense to go around.
phendrenad2 7y ago
> As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft a pilot friend of mine said to ask actual pilots if they’d get on board a fully self flying aircraft and you’d be hard pressed to find one. That doesn't say much - pilots are only experts in existing autoplilot systems designed to have human backup, not future autopilot systems designed to not have human backup.
- lisper 7y ago
  > pilots are only experts in... Since you are questioning the judgement of pilots based on their expertise, I am going to present my qualifications: I am a private pilot with an instrument rating and over 900 hours and 23 years of experience. I was also an AI researcher in the first half of my career. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on how to build autonomous vehicles that would navigate through natural terrain (I did this while working for NASA on the research program that led up to the first Mars rover mission). I was also the PI for the Remote Agent Executive [1], which controlled the first (and to my knowledge still only) fully autonomous interplanetary spacecraft. So I think I'm about as qualified as a person could be to make the following judgement: I would absolutely not fly in a fully autonomous spacecraft. No fucking way. I have no doubt that they would work fantastically well >99% of the time as long as everything was going to plan. But I don't want to be in the aircraft the one time that something goes wrong that the system is not equipped to handle, and watch my life slip away watching the aircraft doing something stupid because some minimum wage sub-contractor in Asia forgot to put a semicolon in the right place. And I don't think you need to be an expert to realize that full autonomy is a Really Bad Idea. All you have to do it look at how the 737MAX MCAS debacle is unfolding. MCAS was autonomy writ very, very small, and 346 people are dead. [1] https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/vandv/remote/ https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/vandv/remote/
  - Udik 7y ago
    > I would absolutely not fly in a fully autonomous spacecraft. No fucking way. So I guess you'd never get into a self driving car- the problem of driving a car on a trafficked road seems enormously more complex than that of piloting an aircraft.

sokoloff 7y ago

I'd fly hundreds of domestic flights on an un-fixed 737 Max before I'd fly a single flight on a pilot-less airplane at this point in the state of technology.

bdavis__ 7y ago
s/hundreds/thousands/ same for self driving cars. software quality is too low.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  They weren't suppose to take "move fast and break things" literally! (It's really weird how "literally" has two literally opposite meanings.)
  - ribasushi 7y ago
    Entertaining 1 minute on "literally" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ImRMJX68s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ImRMJX68s
- tamaharbor 7y ago
  Would you trust Alexa to land your plane or drive your car?

dehrmann 7y ago

> As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft My fear, is that AI would generally work, but do worse than humans in failure scenarios. Flying is inherently higher-risk than cars because cars can (almost) always just stop moving and be safe. > They crashed short of the runway on a simply manual landing in perfect weather because they couldn’t fly the plane properly! This. It was a clear day, but they couldn't read the visual approach indicators and didn't have the sense to go around.

phendrenad2 7y ago

> As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft a pilot friend of mine said to ask actual pilots if they’d get on board a fully self flying aircraft and you’d be hard pressed to find one. That doesn't say much - pilots are only experts in existing autoplilot systems designed to have human backup, not future autopilot systems designed to not have human backup.

lisper 7y ago
> pilots are only experts in... Since you are questioning the judgement of pilots based on their expertise, I am going to present my qualifications: I am a private pilot with an instrument rating and over 900 hours and 23 years of experience. I was also an AI researcher in the first half of my career. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on how to build autonomous vehicles that would navigate through natural terrain (I did this while working for NASA on the research program that led up to the first Mars rover mission). I was also the PI for the Remote Agent Executive [1], which controlled the first (and to my knowledge still only) fully autonomous interplanetary spacecraft. So I think I'm about as qualified as a person could be to make the following judgement: I would absolutely not fly in a fully autonomous spacecraft. No fucking way. I have no doubt that they would work fantastically well >99% of the time as long as everything was going to plan. But I don't want to be in the aircraft the one time that something goes wrong that the system is not equipped to handle, and watch my life slip away watching the aircraft doing something stupid because some minimum wage sub-contractor in Asia forgot to put a semicolon in the right place. And I don't think you need to be an expert to realize that full autonomy is a Really Bad Idea. All you have to do it look at how the 737MAX MCAS debacle is unfolding. MCAS was autonomy writ very, very small, and 346 people are dead. [1] https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/vandv/remote/ https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/vandv/remote/
- Udik 7y ago
  > I would absolutely not fly in a fully autonomous spacecraft. No fucking way. So I guess you'd never get into a self driving car- the problem of driving a car on a trafficked road seems enormously more complex than that of piloting an aircraft.