23 ms·

Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and landing tests

332 points by apsec112 6y ago

kirykl 6y ago
>"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own" It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is really critical
ngngngng 6y ago
> The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply watched. Talk about training your replacement. My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it.
- bdamm 6y ago
  You should because it's a terrible career, although really I think most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career into good industries so in the end, no big deal. Let 'er rip and enjoy the view when you get it
  - Ancalagon 6y ago
    Why is it considered a terrible career?
    - dr-detroit 6y ago
      $20,000-$40,000 annual salary starting out Most of the coastal elites on hackernews spend more than that annually on apps for their iWatch
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - refurb 6y ago
        From what I've read on r/aviation, that was true 10-15 years ago, but not last year. The airline industry goes through cycles of "too many damn pilots" to "oh my god we need more pilots". I was reading some smaller airlines were will to train you to get your type rating and starting pay of $60-70k.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance, doing the same thing a million times, dead-man’s shoes, having to work against a schedule, living out of corporate hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules, shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to like about it? Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union game talk about achieving the same pay an undergraduate intern gets in a tech company.
      - jfk13 6y ago
        While there's doubtless something to what you say, I don't believe there are that many undergrad interns getting the pay of a senior pilot. You're thinking of an extremely select subset of tech companies.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet against the average working pilot earning less than the average tech intern either.
      - benhurmarcel 6y ago
        Tech salaries aren't a reasonable baseline. It's an outlier.
    - gipp 6y ago
      Spend ~4/7 of your life in mediocre hotels far from home, work itself consists of sitting in a cramped box with even less to do than than the passengers on the flight, money can be good but not career-goals good... I can see it.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      One reason it's not great is there are a lot of pilot wannabees that are stuck flying small commercial feeder flights, and they don't have much experience and training, and they get paid barely enough to live on. They hope to get on to one of the bigger companies (american, united, etc). The flights a few years ago that iced up in NY state (I think that was where) were sleeping on someone's couch for a few hours only before a flight, and they didn't have much training.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    And what is your evidence that "most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career"? And, what do you consider "good industries"?
- bargl 6y ago
  I have some friends who love it, some who hate it and some who didn't finish and got a ton of debt. If you decide to be a pilot reach out to real world pilots and ask for advice. I have friends who did years being paid very little at local airports so they could "make it" to the airlines to get paid much better. The biggest thing I observed from my 10+ friends is, being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications. At first you pay for them, then you get paid for them but not much because those people are paying for them, then you get paid a living wage for them because you're flying customers/cargo/etc. My friends who are happiest as pilots either had the government/some other entity pay for their training, or were able to skip ahead in pay by getting directly to airlines.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications Yeap. So if you can fund the initial thousand hours (give or take) you should be ok. If you can't and you don't like small GA aircraft you'll have a miserable time trying to get paid to fly and have enough hours to be considered by airlines.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it. So he wants to be an airline pilot? Ultimately ferrying passengers? He should be ok. The industry is very safety conscious and moves extremely slowly. His children, if he decides to have some, may not be if they choose the same career. I would be more concerned about smaller planes or freighters. This is provided that this is something that he actually loves to do. Because otherwise not sleeping at home and weird hours will get old really quick. If he loves aviation you probably can't talk him out of it :)
  - ngngngng 6y ago
    He's doing the standard "change your mind every couple semesters" thing that most 20 year olds seem to do. Just a few months ago I was teaching him programming, now he's decided becoming a pilot is the thing to do.
- doodles526 6y ago
  It highly depends on what he wants to do in aviation and his motivations for working as a pilot. I can give my perspective as someone who had a full-time tech career and started the transition to working as a helicopter pilot several years ago. Some of this has already been stated in other comments - but thought I would add my opinions overall. Signs you should not be a professional pilot: * You're doing it for prestige. We're decades removed from the golden age of aviation. It may be cool to you to be a pilot - but most other folks don't view you as having a dreamy job. Don't be a pilot for how others view you, do it for you. * You're doing it for the money. High paying(>$200k) jobs in airplanes are rare, and reserved almost only for captains at legacy carriers, and some corporate jet pilots. You need A LOT of experience and a lot of luck to get these jobs. And who knows how long these higher salaries will last. Some of the best paying($350k+) jobs in aviation are in cargo - UPS and Fedex - which are likely to be some of the first to automate away the pilot. Helicopter salaries are much much much worse. The highest pay I've ever seen was a heli-pilot with 35 years of experience and 30,000+ hours making $150k piloting a $22M aircraft. Given, he only works 6 months a year for that pay. But still a pretty terrible best-scenario pay rate. * You're an adrenaline junkie who is looking for their next fix. If you want to get your license and go do crazy stunts out in the desert with no people around - be my guest. But you'll be eaten alive in most sectors of commercial aviation without a safety-first mindset. In some areas of aviation, sure, there's some risks. But they should always be calculated risks where the ends fully justify any added risk factor. * You want to spend time at home. Most flying jobs are nomadic. It is hard on families, and isn't for those who are uncomfortable moving frequently and living the hotel life. Most pilots I know have been divorced several times if they've ever found someone who agree to be in a long term relationship with someone who moves so often and is around so little. Signs you could consider being a professional pilot: * You love flying, and nothing will keep you out of the cockpit. This is pretty much the only reason I think anyone should become a professional pilot right now. For many people there's something incredibly special about being in the air. As a hobby, aviation is incredibly expensive(doubly or triply so for helicopters than fixed-wing). So unless you have a career that can support your expensive aviation fix, you may actually be financially better-off flying for a living(as compared with a low/moderate salary job and flying away all your money). Finally, depending on what you want to do in aviation, there isn't always an equivalent option for hobbyist, and you have to go commercial to fly those missions. Personally, I fall into the "I love flying" category. Even though my tech salary would have allowed me to fly small piston helicopters several times a week as a hobby, I wanted to challenge myself by flying more complex missions and aircraft than I could as a hobbyist - wildland firefighting and search+rescue specifically. This year is my first on a fire contract, and I can say without a doubt that for me the time/money/strain on relationships has absolutely been worth it. I love my job, and every day I'm off-site I wish I were working. However, there are some caveats. I'm single and enjoy being so. I seriously doubt I would stay in aviation if I found a long-term partner and/or started a family - the two do not seem compatible to me at all. Also, I still do contracting in tech for additional income. I know I have that as a fallback career if the aviation industry automates away the jobs I enjoy. So I'm not 100% sure if I would have done this without that fallback career plan. With regards to automation in flying, I don't have a crystal ball. The FAA moves slowly. Very slowly. The only "fast" thing I've seen them do is add more regulations to UAV operators when they started becoming a potential danger to manned air-traffic. But I have never seen nor heard them being quick to loosen regulations or certify automation systems(in fact, FAA safety documentation discusses how automation can cause more harm than good when paired with a human operator - to highlight their thoughts on the matter). But I would likely say that your brother will be able to find flying jobs for decades to come. Airlines will be slow to integrate fully automated cockpits due to regulation - and the first crash, I imagine, will likely roll back approvals for many years after(whenever it comes - we can't build perfect systems. And the NTSB would likely blame the system, even if pilots couldn't possibly have resolved the issues themselves). Also, if your brother is interested in any kind of back-country flying, I bet those will be even longer away from automation if they ever see it. Think flying people to rural airstrips in Alaska, flying float planes charters in the San Juans, or bringing supplies to villages in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia. The highly dynamic environments with unimproved strips and water landings would be a non-impossible but more difficult task than typical airports to automate. And the cheap labor available to these missions would likely not justify the additional expense of automation. Speaking of cheap labor - these back-country jobs pay absolutely garbage wages - but I personally know a couple former airline pilots who transitioned to rural flying missions because they were tired of flying a bus with autopilot and wanted to get back to what they considered "real flying". Hope that mini-rant adds some valuable context for you!
