5 ms·

Would Air Travel Be Safer Without Pilots?

34 points by markmassie 12y ago

WalterBright 12y ago
> When you look at airplane crashes, it’s not equipment failure. It’s human error. A lot of the crashes are due to equipment failure. Take a look at the series "Aviation Disasters". A pilot is needed to figure out what is wrong, and to compensate to bring the airplane back. A computer program can't do that. Such is far, far more complex and nuanced than dealing with a failure on a car. Just take Sully's landing on the Hudson after a flock of geese took out his engines. What computer program could have figured out why the engines failed, and what was possible for the airplane to do? Evaluate the weather conditions, and make the best choice of landing spot? Phooey.
- apprishiate 12y ago
  http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140724-flight-risk/ http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140724-flight-risk/ This may provide some useful insight. 207 crashes - human error; 82 crashes - weather conditions; 74 crashes - mechanical failures; 23 crashes - crime
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    That doesn't include all the incidents where the pilot figured out what was wrong and what corrective action to take, and landed the airplane safely. And besides, what do you do at 30,000 feet with a planeload of people and an emergency and nobody in charge?
- alooPotato 12y ago
  Do the pilots need to be in the plane?
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    If they're in the plane, they have a greater incentive to land it safely - which is why I want a pilot on board with me.
    - joelg236 12y ago
      This kind of seems reasonable, why downvotes?
      - dang 12y ago
        Please don't post comments about downvotes. They add noise, and typically are soon out of sync with reality.
    - potatolicious 12y ago
      What about the gigantic incentive to live resulting in poorer performance? We saw this on Air France - where the pilots' panic caused them to ignore readily available information that would have saved their lives. On the whole of it, I'd rather the plane be flown by a computer, with a remote pilot jumping in for extreme edge cases.
      - brandonmenc 12y ago
        How about all three? Computer, with a pilot on board monitoring things, and a remote pilot for extreme emergencies. Someone should be able to physically take some kind of control when the computer pilot breaks and the comm link to the remote pilot doesn't work.
        brianberns 12y ago
        I think this is a good solution, except that experienced pilots will eventually become quite rare after computers take over the job.
        nemanja 12y ago
        Well, that's more or less how it works today. Airline pilot's job is basically hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror. Computers do most of the work, pilots are there for takeoffs and landings (which could be automated) but more importantly for when things really go wrong. Airline pilots flying scheduled flights (Part 121) are in constant communication with the dispatcher on the ground. Dispatcher is trained to pretty much the same standard as pilots and helps with the planning, safety and can help with workload during flight. Having all three in place is probably why airline flying is so safe these days. On the other hand, I could see freighters (e.g. likes of FedEx fleet) fully automated in the near future (5 years? less?)
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Here is a less radical question: if the plane was capable of flying itself, do two pilots have to be in the plane? Could we get away with just one pilot and still be at sufficient redundancy? And if the pilot had nothing to do, how the heck would they not go mad from boredom?
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      There have been many incidents where it took both pilots to save the airplane.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        The point is not the past, but the future. There is a point where one pilot is reasonable, then none; so when will we get to 1p?
- Sorgam 12y ago
  Even if computers never save the passengers in these emergencies, as long as they do save them from more pilot error emergencies then it's worth it. Sure the Hudson river passengers may have died, but at the same time the 9/11, Air France, Malaysia Airlines, etc ones may have lived. Hell, you could even have no improvement in safety anywhere and it might still be a good idea. Flying is already so safe that there's no harm in doubling the fatality rate. New technology doesn't always have to improve everything to be worthwhile. This is more a political problem - customer fears, unions, regulations, etc.
  - quesera 12y ago
    > Flying is already so safe that there's no harm in doubling the fatality rate. The marketing campaign writes itself!
clueless123 12y ago
As a pilot who loves flying, I am sad to say I must agree with the article. Computers are ideally suited to fly planes, statistically will be safer and we like it or not, will be flying most large aircrafts in a future not to distant. (My guess.. 20 years tops)
coldcode 12y ago
Air travel is already safe. Statistics show 1.27 deaths per 100,000 flight hours, or another stat in a single year you have the odds of dying as 1 in 4 million or so. You are more likely to die driving to the airport. How would having no pilots decrease those odds significantly? I would think that any decrease due to a computer doing it better would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations.
- Evolved 12y ago
  You don't need me to agree but I do agree. Plane travel is immensely safer than car travel. The only reason plane crashes make the news more than car crashes is because of the rarity and the massive casualties (sometimes).
- userbinator 12y ago
