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My understanding of modern airlines is that unless your plane is in the process of taking off, landing, or crashing, it's already essentially pilotless. There'

by Cowen 14y ago

My understanding of modern airlines is that unless your plane is in the process of taking off, landing, or crashing, it's already essentially pilotless. There's always been too much at stake in the airline industry to allow a lot of room for human error. Combined with the huge leaps that fly-by-wire planes have made in the last few decades, that made for some very powerful incentives on everyone's part (engineers, regulators, and companies) to advance autopilot as far as they possibly could.

davidmr 14y ago
While your last sentence may be true-ish (I'm not really qualified to answer with authority), your first sentence is very much not. This relevant link gets posted a lot, but is worth posting again: http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves...
- cbr 14y ago
  Your link doesn't argue with Cowen's first sentence. When Cowen says "essentially pilotless" I understand it to mean "keeps going without operator intervention", and after reading your link that's still my understanding of what happens.
  - davidmr 14y ago
    I'm not sure you and I read it in the same way: And what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean, anyway? Autopilot is simply a tool, along with many other tools available to the crew. You still need to tell it what to do, how to do it and when to do it. And although it frees the pilot from having to have his or her hands physically on the control wheel (or sidestick) or thrust levers, this is only a fraction of what the act of “flying” entails. The autopilot is not flying the plane. The crew is flying the plane, through the autoflight system. That in no way says "keeps going without operator intervention" to me.
rst 14y ago
In normal conditions, yes. But when things go wrong (your "or crashing", perhaps), the pilot is suddenly very much involved, and screwups can be fatal. Take, for example, Qantas flight 32, an A380 that was successfully landed after one of the engines more or less blew up, damaging several other systems. Truly pilotless operation would require automated systems that could do as well --- and hopefully better than the pilots of Air France 447, the transatlantic flight that was lost due to recoverable pilot error.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Yes. The failure/recovery mode for "speedometer is reporting inconsistent speeds" is stop the engine and coast to a stop. That doesn't work as well with planes. Then again, human pilots are fallible, and lots of crashes would be avoided if they paid more attention to instruments and less to instinct (where's that horizon again?), so maybe programming planes to just blindly follow the instruments would result in a net reduction in crashes.

by Cowen 14y ago

davidmr 14y ago

While your last sentence may be true-ish (I'm not really qualified to answer with authority), your first sentence is very much not. This relevant link gets posted a lot, but is worth posting again: http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves...

cbr 14y ago
Your link doesn't argue with Cowen's first sentence. When Cowen says "essentially pilotless" I understand it to mean "keeps going without operator intervention", and after reading your link that's still my understanding of what happens.
- davidmr 14y ago
  I'm not sure you and I read it in the same way: And what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean, anyway? Autopilot is simply a tool, along with many other tools available to the crew. You still need to tell it what to do, how to do it and when to do it. And although it frees the pilot from having to have his or her hands physically on the control wheel (or sidestick) or thrust levers, this is only a fraction of what the act of “flying” entails. The autopilot is not flying the plane. The crew is flying the plane, through the autoflight system. That in no way says "keeps going without operator intervention" to me.

rst 14y ago

In normal conditions, yes. But when things go wrong (your "or crashing", perhaps), the pilot is suddenly very much involved, and screwups can be fatal. Take, for example, Qantas flight 32, an A380 that was successfully landed after one of the engines more or less blew up, damaging several other systems. Truly pilotless operation would require automated systems that could do as well --- and hopefully better than the pilots of Air France 447, the transatlantic flight that was lost due to recoverable pilot error.

tedunangst 14y ago
Yes. The failure/recovery mode for "speedometer is reporting inconsistent speeds" is stop the engine and coast to a stop. That doesn't work as well with planes. Then again, human pilots are fallible, and lots of crashes would be avoided if they paid more attention to instruments and less to instinct (where's that horizon again?), so maybe programming planes to just blindly follow the instruments would result in a net reduction in crashes.