Merrill 6y ago
Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first? Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?
- kamel3d 6y ago
  or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to test this technology since they love cutting cost
msla 6y ago
How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse to deal and a human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two engines gone? Multiple engines gone and a really stiff crosswind? How good is it at landing in a blizzard on an icy runway? I know it never happens. Planes never land on the Hudson River, either. There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe as possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that, but what are the current limits of automation?
- thehappypm 6y ago
  Probably the limit is that in the miracle on the Hudson, Sully wouldn’t have had a co-pilot.
- bdonlan 6y ago
  I suspect that the with the current electrical system on airbuses, the emergency electrical configuration wouldn't have enough power to run all those image processing computers at the very least (dual engine failure would cause this). However that could be resolved with additional battery capacity. A more likely cause of automation failure would be failure or disagreement in the various sensors on the plane. These are typically triple redundant, but there have been cases where, for example, all the pitot tubes ice over and airspeed indications are lost. There are ways to deal with this but they're not currently programmed into the autopilot. Other possible causes include failure of major flight controls requiring workarounds - eg, dealing with a stuck rudder with deliberate asymmetric thrust. That being said flight control issues can probably be dealt with, if necessary. The real problem is with dealing with ambiguous situations where you have to weigh risks. Consider: your radios are out. Per standard procedure you should proceed on your flight plan to the final fix and hold until your scheduled arrival time. However, fuel consumption is high - you're not sure, but you might have a slow fuel leak, and your destination has dicey weather. Do you divert without clearance or risk that you might be marginal on fuel at your scheduled arrival time?
- phire 6y ago
  Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible. The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully understand the complete autopilot algorithm and understand exactly how it should act in any situation. Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are designed to disconnect when they detect something weird. They don't even understand aerodynamics. I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually designed a fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI techniques (so no machine learning or neural networks; Just decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models and predictions) then it could handle a wide range of emergencies. It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out emergencies just fine, and should even be able to land in the Hudson River or anywhere else it has detailed maps. These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer of a fully autonomous plane would know about and test their software against in simulations. The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have issues are avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency landings in areas with substandard mapping and unexpected aerodynamic failures (beyond what their adaptive aerodynamic model can handle)
fataliss 6y ago
Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive corporations like Boeing and Airbus : /
- LifeLiverTransp 6y ago
  To be honest, autonomous cars have me more worried.Planes are rare a few dices thrown once a year. Cars are a whole casino, playing each day.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  You could have stopped at "done".
- boramalper 6y ago
  > Boeing and Airbus I wouldn’t even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing; they are using formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has outsourced its software to $9-an-hour engineers[1]. [0]: https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun intended) before self-driving cars.
- kbenson 6y ago
  It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been mostly automated for a while now. The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on almost entirely empty freeways and highways, and on designated, fairly uniform and well marked parking lots directly off those freeways. Self driving cars can already do all that fairly well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal with (pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage, lots of other cars, etc) that make self driving cars hard.
  - mmcconnell1618 6y ago
    Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so not only is there more space, but it is relatively easy to check for potential conflicts before flights leave the ground.
    - asdfadsfgfdda 6y ago
      Flight plans are filed in advance, but a flight plan is just a plan. It's an impossible task to predict where an airplane will fly in advance, there are so many variables involved. Just some of the many reasons a flight will vary from flight plan: -Avoiding convective build up (thunderstorm) -Avoiding turbulence for passenger comfort (changing altitude) -Unexpectedly high headwinds (changing altitude) -A cold front causes winds to shift, so the runways in use change -Low clouds limits arrival/departure rate, so holding is needed -Snow removal from runways/taxiways
- carabiner 6y ago
  We have these with Predator drones etc. These were mature at the time when the DARPA Grand Challenge had robot cars crashing in the desert.
mehrdadn 6y ago
Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will still need to be there to take over during an emergency, so it won't save on pilot costs, right? And they can already lay back and relax during most of the flight so it won't really help with fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take off with less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error during phases where such autopilot could've been running a source of accidents in practice?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required number of pilots from 2 to 1 for some flights.
  - kylec 6y ago
    Or 0, eventually
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Sure, but you get a huge amount of the labor cost reduction just by going from 2 to 1 and probably have a much easier time justifying it. Labor costs are already a pretty small part of air freight costs, for instance, so proportionally, the improvement in total costs (in both absolute and relative-to-total terms) from going to 1 from 2 pilots is about the same as going to 0 from 1. EDIT: Just to illustrate... a 777 Freighter can fly a 5000 mile route at like 500 miles per hour carrying about 100tons of freight, I think in one shift so you only need a pilot and copilot. That’s 50,000 ton-miles per hour. Air freight revenue is about $1.40 per ton-mile, so in terms of revenue, you’re talking $70,000 per hour. Pilot and co-pilot wages are much lower per flight hour than you’d imagine, around $20-50/hour, so combined, they both contribute about $70 in direct labor costs per hour, so already just on thousandth, or 0.1%, of the revenue from the freight they’re carrying. Even eliminating the pilots doesn’t reduce costs much! Much bigger difference for smaller and slower regional air freight routes.
  - numpad0 6y ago
lnsru 6y ago
Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they got obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and bad weather flights.
- alacombe 6y ago
  Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile objects on the road ?
Upvoter33 6y ago
I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long ago... ? [sorry, should have done more googling: https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatically https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica... seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no auto-takeoff]
- Avicebron 6y ago
  It has been, but there is still a strong incentive to have a human in semi-control for contingencies
  - outworlder 6y ago
