4 ms·

Agreed, and similar accidents are helped by autopilot even on aeroplanes. See below as an example. While the main cause is not autopilot, it is heavily relied o

by robot 12y ago

Agreed, and similar accidents are helped by autopilot even on aeroplanes. See below as an example. While the main cause is not autopilot, it is heavily relied on, and certainly worsened the situation when it was suddenly cut off in the middle of the night. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_rep... "the crew lacked practical training in manually handling the aircraft both at high altitude and in the event of anomalies of speed indication; the two co-pilots' task sharing was weakened both by incomprehension of the situation at the time of autopilot disconnection, and by poor management of the "startle effect", leaving them in an emotionally charged situation;"

baddox 12y ago
There are obviously high profile tragedies like that one, but it don't see that as evidence that autopilot technology doesn't on net make air travel much safer and more reliable.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Obviously people believe that autopilot represents a net benefit to air travel, but there are far fewer planes in the sky than cars on the road, a lot more open space that is not impregnable by most foreign objects, and a ton more money per plane allowing for more sophisticated sensors and systems. There is a dedicated traffic coordination system for aircraft and each pilot takes instruction as given by the ATC. Planes are also constantly monitored by highly-trained pilots and mechanics and operations are closely supervised by multiple regulatory bodies. A great deal of the required operations for autodriving are offloaded or irrelevant in autopiloting. I know we were talking about an isolated case of the unexpected failure of an automated piloting system, but if we consider all of these additional complexities in typical road driving * millions more cars with barely-trained operators, it's reasonable to suppose that those types of problems would occur much more frequently with autodrivers than autopilots.
mikeash 12y ago
Personally I think the only things that mattered in that accident were poor training and poor UI. First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall. Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on. One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.

by robot 12y ago

baddox 12y ago

There are obviously high profile tragedies like that one, but it don't see that as evidence that autopilot technology doesn't on net make air travel much safer and more reliable.

cookiecaper 12y ago
Obviously people believe that autopilot represents a net benefit to air travel, but there are far fewer planes in the sky than cars on the road, a lot more open space that is not impregnable by most foreign objects, and a ton more money per plane allowing for more sophisticated sensors and systems. There is a dedicated traffic coordination system for aircraft and each pilot takes instruction as given by the ATC. Planes are also constantly monitored by highly-trained pilots and mechanics and operations are closely supervised by multiple regulatory bodies. A great deal of the required operations for autodriving are offloaded or irrelevant in autopiloting. I know we were talking about an isolated case of the unexpected failure of an automated piloting system, but if we consider all of these additional complexities in typical road driving * millions more cars with barely-trained operators, it's reasonable to suppose that those types of problems would occur much more frequently with autodrivers than autopilots.

mikeash 12y ago

Personally I think the only things that mattered in that accident were poor training and poor UI. First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall. Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on. One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.