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[pilot here] There's a lot more to managing planes in bad weather than landing them: you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm. Furthermore, sometimes go/n
by juliansimioni 6y ago
[pilot here]
There's a lot more to managing planes in bad weather than landing them: you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm.
Furthermore, sometimes go/no-go decisions have to be made a long way out. If it looks like there might be lots of thunderstorms near your destination, it's sometimes prudent to divert immediately rather than risk being near an airport with weather too bad to land AND low fuel.
A great example is a youtube video by stevo1kinevo: he's flying a TBM 850 (fast turboprop) from Florida to Boston International. While checking the weather enroute he decides the chance of storms near Boston is too high, and with the complexity of getting in and out of a major airport, he decides well in advance to divert to an airport on Long Island. This sort of stuff happens all the time and is the very definition of good airmanship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZzOsXya4zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZzOsXya4zw
- Ericson2314 6y agoOn the ground operator can also make those calls? Really, it's like fleet-specific air traffic controller + rc pilot.
- juliansimioni 6y agoYeah, definitely. And thinking about it more I'm sure there are some air traffic controllers that manage 10+ airplanes fine (although they aren't as involved as the pilots, so a remote operator would have a higher workload). I bet a fleet of commercial autonomous aircraft operation out of private facilities would also have a lot more common procedures (all their airspeeds, climb/descent rates, etc would all be the same), so it might even be easier.
- whiddershins 6y agoAlso maybe they could pool resources? Like pilots in an area where everything is fine leave their planes on full auto and go take over another plane from another pilot? Edit: Or maybe, expect the planes to be fully auto, then have a bank of pilots available to take over any plane that is having troubles.
- jzwinck 6y ago> you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm. You can't, but can a UAV? I'm curious how much more tolerant of bad weather a plane can be if there are no people inside. Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?
- ghayes 6y agoFlying by instruments, I wonder how high the risk truly is. One of the bigger concerns might be an instrument failure, like the failure of the airspeed sensors on Air France 447.
- bfuclusion 6y agoVery very high. What fuels a thunderstorm is large amounts of air rising, and falling very rapidly. When the aircraft encounters those air movements it can very quickly exceed the structural limits of the aircraft.
- usrusr 6y agoSome more detail: flying in rising or sinking air isn't a problem in itself, as long as you can tolerate the change in altitude. But flying from one into the other, fast, is a sure way to exceed structural load levels.
- sokoloff 6y agoThere were many failures in the cockpit of AF447. Almost all of them were aft of the instruments.
- juliansimioni 6y agoProblem exists between keyboard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H yoke and chair
- scoopertrooper 6y agoThe addition of people to the plane makes zero difference to storm survivability, why would it? Storms are definitely regularly large enough to bring down even large aircraft, it doesn't happen often because planes of systems on board to ensure they avoid such weather, but it can happen! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_242 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_242
- drran 6y agoSo, one experienced pilot will need to make this decision for all roboplanes.