    Not only that, but it's free training. This helps keep pilots sharp and current. If autoland fails it could be that there's something else going wrong with the aircraft(ranging from a faulty sensor to something more serious). Now you have a pilot with degraded proficiency trying to land in an unusual condition. This impairs safety.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  I believe the A320 has some auto land capability. Not a pilot, so don't know the details, but based on Youtube, it appears the pilot has to do some configuration on approach (line up the plane to some extent, set engines appropriately, etc).
- cachvico 6y ago
  Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system It does require hardware on the runway though.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    This is for landing without visual contact with the runway (i.e. instrument flight conditions), typically the pilot is still controlling the aircraft, and looking at an instrument that tells him/her how to adjust the controls, although many aircraft can land automatically using these same systems.
Joeri 6y ago
I wouldn’t trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if they’ve barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I’m worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.
- gibsonhouse 6y ago
  simulators might be good enough to train for most situations, maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying the whole time.
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can only be trained for in a simulator. The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      (sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        You can't induce emergencies in actual passenger aircraft for the purpose of training. So your only option is a good simulator.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  There's some interesting articles about the role of automation in the Air France 447 disaster: Short article: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-shows-the-unlikely-but-catastrophic-consequences-of-automation https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-sho... Much longer article, but 100% worth the read if you have time: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...
darren0 6y ago
I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.
- irrational 6y ago
  I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.
- bsder 6y ago
  The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into LAX probably somewhere around 2000. We were flying through a really big storm front forever. Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours. Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I had ever experienced. Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down in that weather on autoland." Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have turned that on 2 hours earlier?" Pilots are done.
- boogies 6y ago
  The article mentions that. “For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by helping reduce workload. … "For autonomous technologies to improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance, pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in a press release.”
- newsclues 6y ago
  Is that logical? What are the environmental and economic costs of an automated cargo ship going down vs airliner (cargo for comparison)? It’s hundreds of millions dollars and fuel.
  - deleted 6y ago
edmundhuber 6y ago
Link to Airbus's press release: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/airbus-concludes-attol-with-fully-autonomous-flight-tests.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/ai... More info here: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-mobility.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-mobi... Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight. Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Drivers take almost all information they need for driving from looking through the windows, whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials. That difference alone makes flying inherently more automatable. Automated driving adds a lot of sensing requirements over manual driving, but in flying the manual way already requires most of the sensing you'd need for automation.
    - asdfadsfgfdda 6y ago
      The act of controlling a plane can be done entirely by looking at gauges, but that's not the only thing a pilot does. Pilots are also interfacing with ATC, flight attendants, dispatch, maintenance, and passengers. Even if you replace these interfaces with a computer usable format, you still need someone with judgment and responsibility for the flight. Pilots exercise their judgment over the information they receive from these other sources, and to coordinate these resources for efficient, safe flight. It's a huge challenge to replace all of this with a system.
plumsempy 6y ago
no
vemv 6y ago
This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen. We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one-trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system. Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.
- baron816 6y ago
  I think I might trust an “AI” pilot more than a human one. Human pilots often fail to respond to unexpected conditions as well (see Air France Flight 447). Pilots have also gone nuts and crashed the plane intentionally (see Germanwings Flight 9525). Something like this should at least allow airlines to use just one human pilot, who I doubt would do much 99% of the time. If there’s something that the computer can’t handle, the human could take over.
  - mmcconnell1618 6y ago
    It's relatively easy to get the stats of fatal accidents that did happen, but how difficult is it to get the stats of accidents prevented by human pilots? Both are relevant to evaluating the impact of a 100% AI pilot. I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records of incidents but I also suspect there could be many unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their career. Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify? How is this verified?
- chewbaxxa 6y ago
  So was the person who dubbed statistics ML
- anchpop 6y ago
  from edmundhuber: > Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.
nabla9 6y ago
Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money. Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get certification to fly in drone mode between remote airfields at first. A350 freighter seems to be under consideration. https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter-program/ https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter...
cachvico 6y ago
And when there's zero visibility? ILS presumably - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way?
- outworlder 6y ago
  > So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way? There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing for decades and can be used by many aircraft today (from both Boeing and Airbus) All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III approach if it is available and let the old and boring autopilot do its thing. Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do what pilots already do: divert to an alternate airport. https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatically https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica...
  - nabla9 6y ago
    In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing manoeuvres but the pilot is still in control. Complete zero visibility landing is not allowed. Pilot needs to see something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind limits, almost no turbulence is not allowed and so on.
    - charlesdenault 6y ago
      That's not entirely true. Cat IIIc is "zero zero" autoland capable with no decision height required.
qppo 6y ago
Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but only on the ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between flights that need corrections as problems occur. Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust communications infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet but it's fun to imagine. I trust machines more than people, unless they're made by Boeing.
- pak9rabid 6y ago
  I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the deadzone issue?
  - qppo 6y ago
    We already have satellite communications for media and voice, but iirc they have fairly limited bandwidth constraints. I think figuring out a way to get the flight recorder data to operators in realtime would be the first problem to solve, and I don't think it's been done yet for commercial flights. There was a startup around like 5-6 years ago (gone now, can't find any info on them, their name was "Flamingo" something or other) that had a proof of concept solution but they burned out quickly.
    - phantom784 6y ago
      Latency is probably the bigger issue for aircraft, but Starlink could help there as well.
  - koatuok 6y ago
    Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at 500 mph? I had assumed that it only worked with a stationary transceiver.
    - elcritch 6y ago
      Perhaps not initially, but IIRC, they use "digital" antenna so it should be upgradable to track in real-time. Perhaps even by an OTA update.
irrational 6y ago
How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets, fighters, etc.) is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find people to "take over" from the AI pilot in case of an emergency? I suppose you wouldn't need that many since it's unlikely there will be multiple emergencies concurrently.
PinguTS 6y ago
