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I have zero expertise for my claim, but I feel like autonomous flight is easier than autonomous driving.
by bdcravens 1y ago
I have zero expertise for my claim, but I feel like autonomous flight is easier than autonomous driving.
- snickerdoodle14 1y agoI also feel like the demand is way, way lower. A pilot can't be that large a % of the cost of a flight. Maybe if we lived in the jetsons era.
- rkomorn 1y agoDepends on the size of the plane, really. One of the reasons a few companies were investing in fully autonomous air taxis is because the math on a small piloted aircraft wasn't realistic for a low enough price point to be competitive.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoThe problem is actually safety. As automated systems get better, the pilot is left with not much to do, and has to maintain vigilance while being really really bored. It is almost better to have fewer automated systems and give the pilot more things to do during the flight so it is easier to keep them paying attention, or all automated with no human pilot to mess things up.
- 0_____0 1y agoIn the abstract yes but in practice the economic (ratio of cost of pilot to pax miles) and safety context of aviation mean fully autonomous flying has to be extremely robust before it has actual utility in industry.
- rkomorn 1y agoIn practice, you're also currently very reliant on infrastructure that is definitely not as solid as you want (eg: ILS and GPS can be interfered with quite nastily). ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.
- notahacker 1y agoCommercial pilots are also extremely good at dealing with edge cases you wouldn't design an autonomous system for no matter how solid the infrastructure, like deciding the Hudson river is a good place to ditch And their cost relative to other operational costs is so low there isn't even any pushback on regulations regarding there being two of them.
- rkomorn 1y agoPilot cost isn't low. The airline industry is very much looking for ways to reduce crews, whether that's going to single pilot operations (long term) or reduced crew operations (short term). RCO is very much "pushback on regulations".
- dcrazy 1y agoOn the happy path, yes. Though I don’t think takeoff is automated yet. Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoI'm pretty sure drones can already take off on their own. Taking off is a lot easier than landing, and planes have auto-landing tech already.
- dcrazy 1y agoTakeoff at a commercial airport is a very challenging and potentially dangerous situation. There’s way more margin to abort a landing than a takeoff.
- csours 1y agoIt's kind of funny how you can both be right.
- prmoustache 1y agoOTOH takeoff and landing could in theory be operated by people on the ground, flying simulator style. I still believe that having an actual pilot inside the plane that care for his own life is not a bad idea vs someone remote feeling a bit disconnected with the reality of a crash.
- nradov 1y agoRemote piloting is how the military operates certain drones like the MQ-1 Predator. The mishap rate is very high relative to crewed aircraft due to network lag and sensor issues. The military is willing to accept some level of equipment loss in order to accomplish their mission but this would never be allowed for commercial airliners.
- xyzelement 1y ago
- efavdb 1y agoDon’t have a ref but heard that it’s been safe for quite a while but they keep the pilots around due to consumer fear rather than actual improved performance. Curious if anyone can confirm.
- rkomorn 1y agoNo. Airliners can't even take off on their own yet, and are only allowed to auto-land with zero visibility at a few dozen airports when the pilots, plane, and runway are all current/recently checked. Look up the Airbus ATTOL project's first automated takeoff a few years ago. Also, there's virtually no automation when it comes to interacting with ATC.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAn airplane will take off when it is properly configured and it hits a certain speed. It's simple aerodynamics/physics. Pilots are there to react to failures and unexpected events.
- rkomorn 1y agoSure. It'll also land if you don't care about anyone surviving.
- 3ple_alpha 1y agoThere's a bit more to it since you do need to do last bit of configuration (pull up the nose) just as you hit the target speed. But yeah, automatic take-off is quite a bit easier than automatic rejection of take-off.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoEven manually pulling up the nose once you reach Vr isn't necessary if you just trim for a little extra nose-up. It'll eventually get off the ground with just enough speed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anonymars 1y agoIn a pinch, a car can just put on its hazards and pull over
- dcrazy 1y agoThat “just” is doing some heavy lifting! The car still has to deal with all the normal hazards of the road while pulling over, plus the hazards it is itself creating by acting abnormally.
- anonymars 1y agoWell if we're being picky, technically the car itself doesn't have to deal with the hazards it has created, rather everyone else does. The point is you can't just "stop" a plane and wait for someone to figure things out (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en). Whatever the difficulties in dealing with an abnormal situation in a car, it is strictly much more difficult to deal with them in a vehicle constantly fighting the homicidal urge to fall out of the sky.
