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Frankly the tech for autonomous aviation has been around for a while now. I expect even strong crosswind landings will soon be better handled by a computer than

Frankly the tech for autonomous aviation has been around for a while now. I expect even strong crosswind landings will soon be better handled by a computer than a pilot. But then here’s the problem... Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. When you’re driving a car you usually follow traffic rules and stop lights to get to your destination safely. In an airplane there’s constant communication and things change frequently based on weather, traffic, emergencies, etc. I can’t count the number of times ATC has repeated back an incorrect call sign. As a human we know it was probably meant for us and call back to confirm. Would a computer do that? Even if we used datalink communications then ATC would now have a much higher burden. Also human pilots would lose the situational awareness of hearing instructions for other aircraft on frequency. Then there’s the question of— in an emergency situation is the computer going to be able to make the right judgement calls? What if its sensors are iced over/inop? All in all, while technologically I feel this could have been pulled off yesterday, I doubt we will see fully autonomous aircraft operating long routes in controlled airspace anytime soon.

liability 6y ago
Along these lines, would an autopilot ever think of landing in the Hudson? (Particularly if it hadn't been done before?)
- java-man 6y ago
  One side benefit of using robotic planes (in theory) is that the fleet can be OTA'd to include emergency water landings, once the models are updated.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Devil's advocate: Would a human pilot be skilled and lucky enough to pull this off a second time?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    IMO, the critical thing the human crew did in US1549 was the decision to take the Hudson; once they decided that, most crews could pull off the execution of that decision. (Then the presence/absence of boat traffic comes down to luck.)
    - outworlder 6y ago
      > once they decided that, most crews could pull off the execution of that decision That's not correct. Ditching is very hard. Mess up your angle or sink rate or roll even slightly and you'll be in pieces. Same if the water doesn't cooperate. One interesting thing is that it happened with an Airbus. The flight computers actually modified Sully's inputs on pitch by about 2 degrees, which ensured a softer splashdown than what Sully was commanding. But that was a very subtle adjustment. Sully was an experienced pilot, with Glider training too.
  - generatorguy 6y ago
    Yes. The aviation system produced the human pilot who was able to transfer their skills and experience from all previous landings to this new unusual one. I do believe another equally as well trained pilot would have been able to pull it off as well. What would a computer program have done?
    - unionemployee 6y ago
      Perhaps pilots of previous generations could do this but, having trained numerous pilots for international airlines, as well as pilots for "fee-for-departure" (regional) airlines in the US, I wonder how many crews are up there that could competently handle most catastrophic events. Though I didn't train him directly, the pilot who crashed the Atlas 767 was pushed through the training program I worked for. Described as a "train wreck" in articles, his ability level was characteristic of others I trained (which I regret). Major US carriers do well screening their pilots but, at lower tiers of US aviation employment, I wonder if more automation would be the safer choice.
- foxdev 6y ago
  Pilots train for water landings. Why wouldn't an automated system get the same training?
  - liability 6y ago
    Human pilots are trained in how to ditch, but the decision to ditch in that scenario was, as far as I'm aware, an instance of creative problem solving.
  - mopsi 6y ago
    Before Hudson, the idea of a water landing looked like this: https://youtu.be/RM7zMW8WVYU?t=19 https://youtu.be/RM7zMW8WVYU?t=19 It was not considered a serious option.
- loeg 6y ago
  Taking a step back, do we want autopilots flying over a dense population center like NYC?
treis 6y ago
>Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results That describes humans as well.
- java-man 6y ago
  Depending on the circumstances, a robotic system might offer a better response than the humans: it does not have emotions. If anything, robotic systems might be more predictable.
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    Automated cars have decidedly NOT been predictable in their failure modes
godelski 6y ago
It's not the mistakes that matter, it's the proportion. Pareto says most cases should be ordinary, so looks like we got that covered. The question is given x amount of flight hours under likely ranges of events, who does better and by how much. If the human can perform better in niche situations but not better in ordinary then that may lead to an overall decrease in crashes or loss of cargo (the metrics we actually care about). If the human only performs slightly better, well it makes sense to switch to autonomous because humans are expensive, especially when things go wrong. The point is that no one expects the machine to be perfect. You can get caught up in the "well it can't handle x well" all day, but that's missing the forest for the trees. A robot isn't going to get frustrated if you only fly it on VFR days and ground it for 20 hours in Little Rock because weather changed.
GhostVII 6y ago
I think the best case scenario is to have an autonomous system that only steps in when the human pilot is doing something wrong. Then the pilots stay well-trained, while getting the benefits of autopilot. You could then manually give autopilot control for short periods in times when it is too dangerous for human pilots, ex. windy dark landings.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  This has sort of been tried before for some time with occasional disastrous results. When the pilot was trying to do one thing to save the aircraft and the autonomous system was trying to do another, crashes have resulted. It's likely that either one would have been ok on their own, but the combination can be bad. I know the rebuttal to this is "override the pilot" but it's really not so simple. Sometimes the pilot has switched off part but not all of an autopilot system, and it makes sense to maintain that capability. It's a very difficult problem to solve.
  - g_p 6y ago
    I believe this is speculated to have happened with an Airbus doing a low pass or touch-and-go at an airshow. The aircraft seemed to believe it was landing, the captain was requesting TOGA thrust. Airbus auto throttle is a nice idea when it works (once you understand it), but there's certainly something uncanny about the idea of not having direct control of the primary and secondary flight controls. If I was coming in with one engine out, the last thing I'd want is the aircraft trying to out-think me and tell me what's right, or decide I'm at risk of stalling (2 feet above the runway), and apply power (which with only one engine available would risk skewing the landing).
- karmakaze 6y ago
  This reads like 737-Max MCAS. Who/what decides that 'the pilot is doing something wrong'?
- numpad0 6y ago
  Well there’s an airplane manufacturer in Toulouse, France, named Airbus...
sargun 6y ago