A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago, that Airbus can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It was about 15 years ago. But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems during take-off and landing, because the pilots don't get practise. But pilots need those practise if they should take over in emergency situations. The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see automated railways and automated airplanes before we see automated cars. PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways system to allow mixed traffic of automated and manual railways. Yeah, I know some of the guys doing the saftey certifcations for this.
- contrarianmop 6y ago
  We already have automated railways - metro trains in copenhagen have been self driving for over a decade now. While I am not personally sure about airplanes, automated trains should become more popular.
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
  > we will see automated railways The future is now: there are automated rail lines in a numbers of cities around the world. Some are relatively old, too. The JFK AirTrain is one such example.
  - PinguTS 6y ago
    Most of the automated railways operate on closed tracks. Many of those even on closed platforms. Here in Germany, my hometown Nuremberg, it runs one of the first underground railways with open platforms and combined with man operated railways. It needs a lot of safety electronics and I know some guys who were responsible for certification after install. (Yeah, I am somehow from the business.) Don't try to compare closed tracks to open tracks. A closed track is more like an elevator.
    - ProZsolt 6y ago
      We have the London DLR
jedisct1 6y ago
But can it serve Tomato juice?
supernova87a 6y ago
Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them in the plane? If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale. That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers. I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You’d still have a cabin-crew, too.
  - joakleaf 6y ago
    You probably don’t need a crew for freight only flights.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    You save the cost of the pilots, and the cockpit (which would reduce the aircraft price and weight significantly, and increase capacity).
- josefrichter 6y ago
  Might be hard to imagine for you now, but could be completely different story in a few years. Basically there’s no reason to believe people will be always more reliable than machines.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Avicebron 6y ago
I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.
mhh__ 6y ago
Would you get on a plane with no pilot?
- rglover 6y ago
  Hell no. At least have qualified pilots who want discounted travel on board (being available for emergency take over pays for their flight—a new pilot takes over at their destination).
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    There won't be enough qualified pilots if most flights are autonomous.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      So passengers have to demonstrate a successful landing in Microsoft Flight Simulator if they want to get a discount ;-)
- lightgreen 6y ago
  Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a plane without a pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?
  - vkou 6y ago
    Would you choose it if it were 0.5% cheaper? Keep in mind that when you have a human pilot on board, they ultimately make all decisions about safety. And they have skin in the game. They are the ones who push back if they do not feel confident in weather conditions, or in the mechanical state of the aircraft to fly it. Would you prefer that those decisions be made by beancounters in a corporate office, who are more concerned about not having to refund people's tickets, than getting the plane safely from one destination to the other? Compare the safety-obsession culture of commercial flight, versus, say surgeons - who, as a profession, aggressively push back on even trivial safety improvements - like checklists. If the surgeon were killed every time they made a serious surgical mistake, you'd probably see a much better safety culture in that profession.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
What's the error rate of pilots compared to computers? If we, today, completely eliminated all human pilots for all flights on all aircraft and replaced them with the best automated systems available in one fell swoop would deaths increase or decrease? I'm sure there would be incidents where "A simple software bug killed 200 people today". I'm also sure that bug can be fixed, and there are also "dumb human error killed 200 people today". I don't know if any amount of human skill, trained for an entire human lifetime, using the best pedagogical methods, with infinite resources devoted to training, can beat a computer in the long run. Navy jets have auto-takeoff, tons of passenger planes have auto landing (which, apparently isn't as smooth as human landing), and planes spend most of their time on autopilot already. I think some military UAVs can do all or most of this stuff already. What are their accident rates compared to commercial airlines?
ggm 6y ago
Whats the publicly available data on the crash rate of autonomous drones in the military, unrelated to targeted attacks. It is the best indication, noting that they fly in adverse weather and uncertain routes with possibly less visibility to fall-back systems, and on long-delay operators. I would expect domestic autonomous flying to incur at least comparable rates of failure to the military for routine operations with root causes in weather, or systems problems, given the likely sharing of weather, and IT systems behind autonomous vehicles. It would be interesting to see take off, cruise and landing distinctly to understand their risk profiles. There is also the public perception problem: We tolerate a level of crashes in air transport, predicated on a belief the system is self-correcting. the 737 MAX was withdrawn from service. The lithium battery problem in the 787 was identified. The square windows in the Comet were identified as a root cause. Will we tolerate a 0.0000001% effective crash risk rate, from autonomous vehicles with 400+ passengers?
dreamcompiler 6y ago
Old pilot joke: "The airplanes of the future will have a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot's job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."
jb775 6y ago
The hard sell here will be convincing passengers it's safe enough. Not sure if I'd be willing to fly on a pilot-less flight even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  > convincing passengers it's safe enough This is a pretty tough problem, different than self-driving cars because people see driving as something easy, but flying is seen as hard (just look at the difference in training and salary between a bus driver and a commercial pilot). Trained pilots/meat-computers will soon be worse than an automated system 99.99% of the time, but in those strange 0.01% corner cases the meat-computer really shines. There are several cases like Flight 214 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214) that computers would have helped, but there's still a few "Miracle on the Hudson" that any computer short of a general AI would have botched (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549). It will take a lot of work to get to where people will accept an automated flight without a safety pilot on board, and if you have to pay a safety pilot to ride along, you aren't saving as much money. > even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me HA! Like that will happen. The only time that airlines "pass on cost savings" to the customer is when a low cost carrier starts offering service for the same route.
- l0b0 6y ago
  There will probably be something like hundreds of flights in unpopulated areas, then overseas freight, then inland freight, then passengers.
- wuunderbar 6y ago
  $250,000 pilot cost per year (including their benefits and training, correct me if I'm too low) 261 working days 1 long-haul flight a day 300 seats in a 777 (disregarding class) Comes out to ~$7 cost savings for two pilots per flight. Doesn't seem that impressive for a long-haul unless I'm missing something.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Just introduce it on a low cost airline, where the passengers literally don't care about a single other thing than price.
jb775 6y ago
I feel like this could backfire from a marketing perspective. Imagine an airline integrating pilot-less flights, then a competitor starts using the slogan "We use real pilots, because we care more about your safety than increasing profits".
galaxyLogic 6y ago
What about the air-hostesses?
gpmcadam 6y ago
Part of me wonders, in the future, how we'll view the attempts to automate pilots and drivers. It feels like a natural step now in the technology but perhaps it'll be viewed like trying to make a robot ride a horse instead of looking to invent the car. I wonder what the next order-of-magnitude leap for transport will be. Cheap, fast, safe. Hyperloop maybe? Will we look back at holding on to air and road travel as a bit of a reckless endeavour?
- hencoappel 6y ago
  If you took humans off the road and made the roads suitable for only automated cars it would be so much easier to automate, its only hard because we have to make it drive with the signals/lines and such that humans require rather than just broadcasting things like the traffic signal in an easy way for cars to understand.