  would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations Indeed, it's always the "unanticipated situations" that cause problems both for humans and computers - and in the case of flying, I think it's better to have some level of automation to reduce human error, but there must always be a manual override. Completely replacing the pilot with innumerable lines of code executed by a computer would be even more dangerous as it's far more likely that a pilot can react intelligently to assess the situation and take manual control of the plane than someone be able to immediately find the bug and fix it, without introducing any new ones, then update the software "on-the-fly" (literally). It's similar to the issues that abstractions cause in software: the more we rely on them to hide details, and the more complex the systems we build as a result, the harder it is to reason about the problems that arise due to something lower down in the stack. "Out of sight, out of mind." Here is a related article about this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...
- melling 12y ago
  No one said that it wasn't safe. However, why wouldn't we'd still try to improve on good? One commercial crash in one lifetime should be a lot.
jpatokal 12y ago
"Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already." Well, yes, the easy bits. The problem is that you still need pilots when things don't go exactly to plan, and they never do: http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/ http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/ This is not to say that passenger planes can't be automated someday, but we're nowhere near there yet.
DigitalSea 12y ago
I do not know how I feel about this. I realise that a modern day plane basically flies itself once it reaches cruise altitude what is referred to as fly-by-wire. However, the notion that pilots are not needed or do nothing on planes is ridiculous. Are we forgetting that it was a pilot in 2009 on US Airways Flight 1549 that safely landed the plane after striking a flock of geese during its initial climbout only to be ditched into the Hudson River shortly after. If a pilot was not in the plane at the time, no computer would have been able to save the plane. Typically a pilot will turn off the autopilot around 1000 feet and then do the rest for descent and subsequent landing. On takeoff, most pilots will fly to around 10,000 feet, some to cruise altitude before turning on the autopilot. There are some tasks on modern day planes that cannot be currently done without a pilot (at least not safely). We have to remember things like autopilot still require manual input from the pilot and cockpit crew to get from its departure point to its destination. A pilot doesn't just fly a plane out of an airport, press a couple of buttons and then do nothing for the rest of the flight, this is a misconception perpetrated by the media and so-called experts who have never flown a plane in their life. Autopilot is merely a tool, much like a machine keeping a patient breathing and their blood flowing in the operating theatre is a tool for surgeons. The machines need to be calibrated, have their data input and be closely monitored much like a pilot does on a plane, even with autopilot engaged. While I applaud the forward thinking from people like Steve Jurvetson, statements like "Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already" would be strongly disagreed with any pilot you ask. No two flights are the same and all flights are made up of individual and manual decisions from the pilot and crew. If a pilotless plane were something that could be a reality, the airline industry which has been struggling for years now to keep costs down amidst rising fuel costs would have already partially integrated this or started to cut down on the number of pilots they hire. I would like to see a pilotless plane decide what to do when the landing gear fails and an emergency landing needs to be made. I would like to see what happens when a tire blows on a high-speed take off and the plane has to make an emergency landing, or what happens when a plane has to make an emergency detour over rocky terrain. You would still need people to operate these planes remotely, what happens when contact is lost with a plane and it finds itself flying without a pilot at 35,000 feet who can manually take control of the plane and land it? Is Steve forgetting that a pilot would effectively be replaced with someone in a call centre type building sitting at a computer terminal remotely programming commands and programming things like runway codes and other things into the plane? Some things just can't and should never be replaced. Is modern day technology meant to replace doctors? Every time a new device intended to help keep a patient alive is created, is its intent to aide or replace a doctor? Of course not. People would never agree with replacing doctors with machines completely. Looking to eliminate drivers on the ground is one thing, because ground transportation is far more dangerous than air transportation. I agree with driverless cars because we already have the data and vehicle trips thanks to mapping data and technology mean they are predictable to a certain degree. Air travel is the safest kind of travel there is, fatalities and accidents have been consistently going down year after year, the number of accidents with fatalities in the last 10 years on Western commercial airlines can be counted with both hands. Replacing pilots in commercial aircraft is something that will not happen in my lifetime, or perhaps ever. It is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Not everything can or should be automated for the sake of automating them.
Animats 12y ago
Not yet, but a decade or two out, maybe. It requires much better sensors. For one thing, you need all the gear for automatic driving to get from the runway to the gate. Landing on an airport without ground aids may be necessary in an emergency. What we'll probably see first is larger one-pilot aircraft, able to land themselves in case of pilot failure. Also, unpiloted fighter jets are almost inevitable, simply because modern airframes can pull more Gs than pilots can stand. Boeing is modifying old F-16 aircraft into the QF-16, which is unmanned. These were originally intended for target practice, but DARPA is interested in using them for other purposes.
- Evolved 12y ago