- Dylan16807 1y agoThey each have their own unique issues. Being in a pinch is not universally harder for a plane. Also constant urge to fall out of the sky is a helicopter. A plane generally wants to glide.
- jerf 1y agoThe hard part of automated driving is dealing with all the ground clutter that planes serenely fly over. If pedestrians could charge out in front of a 777 going 650 mph at 34,000 feet... well... we'd be living in pretty different world! And in that world, flying would be much more difficult. Not just for computers but for humans too. Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.
- bluGill 1y agoFlying is almost always easier than driving. landing is hard. Bad weather is hard. But just flying - human pilots have napped many times over the years and it only rarely is an issue. Airplanes with primitive autopilot are very good.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoYeah, a primitive autopilot in a plane just needs an altimeter and compass, but a AoA sensor, speedometer, fuel level sensor, and pitch sensor help to detect unsafe conditions like runaway pitch, stalling, overspeed, low fuel, etc. Each of those sensors is providing a simple 1-dimensional data point. Redundancy is relatively inexpensive. Automatic lane keeping in a car requires cameras that software needs to then analyze to find the lines in the road in real time. But if you want a "set it and read a book for an hour", then you have to respond to other traffic. No longer just some simple PID controllers, the software now needs to plan and execute based on surrounding traffic.
- kersplody 1y agoYep. 0ft-1000ft AGL Takeoff, Climb, Approach, and Landing are the tough bits. The rest (Cruise) is very low demand and much easier than driving.
- toast0 1y agoTaxiing is probably harder to automate than the rest. But you could have pilots on hand to taxi to the runway, and take a shuttle to the other end and hop on a just landed plane to taxi to the gate. Or you could use tugs for ground movement.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tim333 1y agoIt depends a bit on your safety standards. There are already autonomous flying things delivering blood and blowing up oil depots where it doesn't matter so much if stuff goes wrong, but to be an airline pilot you have to know how to deal with a huge range of emergencies and systems packing up. With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.
- hoosieree 1y ago0d (parked) - null program easy 1d (train) - easy. just one lever 2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this? 2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians. 3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers
- SR2Z 1y agoI'm not actually sure how hard landing is. Most airports that support autonomous landings do it by having ILS antennae that guide the airplane to within tens of feet of the runway, at which point the airplane switches to radar for altitude. Automatic landings started in 1964. I think that it seems hard mostly because of how tightly regulated aviation is - modern technology could probably make things a lot better if people were more receptive to the idea of heavy automated aircraft over populated areas.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agolanding is easy. the hard part is landing with 20mph cross winds and one engine out (or other mechanical failures). we've had auto-land that is 99% reliable for a while now, but you need to get to 6 9s before you have a system safe enough to replace pilots
- SR2Z 1y agoI think that as long as the autopilot is able to fly in a crosswind or with an engine failure, it can probably land with one. Autopilots are already able to do these things. I doubt anyone has tested this in depth, but I'm not sure there are too many configurations of airplane these days where a human can safely land it and a computer can't. Maybe if a big chunk of wing or control surfaces were totally gone, but even a human pilot isn't getting 99% reliability in a situation like that. In any case, I don't think that the first candidates for automation are gonna be passenger flights. It will probably be small cargo planes first - Cessna Caravans and other turboprop aircraft where the cost of paying pilots is roughly similar to the price of fuel.
- 1y ago
- ugh123 1y agoNavigation might be easier. The battery and safety tech isn't there yet to make it practical.
- themafia 1y agoWhen everything is working correctly, no other pilots have emergencies, and no temporary restrictions are in place, and there are no clouds in the sky. Then yes, it /could/ be easier, but almost always it never actually is. There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing. Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo
- KeplerBoy 1y agoWhat would ever make you think that? In an automotive setting you can almost always safely decelerate to a full-stop, put on hazards and call it a fail. Good luck trying that in an aircraft over urban areas.
- tialaramex 1y agoWhen shit goes wrong for a car (such as Waymo) you just stop. Now, that's not trivial, but it's also not very difficult, I expect most of it can happen even if the Waymo hardware itself were suddenly destroyed, rolling along is the hard bit so not doing that isn't too difficult. Everybody aboard can just leave when it stops moving. In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants. You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off. Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.
- njarboe 1y agoNot a pilot myself but it seems that a large part of the danger with flying is that when something goes wrong you are much more likely to have a high speed crash. Cars don't even usually travel at speeds that planes crash at.
- kbenson 1y agoMy layman's understanding is that we've been doing it already for decades with expert system "AI", so likely much easier than navigating streets with other people.