So, NASA, is in the process of working on some of this. They’re trying to come up with a new ATC model which will work better for drones / eVTOL air taxis / etc. Some of the ideas are around “carving” out corridors, where you would be able to fly, and this corridor could be reasonably large (across multiple towers today). The other interesting thing is hierarchical ATC automation. So, normal ATC would still exist, but they would interact with a tier of controllers who are responsible for them interacting with UAVs. A lot of this apparently came from the idea that eVTOL is the future, and we will all be commuting to work in an electric airplane. See: https://www.nasa.gov/simlabs/atc https://www.nasa.gov/simlabs/atc
- aabnuy 6y ago
  Ugh, so a state agency is working on getting people unemployed. But the jobs of the bureaucrats will be safe.
- delfinom 6y ago
  I await our future where nobody will go outdoors anymore because all you will hear is vuvuzelas / drones.
Shivetya 6y ago
Well this is where I think autonomous planes would be superior. First off they could make determinations on their own, the old have three or more computers making decisions and voting, as well as be constantly updating and receiving from ground stations. This can be vital in a situation where the computer decides it no longer trusts its own inputs. It all comes down to this, it won't be solved quickly, but with proper flight routing and use of specialized airports it can all be resolved without endangering the public. For the most part planes are not falling out of the sky on a regular basis but it would be interesting to see statistics on the number of registered events per miles flown. Human ATC could still be involved, the words used for events can be very specific and the system can know how to respond to all of this. Automated flights would have special call signs and even may end up handled by assigned ATC to keep them separate.
spaceflunky 6y ago
Autopilots also rely on the instruments working perfectly. A human can usually safely land a plane even when all the instruments (and even the engines) fail.
tpurves 6y ago
Tech for automating ATC has been available for decades. The biggest resistance has come from the major US airlines, and associated regulatory capture. Automating ATC would significantly increase efficiency and landing slots. Increasing landing slots at major US airlines would create more competition for the majors. Monopolizing landing slots helps majors suppress competition on key routes and hubs. Wonder if these dynamics are moot now however post covid...
xoa 6y ago
>Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. [...] All in all, while technologically I feel this could have been pulled off yesterday, I doubt we will see fully autonomous aircraft operating long routes in controlled airspace anytime soon. You're correct that edge cases are tricky, but you've made the mistake of forgetting the other possible half of dealing with them that full robotics makes possible: simply sufficiently reduce the cost of edge failure. An aircraft with humans on board crashing is a tragedy, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. In general a cargo aircraft carrying mass produced goods crashing in the middle of nowhere is merely a financial statistic. By far the trickiest part of flying is takeoff/landing and navigation on the ground. But players with shipping volume at the level of FedEx, UPS, USPS or probably even Amazon/Walmart alone can flat out afford their own dedicated airports. With no existing path dependency, they can easily build them quite a ways from population. This completely changes the calculus and possible responses. If something goes badly wrong on takeoff/landing or at the automated airport itself, it just costs money. There is financial incentive for the players to figure it out, but it doesn't involve anyone else. And once at flight given modern aircraft glide ratios, there is no place on the planet that doesn't have ocean/empty land within glide range. For human flights, ditching the plane as safely as possible, or hopefully making it all the way to an airport, are critical considerations. For a robot plane though experiencing an all-engine out just specifically ordering it to crash somewhere without anyone around is mostly okay (there will be some environmental pollution, but it'd be trivial on humanity's list of environmental damage, and the operator could be fined for cleanup). Robot aircraft could even flat out be equipped with self-destruct systems like the range safety systems rockets have. So for the specific domain of dedicated cargo craft it seems reasonable that fully autonomous control could exist far ahead of human transport simply by virtue of being more expendable and having infrastructure purpose built exclusively for it in ways that are impractical elsewhere.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
There are endless "what if" type scenarios where the answer boils down to simply detecting that this is one of those "what if" scenarios and then initiating the appropriate emergency procedure so it can be figured out properly. E.g. an emergency landing is always an option. That's basically what pilots do as well. They spent most of their time assessing whether everything is OK via checklists and when it is somehow not OK there's not enough time to think and they reach for some emergency procedure instead. Mostly this never happens and there are whole sets of procedures that most pilots never even handle outside a simulator. E.g. landing a 737 with all engines out is a thing but obviously not something most 737 pilots would ever have to do in a real plane. ATC obviously needs to be automated too. Automating routine interactions like exchanging altimeter settings, agreeing on what the current weather report is, what the active runway is, etc, would eliminate a lot of need for humans to talk to each other and pass the information on to dedicated computer systems on both ends (which is largely what pilots and controllers do). These systems could, and should, communicate directly. Any autonomous plane would have to be integrated this way. Situational awareness is currently bottle necked on the ability to pass information around, which happens to be something computers are good at. A stop gap solution is putting a remote human pilot in between to enter information relayed by human atc. The main challenge is not just replacing the pilots but also ATC and standardizing the interactions between them.
manquer 6y ago
This is just as true for Human pilots as well, there are plenty of judgement calls and scenarios average pilots also will fail . Are the autonomous systems better than our best, most experienced pilots? not yet. They are however likely already better than the average pilot. Updating the autonomous software to factor in new scenario is easier than grounding pilots and getting them retrained on the simulator The expense and availability of type certification and simulators is one of the reasons the 737 MAX was designed to handle like the older model, although it was fundamentally different. After the fixes, if the FAA require separate type rating it will be very expensive and slow process for all airlines. The autonomous systems will behave consistently under a given scenario, human responses and errors may vary. Fixing the former is easier than quality checking the later. Planes already fly a lot on their own, they also crash on their own already too, due to software bugs or faulty sensors, 737 MAX is software bug from a faulty sensor reading on the autonomous system after all. It is a blurry line between what we have and a fully autonomous system. The risks are already there, might as well embrace it and test the software lot more rigorously than depend on the human to intervene and override as we do now.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