  The QF-16s are unmanned but they are not computer-controlled. I believe the argument here is for computer-controlled airliners not remotely piloted ones. After what happened to one of our Scan Eagle UAVs[1], the last thing we need is the tragic loss of life and PR nightmare of an unmanned commercial airliner getting hacked and crashed. [1]http://rt.com/news/iran-drone-hacked-downed-353/ http://rt.com/news/iran-drone-hacked-downed-353/
- neurotech1 12y ago
  QF-16 is "remote piloted" not unpiloted. I don't think the QF-16 has more than basic autopilot (hold heading and altitude) integrated. This is partly due to the QF-16As being Block 15 jets.
speeq 12y ago
Steve Jurvetson wants to disband the TSA. The following text is copied from his post: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/315439026 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/315439026 --- I focused on scenarios for removing all security checkpoints and delays from a customer perspective. Imagine checking in at a kiosk to get your boarding pass, and going though no security lines to board the plane. Bring anything you want with you, but know that the flight is under video surveillance, like retail stores today. I assumed technologies that work in rudimentary form today and will benefit from Moore’s Law. (The only 12-year forecast that I felt confident about is the continuation of the 100-year abstraction of Moore’s Law, bringing a 256x computational advance by 2018). So, I started with the assumption that computer-controlled flight would be possible. It’s a pretty safe assumption given what we already have today. With no cockpit, everything changes. The potential for harm is greatly reduced if the plane cannot be navigated from within. No hijacking. No use of the plane as a weapon. Bombs become the only threat, and a reduced one. Personal weapons? A gun or knife-fight could do more damage in a restaurant, or many large group gatherings. Why bother with a plane where criminal activity will be recorded, and the only people harmed are on board? As for bombs, passive sniffers in a free flowing airport gateway are more plausible than detecting improvised weapons than could be used against a pilot. At the airport, a quick fingerprint biometric would be a natural way to get a boarding pass (as 12 million people have already done in Florida to get access to an amusement park). So even smuggled bombs would have more capture and downside risk for a terrorist cell than other targets. Pie-in-sky ideas: hardening a UAV to bombs should be easier than current planes; smaller planes could lower risk; luggage could fly separately; biologic weapon sensors could trigger a flight path to quarantine, etc.
- robertmrangel 12y ago
  then somehow someone hacks you fkd
ghshephard 12y ago
I've always wondered why we don't have more sophisticated autopilots for trains. I recognize the importance of having staff on a train to deal with a lot of the engineering, break, track and other equipment issues, but It's unclear to me why the actual driving (braking/acceleration) of the trains is still done by (often bored out of their skulls) train operators. I'm guessing the big element that was missing was sensing track obstacles and braking accordingly - in Singapore/Dubai they have doors limiting access to the track, and in vancouver they have (tending to failure in the winter) track sensors to see if anyone has hopped onto the track.
mpweiher 12y ago
Obligatory reference to "Children of the Magenta Line" http://independentflightinstructors.com/instructors/2011/11/children-of-the-magenta-line/ http://independentflightinstructors.com/instructors/2011/11/... (Automation systems typically tell the pilot where to go with a magenta line, on the G1000 systems I am used to it's an indicator of GPS navigation) From the opening line: "as we look at this accident history, we find that in 68% of these accidents, Automation Dependency played a significant part". So automation certainly is not the solution currently, at least not by itself. It handles a lot of the routine very well, but not non-routine situations, which happen frequently enough. Big events like Captain Sullenberger's Hudson landing have been mentioned, but there are many other smaller situations that occur on a regular basis. On the other hand, automation has been a crucial part of making commercial aviation so incredibly safe and accidents so rare that we no longer really have a statistically relevant sample base. That's an enormous achievement, but automation is only part of the story. The current amazing safety record has been achieved with the current consensus/compromise setup: humans + machines. Most of the problems that happen nowadays seem to happen due to problems at the man+machine interface. Asiana 214 for example would have been fine as a fully automated approach just as much as a fully hand-flown approach, but confusions between the automation and the pilots caused a crash. However, looking at those statistics and saying "we must remove one element" is fallacious, simply because the statistics do not show how many crashes were prevented by having that element aboard. So while these sorts of radical proposals sound good and appear to make a lot of sense when not examined too closely, I would be very surprised if the objectively best solution is not the combination that we have, refined further to smooth out problems at the computer/human interface. Automated trains and cars have been mentioned as examples. Planes are fundamentally different, because with any surface bound vehicle you can, in an emergency, just stop and wait for help. For a train, that's literally it. For a car, you'd probably want to pull over somewhere safe, but if worse comes to worse you can stop in place and hope everyone around you stops as well or avoids you. If you "stop" a plane in flight, everyone on board dies. You have to actively land the plane on a suitable surface at suitable speed and orientation, arguably the hardest part of flying. That's also one reason why requirements for airplane engines are so different than for cars: if a car engine dies, you pull over. If a plane engine dies, you also die unless you find a good place to land in the next couple of seconds or minutes.