332 points by apsec112 6y ago

>"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own" It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is really critical

ngngngng 6y ago

> The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply watched. Talk about training your replacement. My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it.

bdamm 6y ago
You should because it's a terrible career, although really I think most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career into good industries so in the end, no big deal. Let 'er rip and enjoy the view when you get it
- Ancalagon 6y ago
  Why is it considered a terrible career?
  - dr-detroit 6y ago
    $20,000-$40,000 annual salary starting out Most of the coastal elites on hackernews spend more than that annually on apps for their iWatch
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - refurb 6y ago
      From what I've read on r/aviation, that was true 10-15 years ago, but not last year. The airline industry goes through cycles of "too many damn pilots" to "oh my god we need more pilots". I was reading some smaller airlines were will to train you to get your type rating and starting pay of $60-70k.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance, doing the same thing a million times, dead-man’s shoes, having to work against a schedule, living out of corporate hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules, shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to like about it? Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union game talk about achieving the same pay an undergraduate intern gets in a tech company.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      While there's doubtless something to what you say, I don't believe there are that many undergrad interns getting the pay of a senior pilot. You're thinking of an extremely select subset of tech companies.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet against the average working pilot earning less than the average tech intern either.
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Tech salaries aren't a reasonable baseline. It's an outlier.
  - gipp 6y ago
    Spend ~4/7 of your life in mediocre hotels far from home, work itself consists of sitting in a cramped box with even less to do than than the passengers on the flight, money can be good but not career-goals good... I can see it.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    One reason it's not great is there are a lot of pilot wannabees that are stuck flying small commercial feeder flights, and they don't have much experience and training, and they get paid barely enough to live on. They hope to get on to one of the bigger companies (american, united, etc). The flights a few years ago that iced up in NY state (I think that was where) were sleeping on someone's couch for a few hours only before a flight, and they didn't have much training.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  And what is your evidence that "most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career"? And, what do you consider "good industries"?
bargl 6y ago
I have some friends who love it, some who hate it and some who didn't finish and got a ton of debt. If you decide to be a pilot reach out to real world pilots and ask for advice. I have friends who did years being paid very little at local airports so they could "make it" to the airlines to get paid much better. The biggest thing I observed from my 10+ friends is, being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications. At first you pay for them, then you get paid for them but not much because those people are paying for them, then you get paid a living wage for them because you're flying customers/cargo/etc. My friends who are happiest as pilots either had the government/some other entity pay for their training, or were able to skip ahead in pay by getting directly to airlines.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications Yeap. So if you can fund the initial thousand hours (give or take) you should be ok. If you can't and you don't like small GA aircraft you'll have a miserable time trying to get paid to fly and have enough hours to be considered by airlines.
outworlder 6y ago
> My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it. So he wants to be an airline pilot? Ultimately ferrying passengers? He should be ok. The industry is very safety conscious and moves extremely slowly. His children, if he decides to have some, may not be if they choose the same career. I would be more concerned about smaller planes or freighters. This is provided that this is something that he actually loves to do. Because otherwise not sleeping at home and weird hours will get old really quick. If he loves aviation you probably can't talk him out of it :)
- ngngngng 6y ago
  He's doing the standard "change your mind every couple semesters" thing that most 20 year olds seem to do. Just a few months ago I was teaching him programming, now he's decided becoming a pilot is the thing to do.
doodles526 6y ago
It highly depends on what he wants to do in aviation and his motivations for working as a pilot. I can give my perspective as someone who had a full-time tech career and started the transition to working as a helicopter pilot several years ago. Some of this has already been stated in other comments - but thought I would add my opinions overall. Signs you should not be a professional pilot: * You're doing it for prestige. We're decades removed from the golden age of aviation. It may be cool to you to be a pilot - but most other folks don't view you as having a dreamy job. Don't be a pilot for how others view you, do it for you. * You're doing it for the money. High paying(>$200k) jobs in airplanes are rare, and reserved almost only for captains at legacy carriers, and some corporate jet pilots. You need A LOT of experience and a lot of luck to get these jobs. And who knows how long these higher salaries will last. Some of the best paying($350k+) jobs in aviation are in cargo - UPS and Fedex - which are likely to be some of the first to automate away the pilot. Helicopter salaries are much much much worse. The highest pay I've ever seen was a heli-pilot with 35 years of experience and 30,000+ hours making $150k piloting a $22M aircraft. Given, he only works 6 months a year for that pay. But still a pretty terrible best-scenario pay rate. * You're an adrenaline junkie who is looking for their next fix. If you want to get your license and go do crazy stunts out in the desert with no people around - be my guest. But you'll be eaten alive in most sectors of commercial aviation without a safety-first mindset. In some areas of aviation, sure, there's some risks. But they should always be calculated risks where the ends fully justify any added risk factor. * You want to spend time at home. Most flying jobs are nomadic. It is hard on families, and isn't for those who are uncomfortable moving frequently and living the hotel life. Most pilots I know have been divorced several times if they've ever found someone who agree to be in a long term relationship with someone who moves so often and is around so little. Signs you could consider being a professional pilot: * You love flying, and nothing will keep you out of the cockpit. This is pretty much the only reason I think anyone should become a professional pilot right now. For many people there's something incredibly special about being in the air. As a hobby, aviation is incredibly expensive(doubly or triply so for helicopters than fixed-wing). So unless you have a career that can support your expensive aviation fix, you may actually be financially better-off flying for a living(as compared with a low/moderate salary job and flying away all your money). Finally, depending on what you want to do in aviation, there isn't always an equivalent option for hobbyist, and you have to go commercial to fly those missions. Personally, I fall into the "I love flying" category. Even though my tech salary would have allowed me to fly small piston helicopters several times a week as a hobby, I wanted to challenge myself by flying more complex missions and aircraft than I could as a hobbyist - wildland firefighting and search+rescue specifically. This year is my first on a fire contract, and I can say without a doubt that for me the time/money/strain on relationships has absolutely been worth it. I love my job, and every day I'm off-site I wish I were working. However, there are some caveats. I'm single and enjoy being so. I seriously doubt I would stay in aviation if I found a long-term partner and/or started a family - the two do not seem compatible to me at all. Also, I still do contracting in tech for additional income. I know I have that as a fallback career if the aviation industry automates away the jobs I enjoy. So I'm not 100% sure if I would have done this without that fallback career plan. With regards to automation in flying, I don't have a crystal ball. The FAA moves slowly. Very slowly. The only "fast" thing I've seen them do is add more regulations to UAV operators when they started becoming a potential danger to manned air-traffic. But I have never seen nor heard them being quick to loosen regulations or certify automation systems(in fact, FAA safety documentation discusses how automation can cause more harm than good when paired with a human operator - to highlight their thoughts on the matter). But I would likely say that your brother will be able to find flying jobs for decades to come. Airlines will be slow to integrate fully automated cockpits due to regulation - and the first crash, I imagine, will likely roll back approvals for many years after(whenever it comes - we can't build perfect systems. And the NTSB would likely blame the system, even if pilots couldn't possibly have resolved the issues themselves). Also, if your brother is interested in any kind of back-country flying, I bet those will be even longer away from automation if they ever see it. Think flying people to rural airstrips in Alaska, flying float planes charters in the San Juans, or bringing supplies to villages in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia. The highly dynamic environments with unimproved strips and water landings would be a non-impossible but more difficult task than typical airports to automate. And the cheap labor available to these missions would likely not justify the additional expense of automation. Speaking of cheap labor - these back-country jobs pay absolutely garbage wages - but I personally know a couple former airline pilots who transitioned to rural flying missions because they were tired of flying a bus with autopilot and wanted to get back to what they considered "real flying". Hope that mini-rant adds some valuable context for you!

