4 ms·

Doesn’t basic airplane autopilot just maintain flight level, speed, and heading? What are some other things it can do?

by beering 8mo ago

Retric 8mo ago
Recover from upsets is the big thing. Maintaining flight level, speed, and heading while upside down isn’t acceptable. Levels of safety are another consideration, car autopilot’s don’t use multiple levels of redundancy on everything because they can stop without falling out of the sky.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
  That's still massively simpler than making a self-driving car. It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude you want and over a reasonable timescale it will do just that.
  - Retric 8mo ago
    > It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-collision/ https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c... Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful. Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
    - ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
      > Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes I would say not, no. It's almost impossible to crash a plane. There's nothing to hit except the ground, and you stay away from that unless you really really mean to get close. It's very easy to crash a car, and if you do that most of the time you'll kill people outside the car, often quite a lot of them. There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off.
      - Retric 8mo ago
        Autopilots have contributed to a significant number of crashes and that’s with a very safety conscious industry. In a hypothetical Tesla style let’s take more risk approach, buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground. What is the worst possible thing an autopilot could do in this situation is eye opening here. > There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off. That was a production aircraft still in service. https://simpleflying.com/how-many-f-15-eagles-are-still-in-service/ https://simpleflying.com/how-many-f-15-eagles-are-still-in-s... Granted that specific case depends on the aircraft being a lifting body etc so obviously doesn’t extend to commercial aviation. But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok.
        ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
        > Autopilots have contributed to a significant number of crashes and that’s with a very safety conscious industry. "Contributed to", in the sense that the pilots decided to just blindly trust the autopilot and let it make a developing situation worse rather than, oh I don't know, maybe FLYING THE DAMN PLANE. > buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground If you allow the autopilot to fly the plane into the ground, yes. If you're paying attention you ought to be able to recover just about anything, if most of the plane is still working. The vast majority of incidents where aircraft have departed controlled flight and crashed are because the pilots lost sight of the important thing - FLYING THE DAMN PLANE. > But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok. It's got nothing to do with aerodynamic stability. If you adjust the steering and suspension in a car correctly, it'll drive in a perfectly straight line with no user input for a surprisingly long way. With modern electronic power steering and throttle-by-wire systems it's actually surprisingly easy to turn an off-the-shelf car (even something cheap, secondhand, and quite old like a 2010s Vauxhall Corsa) into a simple line-following robot like we used to build at uni in the 80s and 90s in robotics class. Sure, you need a disused aerodrome to play with it, but it'll work. There is the far greater problem that self-driving cars have to cope with a far more rapidly changing environment than an aircraft. A self-flying plane would be far easier to get right than a self-driving car. A human driver can't just react, painfully slowly, in the way that current "self-driving" cars do, they have to anticipate and be "reacting" before the problem even begins to start. You do it yourself, even if you don't realise it. You hang back from that car because you know they're going to - there, right across two lanes, not so much as a glance in their mirror, what did I tell you? - they're going to do something boneheaded. That car's just pulled in, the passenger in the back is about to open their door right into your - nicely done, you moved out to the line and missed them by 50cm at least. Self-driving cars can't do that, and probably never will. Self-flying aircraft won't need to do that. And an autopilot is a surprisingly simple device that responds in simple and predictable ways to sensor inputs.

Doesn’t basic airplane autopilot just maintain flight level, speed, and heading? What are some other things it can do?

by beering 8mo ago

Doesn’t basic airplane autopilot just maintain flight level, speed, and heading? What are some other things it can do?

Recover from upsets is the big thing. Maintaining flight level, speed, and heading while upside down isn’t acceptable. Levels of safety are another consideration, car autopilot’s don’t use multiple levels of redundancy on everything because they can stop without falling out of the sky.

ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
That's still massively simpler than making a self-driving car. It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude you want and over a reasonable timescale it will do just that.
- Retric 8mo ago
  > It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-collision/ https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c... Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful. Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
  - ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
    > Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes I would say not, no. It's almost impossible to crash a plane. There's nothing to hit except the ground, and you stay away from that unless you really really mean to get close. It's very easy to crash a car, and if you do that most of the time you'll kill people outside the car, often quite a lot of them. There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off.
    - Retric 8mo ago
      Autopilots have contributed to a significant number of crashes and that’s with a very safety conscious industry. In a hypothetical Tesla style let’s take more risk approach, buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground. What is the worst possible thing an autopilot could do in this situation is eye opening here. > There are no production aircraft fitted with autopilots that can correct for breaking a wing off. That was a production aircraft still in service. https://simpleflying.com/how-many-f-15-eagles-are-still-in-service/ https://simpleflying.com/how-many-f-15-eagles-are-still-in-s... Granted that specific case depends on the aircraft being a lifting body etc so obviously doesn’t extend to commercial aviation. But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok.
      - ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
        > Autopilots have contributed to a significant number of crashes and that’s with a very safety conscious industry. "Contributed to", in the sense that the pilots decided to just blindly trust the autopilot and let it make a developing situation worse rather than, oh I don't know, maybe FLYING THE DAMN PLANE. > buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground If you allow the autopilot to fly the plane into the ground, yes. If you're paying attention you ought to be able to recover just about anything, if most of the plane is still working. The vast majority of incidents where aircraft have departed controlled flight and crashed are because the pilots lost sight of the important thing - FLYING THE DAMN PLANE. > But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok. It's got nothing to do with aerodynamic stability. If you adjust the steering and suspension in a car correctly, it'll drive in a perfectly straight line with no user input for a surprisingly long way. With modern electronic power steering and throttle-by-wire systems it's actually surprisingly easy to turn an off-the-shelf car (even something cheap, secondhand, and quite old like a 2010s Vauxhall Corsa) into a simple line-following robot like we used to build at uni in the 80s and 90s in robotics class. Sure, you need a disused aerodrome to play with it, but it'll work. There is the far greater problem that self-driving cars have to cope with a far more rapidly changing environment than an aircraft. A self-flying plane would be far easier to get right than a self-driving car. A human driver can't just react, painfully slowly, in the way that current "self-driving" cars do, they have to anticipate and be "reacting" before the problem even begins to start. You do it yourself, even if you don't realise it. You hang back from that car because you know they're going to - there, right across two lanes, not so much as a glance in their mirror, what did I tell you? - they're going to do something boneheaded. That car's just pulled in, the passenger in the back is about to open their door right into your - nicely done, you moved out to the line and missed them by 50cm at least. Self-driving cars can't do that, and probably never will. Self-flying aircraft won't need to do that. And an autopilot is a surprisingly simple device that responds in simple and predictable ways to sensor inputs.