liability 6y ago

Along these lines, would an autopilot ever think of landing in the Hudson? (Particularly if it hadn't been done before?)

java-man 6y ago
One side benefit of using robotic planes (in theory) is that the fleet can be OTA'd to include emergency water landings, once the models are updated.
hanniabu 6y ago
Devil's advocate: Would a human pilot be skilled and lucky enough to pull this off a second time?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  IMO, the critical thing the human crew did in US1549 was the decision to take the Hudson; once they decided that, most crews could pull off the execution of that decision. (Then the presence/absence of boat traffic comes down to luck.)
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > once they decided that, most crews could pull off the execution of that decision That's not correct. Ditching is very hard. Mess up your angle or sink rate or roll even slightly and you'll be in pieces. Same if the water doesn't cooperate. One interesting thing is that it happened with an Airbus. The flight computers actually modified Sully's inputs on pitch by about 2 degrees, which ensured a softer splashdown than what Sully was commanding. But that was a very subtle adjustment. Sully was an experienced pilot, with Glider training too.
- generatorguy 6y ago
  Yes. The aviation system produced the human pilot who was able to transfer their skills and experience from all previous landings to this new unusual one. I do believe another equally as well trained pilot would have been able to pull it off as well. What would a computer program have done?
  - unionemployee 6y ago
    Perhaps pilots of previous generations could do this but, having trained numerous pilots for international airlines, as well as pilots for "fee-for-departure" (regional) airlines in the US, I wonder how many crews are up there that could competently handle most catastrophic events. Though I didn't train him directly, the pilot who crashed the Atlas 767 was pushed through the training program I worked for. Described as a "train wreck" in articles, his ability level was characteristic of others I trained (which I regret). Major US carriers do well screening their pilots but, at lower tiers of US aviation employment, I wonder if more automation would be the safer choice.
foxdev 6y ago
Pilots train for water landings. Why wouldn't an automated system get the same training?
- liability 6y ago
  Human pilots are trained in how to ditch, but the decision to ditch in that scenario was, as far as I'm aware, an instance of creative problem solving.
- mopsi 6y ago
  Before Hudson, the idea of a water landing looked like this: https://youtu.be/RM7zMW8WVYU?t=19 https://youtu.be/RM7zMW8WVYU?t=19 It was not considered a serious option.
loeg 6y ago
Taking a step back, do we want autopilots flying over a dense population center like NYC?