34 points by markmassie 12y ago

> When you look at airplane crashes, it’s not equipment failure. It’s human error. A lot of the crashes are due to equipment failure. Take a look at the series "Aviation Disasters". A pilot is needed to figure out what is wrong, and to compensate to bring the airplane back. A computer program can't do that. Such is far, far more complex and nuanced than dealing with a failure on a car. Just take Sully's landing on the Hudson after a flock of geese took out his engines. What computer program could have figured out why the engines failed, and what was possible for the airplane to do? Evaluate the weather conditions, and make the best choice of landing spot? Phooey.

apprishiate 12y ago
http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140724-flight-risk/ http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140724-flight-risk/ This may provide some useful insight. 207 crashes - human error; 82 crashes - weather conditions; 74 crashes - mechanical failures; 23 crashes - crime
- WalterBright 12y ago
  That doesn't include all the incidents where the pilot figured out what was wrong and what corrective action to take, and landed the airplane safely. And besides, what do you do at 30,000 feet with a planeload of people and an emergency and nobody in charge?
alooPotato 12y ago
Do the pilots need to be in the plane?
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  If they're in the plane, they have a greater incentive to land it safely - which is why I want a pilot on board with me.
  - joelg236 12y ago
    This kind of seems reasonable, why downvotes?
    - dang 12y ago
      Please don't post comments about downvotes. They add noise, and typically are soon out of sync with reality.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    What about the gigantic incentive to live resulting in poorer performance? We saw this on Air France - where the pilots' panic caused them to ignore readily available information that would have saved their lives. On the whole of it, I'd rather the plane be flown by a computer, with a remote pilot jumping in for extreme edge cases.
    - brandonmenc 12y ago
      How about all three? Computer, with a pilot on board monitoring things, and a remote pilot for extreme emergencies. Someone should be able to physically take some kind of control when the computer pilot breaks and the comm link to the remote pilot doesn't work.
      - brianberns 12y ago
        I think this is a good solution, except that experienced pilots will eventually become quite rare after computers take over the job.
      - nemanja 12y ago
        Well, that's more or less how it works today. Airline pilot's job is basically hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror. Computers do most of the work, pilots are there for takeoffs and landings (which could be automated) but more importantly for when things really go wrong. Airline pilots flying scheduled flights (Part 121) are in constant communication with the dispatcher on the ground. Dispatcher is trained to pretty much the same standard as pilots and helps with the planning, safety and can help with workload during flight. Having all three in place is probably why airline flying is so safe these days. On the other hand, I could see freighters (e.g. likes of FedEx fleet) fully automated in the near future (5 years? less?)
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Here is a less radical question: if the plane was capable of flying itself, do two pilots have to be in the plane? Could we get away with just one pilot and still be at sufficient redundancy? And if the pilot had nothing to do, how the heck would they not go mad from boredom?
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    There have been many incidents where it took both pilots to save the airplane.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      The point is not the past, but the future. There is a point where one pilot is reasonable, then none; so when will we get to 1p?
Sorgam 12y ago
Even if computers never save the passengers in these emergencies, as long as they do save them from more pilot error emergencies then it's worth it. Sure the Hudson river passengers may have died, but at the same time the 9/11, Air France, Malaysia Airlines, etc ones may have lived. Hell, you could even have no improvement in safety anywhere and it might still be a good idea. Flying is already so safe that there's no harm in doubling the fatality rate. New technology doesn't always have to improve everything to be worthwhile. This is more a political problem - customer fears, unions, regulations, etc.
- quesera 12y ago
  > Flying is already so safe that there's no harm in doubling the fatality rate. The marketing campaign writes itself!