Merrill 6y ago

Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first? Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?

kamel3d 6y ago
or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to test this technology since they love cutting cost

msla 6y ago

How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse to deal and a human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two engines gone? Multiple engines gone and a really stiff crosswind? How good is it at landing in a blizzard on an icy runway? I know it never happens. Planes never land on the Hudson River, either. There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe as possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that, but what are the current limits of automation?

thehappypm 6y ago
Probably the limit is that in the miracle on the Hudson, Sully wouldn’t have had a co-pilot.
bdonlan 6y ago
I suspect that the with the current electrical system on airbuses, the emergency electrical configuration wouldn't have enough power to run all those image processing computers at the very least (dual engine failure would cause this). However that could be resolved with additional battery capacity. A more likely cause of automation failure would be failure or disagreement in the various sensors on the plane. These are typically triple redundant, but there have been cases where, for example, all the pitot tubes ice over and airspeed indications are lost. There are ways to deal with this but they're not currently programmed into the autopilot. Other possible causes include failure of major flight controls requiring workarounds - eg, dealing with a stuck rudder with deliberate asymmetric thrust. That being said flight control issues can probably be dealt with, if necessary. The real problem is with dealing with ambiguous situations where you have to weigh risks. Consider: your radios are out. Per standard procedure you should proceed on your flight plan to the final fix and hold until your scheduled arrival time. However, fuel consumption is high - you're not sure, but you might have a slow fuel leak, and your destination has dicey weather. Do you divert without clearance or risk that you might be marginal on fuel at your scheduled arrival time?
phire 6y ago
Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible. The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully understand the complete autopilot algorithm and understand exactly how it should act in any situation. Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are designed to disconnect when they detect something weird. They don't even understand aerodynamics. I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually designed a fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI techniques (so no machine learning or neural networks; Just decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models and predictions) then it could handle a wide range of emergencies. It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out emergencies just fine, and should even be able to land in the Hudson River or anywhere else it has detailed maps. These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer of a fully autonomous plane would know about and test their software against in simulations. The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have issues are avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency landings in areas with substandard mapping and unexpected aerodynamic failures (beyond what their adaptive aerodynamic model can handle)

fataliss 6y ago

Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive corporations like Boeing and Airbus : /

LifeLiverTransp 6y ago
To be honest, autonomous cars have me more worried.Planes are rare a few dices thrown once a year. Cars are a whole casino, playing each day.
young_unixer 6y ago
You could have stopped at "done".
boramalper 6y ago
> Boeing and Airbus I wouldn’t even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing; they are using formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has outsourced its software to $9-an-hour engineers[1]. [0]: https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun intended) before self-driving cars.

kbenson 6y ago
It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been mostly automated for a while now. The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on almost entirely empty freeways and highways, and on designated, fairly uniform and well marked parking lots directly off those freeways. Self driving cars can already do all that fairly well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal with (pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage, lots of other cars, etc) that make self driving cars hard.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so not only is there more space, but it is relatively easy to check for potential conflicts before flights leave the ground.
  - asdfadsfgfdda 6y ago
    Flight plans are filed in advance, but a flight plan is just a plan. It's an impossible task to predict where an airplane will fly in advance, there are so many variables involved. Just some of the many reasons a flight will vary from flight plan: -Avoiding convective build up (thunderstorm) -Avoiding turbulence for passenger comfort (changing altitude) -Unexpectedly high headwinds (changing altitude) -A cold front causes winds to shift, so the runways in use change -Low clouds limits arrival/departure rate, so holding is needed -Snow removal from runways/taxiways
carabiner 6y ago
We have these with Predator drones etc. These were mature at the time when the DARPA Grand Challenge had robot cars crashing in the desert.

mehrdadn 6y ago

Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will still need to be there to take over during an emergency, so it won't save on pilot costs, right? And they can already lay back and relax during most of the flight so it won't really help with fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take off with less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error during phases where such autopilot could've been running a source of accidents in practice?

Robotbeat 6y ago
I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required number of pilots from 2 to 1 for some flights.
- kylec 6y ago
  Or 0, eventually
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Sure, but you get a huge amount of the labor cost reduction just by going from 2 to 1 and probably have a much easier time justifying it. Labor costs are already a pretty small part of air freight costs, for instance, so proportionally, the improvement in total costs (in both absolute and relative-to-total terms) from going to 1 from 2 pilots is about the same as going to 0 from 1. EDIT: Just to illustrate... a 777 Freighter can fly a 5000 mile route at like 500 miles per hour carrying about 100tons of freight, I think in one shift so you only need a pilot and copilot. That’s 50,000 ton-miles per hour. Air freight revenue is about $1.40 per ton-mile, so in terms of revenue, you’re talking $70,000 per hour. Pilot and co-pilot wages are much lower per flight hour than you’d imagine, around $20-50/hour, so combined, they both contribute about $70 in direct labor costs per hour, so already just on thousandth, or 0.1%, of the revenue from the freight they’re carrying. Even eliminating the pilots doesn’t reduce costs much! Much bigger difference for smaller and slower regional air freight routes.
- numpad0 6y ago

lnsru 6y ago

Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they got obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and bad weather flights.

alacombe 6y ago
Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile objects on the road ?