treis 6y ago

>Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results That describes humans as well.

java-man 6y ago
Depending on the circumstances, a robotic system might offer a better response than the humans: it does not have emotions. If anything, robotic systems might be more predictable.
- mrguyorama 6y ago
  Automated cars have decidedly NOT been predictable in their failure modes

godelski 6y ago

It's not the mistakes that matter, it's the proportion. Pareto says most cases should be ordinary, so looks like we got that covered. The question is given x amount of flight hours under likely ranges of events, who does better and by how much. If the human can perform better in niche situations but not better in ordinary then that may lead to an overall decrease in crashes or loss of cargo (the metrics we actually care about). If the human only performs slightly better, well it makes sense to switch to autonomous because humans are expensive, especially when things go wrong. The point is that no one expects the machine to be perfect. You can get caught up in the "well it can't handle x well" all day, but that's missing the forest for the trees. A robot isn't going to get frustrated if you only fly it on VFR days and ground it for 20 hours in Little Rock because weather changed.

GhostVII 6y ago

I think the best case scenario is to have an autonomous system that only steps in when the human pilot is doing something wrong. Then the pilots stay well-trained, while getting the benefits of autopilot. You could then manually give autopilot control for short periods in times when it is too dangerous for human pilots, ex. windy dark landings.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
This has sort of been tried before for some time with occasional disastrous results. When the pilot was trying to do one thing to save the aircraft and the autonomous system was trying to do another, crashes have resulted. It's likely that either one would have been ok on their own, but the combination can be bad. I know the rebuttal to this is "override the pilot" but it's really not so simple. Sometimes the pilot has switched off part but not all of an autopilot system, and it makes sense to maintain that capability. It's a very difficult problem to solve.
- g_p 6y ago
  I believe this is speculated to have happened with an Airbus doing a low pass or touch-and-go at an airshow. The aircraft seemed to believe it was landing, the captain was requesting TOGA thrust. Airbus auto throttle is a nice idea when it works (once you understand it), but there's certainly something uncanny about the idea of not having direct control of the primary and secondary flight controls. If I was coming in with one engine out, the last thing I'd want is the aircraft trying to out-think me and tell me what's right, or decide I'm at risk of stalling (2 feet above the runway), and apply power (which with only one engine available would risk skewing the landing).
karmakaze 6y ago
This reads like 737-Max MCAS. Who/what decides that 'the pilot is doing something wrong'?
numpad0 6y ago
Well there’s an airplane manufacturer in Toulouse, France, named Airbus...

sargun 6y ago

So, NASA, is in the process of working on some of this. They’re trying to come up with a new ATC model which will work better for drones / eVTOL air taxis / etc. Some of the ideas are around “carving” out corridors, where you would be able to fly, and this corridor could be reasonably large (across multiple towers today). The other interesting thing is hierarchical ATC automation. So, normal ATC would still exist, but they would interact with a tier of controllers who are responsible for them interacting with UAVs. A lot of this apparently came from the idea that eVTOL is the future, and we will all be commuting to work in an electric airplane. See: https://www.nasa.gov/simlabs/atc https://www.nasa.gov/simlabs/atc

aabnuy 6y ago
Ugh, so a state agency is working on getting people unemployed. But the jobs of the bureaucrats will be safe.
delfinom 6y ago
I await our future where nobody will go outdoors anymore because all you will hear is vuvuzelas / drones.