Upvoter33 6y ago

I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long ago... ? [sorry, should have done more googling: https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatically https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica... seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no auto-takeoff]

Avicebron 6y ago
It has been, but there is still a strong incentive to have a human in semi-control for contingencies
- outworlder 6y ago
  Not only that, but it's free training. This helps keep pilots sharp and current. If autoland fails it could be that there's something else going wrong with the aircraft(ranging from a faulty sensor to something more serious). Now you have a pilot with degraded proficiency trying to land in an unusual condition. This impairs safety.
alistairSH 6y ago
I believe the A320 has some auto land capability. Not a pilot, so don't know the details, but based on Youtube, it appears the pilot has to do some configuration on approach (line up the plane to some extent, set engines appropriately, etc).
cachvico 6y ago
Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system It does require hardware on the runway though.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  This is for landing without visual contact with the runway (i.e. instrument flight conditions), typically the pilot is still controlling the aircraft, and looking at an instrument that tells him/her how to adjust the controls, although many aircraft can land automatically using these same systems.

Joeri 6y ago

I wouldn’t trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if they’ve barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I’m worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.

gibsonhouse 6y ago
simulators might be good enough to train for most situations, maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying the whole time.
- Jabbles 6y ago
  The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can only be trained for in a simulator. The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    (sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      You can't induce emergencies in actual passenger aircraft for the purpose of training. So your only option is a good simulator.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
There's some interesting articles about the role of automation in the Air France 447 disaster: Short article: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-shows-the-unlikely-but-catastrophic-consequences-of-automation https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-sho... Much longer article, but 100% worth the read if you have time: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

darren0 6y ago

I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.

irrational 6y ago
I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.
bsder 6y ago
The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into LAX probably somewhere around 2000. We were flying through a really big storm front forever. Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours. Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I had ever experienced. Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down in that weather on autoland." Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have turned that on 2 hours earlier?" Pilots are done.
boogies 6y ago
The article mentions that. “For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by helping reduce workload. … "For autonomous technologies to improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance, pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in a press release.”
newsclues 6y ago
Is that logical? What are the environmental and economic costs of an automated cargo ship going down vs airliner (cargo for comparison)? It’s hundreds of millions dollars and fuel.
- deleted 6y ago

edmundhuber 6y ago

Link to Airbus's press release: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/airbus-concludes-attol-with-fully-autonomous-flight-tests.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/ai... More info here: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-mobility.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-mobi... Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight. Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Drivers take almost all information they need for driving from looking through the windows, whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials. That difference alone makes flying inherently more automatable. Automated driving adds a lot of sensing requirements over manual driving, but in flying the manual way already requires most of the sensing you'd need for automation.
  - asdfadsfgfdda 6y ago
    The act of controlling a plane can be done entirely by looking at gauges, but that's not the only thing a pilot does. Pilots are also interfacing with ATC, flight attendants, dispatch, maintenance, and passengers. Even if you replace these interfaces with a computer usable format, you still need someone with judgment and responsibility for the flight. Pilots exercise their judgment over the information they receive from these other sources, and to coordinate these resources for efficient, safe flight. It's a huge challenge to replace all of this with a system.

plumsempy 6y ago

vemv 6y ago

This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen. We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one-trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system. Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.

baron816 6y ago
I think I might trust an “AI” pilot more than a human one. Human pilots often fail to respond to unexpected conditions as well (see Air France Flight 447). Pilots have also gone nuts and crashed the plane intentionally (see Germanwings Flight 9525). Something like this should at least allow airlines to use just one human pilot, who I doubt would do much 99% of the time. If there’s something that the computer can’t handle, the human could take over.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  It's relatively easy to get the stats of fatal accidents that did happen, but how difficult is it to get the stats of accidents prevented by human pilots? Both are relevant to evaluating the impact of a 100% AI pilot. I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records of incidents but I also suspect there could be many unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their career. Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify? How is this verified?
chewbaxxa 6y ago
So was the person who dubbed statistics ML
anchpop 6y ago
from edmundhuber: > Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.

nabla9 6y ago

Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money. Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get certification to fly in drone mode between remote airfields at first. A350 freighter seems to be under consideration. https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter-program/ https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter...

cachvico 6y ago

And when there's zero visibility? ILS presumably - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way?

outworlder 6y ago
> So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way? There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing for decades and can be used by many aircraft today (from both Boeing and Airbus) All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III approach if it is available and let the old and boring autopilot do its thing. Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do what pilots already do: divert to an alternate airport. https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatically https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica...
- nabla9 6y ago
  In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing manoeuvres but the pilot is still in control. Complete zero visibility landing is not allowed. Pilot needs to see something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind limits, almost no turbulence is not allowed and so on.
  - charlesdenault 6y ago
    That's not entirely true. Cat IIIc is "zero zero" autoland capable with no decision height required.

qppo 6y ago

Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but only on the ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between flights that need corrections as problems occur. Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust communications infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet but it's fun to imagine. I trust machines more than people, unless they're made by Boeing.

pak9rabid 6y ago
I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the deadzone issue?
- qppo 6y ago
  We already have satellite communications for media and voice, but iirc they have fairly limited bandwidth constraints. I think figuring out a way to get the flight recorder data to operators in realtime would be the first problem to solve, and I don't think it's been done yet for commercial flights. There was a startup around like 5-6 years ago (gone now, can't find any info on them, their name was "Flamingo" something or other) that had a proof of concept solution but they burned out quickly.
  - phantom784 6y ago
    Latency is probably the bigger issue for aircraft, but Starlink could help there as well.
- koatuok 6y ago
  Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at 500 mph? I had assumed that it only worked with a stationary transceiver.
  - elcritch 6y ago
    Perhaps not initially, but IIRC, they use "digital" antenna so it should be upgradable to track in real-time. Perhaps even by an OTA update.

irrational 6y ago

How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets, fighters, etc.) is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find people to "take over" from the AI pilot in case of an emergency? I suppose you wouldn't need that many since it's unlikely there will be multiple emergencies concurrently.