Shivetya 6y ago

Well this is where I think autonomous planes would be superior. First off they could make determinations on their own, the old have three or more computers making decisions and voting, as well as be constantly updating and receiving from ground stations. This can be vital in a situation where the computer decides it no longer trusts its own inputs. It all comes down to this, it won't be solved quickly, but with proper flight routing and use of specialized airports it can all be resolved without endangering the public. For the most part planes are not falling out of the sky on a regular basis but it would be interesting to see statistics on the number of registered events per miles flown. Human ATC could still be involved, the words used for events can be very specific and the system can know how to respond to all of this. Automated flights would have special call signs and even may end up handled by assigned ATC to keep them separate.

spaceflunky 6y ago

Autopilots also rely on the instruments working perfectly. A human can usually safely land a plane even when all the instruments (and even the engines) fail.

tpurves 6y ago

Tech for automating ATC has been available for decades. The biggest resistance has come from the major US airlines, and associated regulatory capture. Automating ATC would significantly increase efficiency and landing slots. Increasing landing slots at major US airlines would create more competition for the majors. Monopolizing landing slots helps majors suppress competition on key routes and hubs. Wonder if these dynamics are moot now however post covid...

xoa 6y ago

>Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. [...] All in all, while technologically I feel this could have been pulled off yesterday, I doubt we will see fully autonomous aircraft operating long routes in controlled airspace anytime soon. You're correct that edge cases are tricky, but you've made the mistake of forgetting the other possible half of dealing with them that full robotics makes possible: simply sufficiently reduce the cost of edge failure. An aircraft with humans on board crashing is a tragedy, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. In general a cargo aircraft carrying mass produced goods crashing in the middle of nowhere is merely a financial statistic. By far the trickiest part of flying is takeoff/landing and navigation on the ground. But players with shipping volume at the level of FedEx, UPS, USPS or probably even Amazon/Walmart alone can flat out afford their own dedicated airports. With no existing path dependency, they can easily build them quite a ways from population. This completely changes the calculus and possible responses. If something goes badly wrong on takeoff/landing or at the automated airport itself, it just costs money. There is financial incentive for the players to figure it out, but it doesn't involve anyone else. And once at flight given modern aircraft glide ratios, there is no place on the planet that doesn't have ocean/empty land within glide range. For human flights, ditching the plane as safely as possible, or hopefully making it all the way to an airport, are critical considerations. For a robot plane though experiencing an all-engine out just specifically ordering it to crash somewhere without anyone around is mostly okay (there will be some environmental pollution, but it'd be trivial on humanity's list of environmental damage, and the operator could be fined for cleanup). Robot aircraft could even flat out be equipped with self-destruct systems like the range safety systems rockets have. So for the specific domain of dedicated cargo craft it seems reasonable that fully autonomous control could exist far ahead of human transport simply by virtue of being more expendable and having infrastructure purpose built exclusively for it in ways that are impractical elsewhere.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

There are endless "what if" type scenarios where the answer boils down to simply detecting that this is one of those "what if" scenarios and then initiating the appropriate emergency procedure so it can be figured out properly. E.g. an emergency landing is always an option. That's basically what pilots do as well. They spent most of their time assessing whether everything is OK via checklists and when it is somehow not OK there's not enough time to think and they reach for some emergency procedure instead. Mostly this never happens and there are whole sets of procedures that most pilots never even handle outside a simulator. E.g. landing a 737 with all engines out is a thing but obviously not something most 737 pilots would ever have to do in a real plane. ATC obviously needs to be automated too. Automating routine interactions like exchanging altimeter settings, agreeing on what the current weather report is, what the active runway is, etc, would eliminate a lot of need for humans to talk to each other and pass the information on to dedicated computer systems on both ends (which is largely what pilots and controllers do). These systems could, and should, communicate directly. Any autonomous plane would have to be integrated this way. Situational awareness is currently bottle necked on the ability to pass information around, which happens to be something computers are good at. A stop gap solution is putting a remote human pilot in between to enter information relayed by human atc. The main challenge is not just replacing the pilots but also ATC and standardizing the interactions between them.

manquer 6y ago

This is just as true for Human pilots as well, there are plenty of judgement calls and scenarios average pilots also will fail . Are the autonomous systems better than our best, most experienced pilots? not yet. They are however likely already better than the average pilot. Updating the autonomous software to factor in new scenario is easier than grounding pilots and getting them retrained on the simulator The expense and availability of type certification and simulators is one of the reasons the 737 MAX was designed to handle like the older model, although it was fundamentally different. After the fixes, if the FAA require separate type rating it will be very expensive and slow process for all airlines. The autonomous systems will behave consistently under a given scenario, human responses and errors may vary. Fixing the former is easier than quality checking the later. Planes already fly a lot on their own, they also crash on their own already too, due to software bugs or faulty sensors, 737 MAX is software bug from a faulty sensor reading on the autonomous system after all. It is a blurry line between what we have and a fully autonomous system. The risks are already there, might as well embrace it and test the software lot more rigorously than depend on the human to intervene and override as we do now.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]