PinguTS 6y ago

A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago, that Airbus can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It was about 15 years ago. But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems during take-off and landing, because the pilots don't get practise. But pilots need those practise if they should take over in emergency situations. The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see automated railways and automated airplanes before we see automated cars. PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways system to allow mixed traffic of automated and manual railways. Yeah, I know some of the guys doing the saftey certifcations for this.

contrarianmop 6y ago
We already have automated railways - metro trains in copenhagen have been self driving for over a decade now. While I am not personally sure about airplanes, automated trains should become more popular.
Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
> we will see automated railways The future is now: there are automated rail lines in a numbers of cities around the world. Some are relatively old, too. The JFK AirTrain is one such example.
- PinguTS 6y ago
  Most of the automated railways operate on closed tracks. Many of those even on closed platforms. Here in Germany, my hometown Nuremberg, it runs one of the first underground railways with open platforms and combined with man operated railways. It needs a lot of safety electronics and I know some guys who were responsible for certification after install. (Yeah, I am somehow from the business.) Don't try to compare closed tracks to open tracks. A closed track is more like an elevator.
  - ProZsolt 6y ago
    We have the London DLR

jedisct1 6y ago

But can it serve Tomato juice?

supernova87a 6y ago

Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them in the plane? If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale. That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers. I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You’d still have a cabin-crew, too.
- joakleaf 6y ago
  You probably don’t need a crew for freight only flights.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  You save the cost of the pilots, and the cockpit (which would reduce the aircraft price and weight significantly, and increase capacity).
josefrichter 6y ago
Might be hard to imagine for you now, but could be completely different story in a few years. Basically there’s no reason to believe people will be always more reliable than machines.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Avicebron 6y ago

I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.

mhh__ 6y ago

Would you get on a plane with no pilot?

rglover 6y ago
Hell no. At least have qualified pilots who want discounted travel on board (being available for emergency take over pays for their flight—a new pilot takes over at their destination).
- lightgreen 6y ago
  There won't be enough qualified pilots if most flights are autonomous.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    So passengers have to demonstrate a successful landing in Microsoft Flight Simulator if they want to get a discount ;-)
lightgreen 6y ago
Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a plane without a pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?
- vkou 6y ago
  Would you choose it if it were 0.5% cheaper? Keep in mind that when you have a human pilot on board, they ultimately make all decisions about safety. And they have skin in the game. They are the ones who push back if they do not feel confident in weather conditions, or in the mechanical state of the aircraft to fly it. Would you prefer that those decisions be made by beancounters in a corporate office, who are more concerned about not having to refund people's tickets, than getting the plane safely from one destination to the other? Compare the safety-obsession culture of commercial flight, versus, say surgeons - who, as a profession, aggressively push back on even trivial safety improvements - like checklists. If the surgeon were killed every time they made a serious surgical mistake, you'd probably see a much better safety culture in that profession.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

What's the error rate of pilots compared to computers? If we, today, completely eliminated all human pilots for all flights on all aircraft and replaced them with the best automated systems available in one fell swoop would deaths increase or decrease? I'm sure there would be incidents where "A simple software bug killed 200 people today". I'm also sure that bug can be fixed, and there are also "dumb human error killed 200 people today". I don't know if any amount of human skill, trained for an entire human lifetime, using the best pedagogical methods, with infinite resources devoted to training, can beat a computer in the long run. Navy jets have auto-takeoff, tons of passenger planes have auto landing (which, apparently isn't as smooth as human landing), and planes spend most of their time on autopilot already. I think some military UAVs can do all or most of this stuff already. What are their accident rates compared to commercial airlines?

ggm 6y ago

Whats the publicly available data on the crash rate of autonomous drones in the military, unrelated to targeted attacks. It is the best indication, noting that they fly in adverse weather and uncertain routes with possibly less visibility to fall-back systems, and on long-delay operators. I would expect domestic autonomous flying to incur at least comparable rates of failure to the military for routine operations with root causes in weather, or systems problems, given the likely sharing of weather, and IT systems behind autonomous vehicles. It would be interesting to see take off, cruise and landing distinctly to understand their risk profiles. There is also the public perception problem: We tolerate a level of crashes in air transport, predicated on a belief the system is self-correcting. the 737 MAX was withdrawn from service. The lithium battery problem in the 787 was identified. The square windows in the Comet were identified as a root cause. Will we tolerate a 0.0000001% effective crash risk rate, from autonomous vehicles with 400+ passengers?

dreamcompiler 6y ago

Old pilot joke: "The airplanes of the future will have a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot's job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."

jb775 6y ago

The hard sell here will be convincing passengers it's safe enough. Not sure if I'd be willing to fly on a pilot-less flight even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me.

parsimo2010 6y ago
> convincing passengers it's safe enough This is a pretty tough problem, different than self-driving cars because people see driving as something easy, but flying is seen as hard (just look at the difference in training and salary between a bus driver and a commercial pilot). Trained pilots/meat-computers will soon be worse than an automated system 99.99% of the time, but in those strange 0.01% corner cases the meat-computer really shines. There are several cases like Flight 214 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214) that computers would have helped, but there's still a few "Miracle on the Hudson" that any computer short of a general AI would have botched (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549). It will take a lot of work to get to where people will accept an automated flight without a safety pilot on board, and if you have to pay a safety pilot to ride along, you aren't saving as much money. > even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me HA! Like that will happen. The only time that airlines "pass on cost savings" to the customer is when a low cost carrier starts offering service for the same route.
l0b0 6y ago
There will probably be something like hundreds of flights in unpopulated areas, then overseas freight, then inland freight, then passengers.
wuunderbar 6y ago
$250,000 pilot cost per year (including their benefits and training, correct me if I'm too low) 261 working days 1 long-haul flight a day 300 seats in a 777 (disregarding class) Comes out to ~$7 cost savings for two pilots per flight. Doesn't seem that impressive for a long-haul unless I'm missing something.
hobofan 6y ago
Just introduce it on a low cost airline, where the passengers literally don't care about a single other thing than price.

jb775 6y ago

I feel like this could backfire from a marketing perspective. Imagine an airline integrating pilot-less flights, then a competitor starts using the slogan "We use real pilots, because we care more about your safety than increasing profits".

galaxyLogic 6y ago

What about the air-hostesses?

gpmcadam 6y ago

Part of me wonders, in the future, how we'll view the attempts to automate pilots and drivers. It feels like a natural step now in the technology but perhaps it'll be viewed like trying to make a robot ride a horse instead of looking to invent the car. I wonder what the next order-of-magnitude leap for transport will be. Cheap, fast, safe. Hyperloop maybe? Will we look back at holding on to air and road travel as a bit of a reckless endeavour?

hencoappel 6y ago
If you took humans off the road and made the roads suitable for only automated cars it would be so much easier to automate, its only hard because we have to make it drive with the signals/lines and such that humans require rather than just broadcasting things like the traffic signal in an easy way for cars to understand.