clueless123 12y ago

As a pilot who loves flying, I am sad to say I must agree with the article. Computers are ideally suited to fly planes, statistically will be safer and we like it or not, will be flying most large aircrafts in a future not to distant. (My guess.. 20 years tops)

coldcode 12y ago

Air travel is already safe. Statistics show 1.27 deaths per 100,000 flight hours, or another stat in a single year you have the odds of dying as 1 in 4 million or so. You are more likely to die driving to the airport. How would having no pilots decrease those odds significantly? I would think that any decrease due to a computer doing it better would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations.

Evolved 12y ago
You don't need me to agree but I do agree. Plane travel is immensely safer than car travel. The only reason plane crashes make the news more than car crashes is because of the rarity and the massive casualties (sometimes).
userbinator 12y ago
would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations Indeed, it's always the "unanticipated situations" that cause problems both for humans and computers - and in the case of flying, I think it's better to have some level of automation to reduce human error, but there must always be a manual override. Completely replacing the pilot with innumerable lines of code executed by a computer would be even more dangerous as it's far more likely that a pilot can react intelligently to assess the situation and take manual control of the plane than someone be able to immediately find the bug and fix it, without introducing any new ones, then update the software "on-the-fly" (literally). It's similar to the issues that abstractions cause in software: the more we rely on them to hide details, and the more complex the systems we build as a result, the harder it is to reason about the problems that arise due to something lower down in the stack. "Out of sight, out of mind." Here is a related article about this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...
melling 12y ago
No one said that it wasn't safe. However, why wouldn't we'd still try to improve on good? One commercial crash in one lifetime should be a lot.

jpatokal 12y ago

"Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already." Well, yes, the easy bits. The problem is that you still need pilots when things don't go exactly to plan, and they never do: http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/ http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/ This is not to say that passenger planes can't be automated someday, but we're nowhere near there yet.

DigitalSea 12y ago

I do not know how I feel about this. I realise that a modern day plane basically flies itself once it reaches cruise altitude what is referred to as fly-by-wire. However, the notion that pilots are not needed or do nothing on planes is ridiculous. Are we forgetting that it was a pilot in 2009 on US Airways Flight 1549 that safely landed the plane after striking a flock of geese during its initial climbout only to be ditched into the Hudson River shortly after. If a pilot was not in the plane at the time, no computer would have been able to save the plane. Typically a pilot will turn off the autopilot around 1000 feet and then do the rest for descent and subsequent landing. On takeoff, most pilots will fly to around 10,000 feet, some to cruise altitude before turning on the autopilot. There are some tasks on modern day planes that cannot be currently done without a pilot (at least not safely). We have to remember things like autopilot still require manual input from the pilot and cockpit crew to get from its departure point to its destination. A pilot doesn't just fly a plane out of an airport, press a couple of buttons and then do nothing for the rest of the flight, this is a misconception perpetrated by the media and so-called experts who have never flown a plane in their life. Autopilot is merely a tool, much like a machine keeping a patient breathing and their blood flowing in the operating theatre is a tool for surgeons. The machines need to be calibrated, have their data input and be closely monitored much like a pilot does on a plane, even with autopilot engaged. While I applaud the forward thinking from people like Steve Jurvetson, statements like "Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already" would be strongly disagreed with any pilot you ask. No two flights are the same and all flights are made up of individual and manual decisions from the pilot and crew. If a pilotless plane were something that could be a reality, the airline industry which has been struggling for years now to keep costs down amidst rising fuel costs would have already partially integrated this or started to cut down on the number of pilots they hire. I would like to see a pilotless plane decide what to do when the landing gear fails and an emergency landing needs to be made. I would like to see what happens when a tire blows on a high-speed take off and the plane has to make an emergency landing, or what happens when a plane has to make an emergency detour over rocky terrain. You would still need people to operate these planes remotely, what happens when contact is lost with a plane and it finds itself flying without a pilot at 35,000 feet who can manually take control of the plane and land it? Is Steve forgetting that a pilot would effectively be replaced with someone in a call centre type building sitting at a computer terminal remotely programming commands and programming things like runway codes and other things into the plane? Some things just can't and should never be replaced. Is modern day technology meant to replace doctors? Every time a new device intended to help keep a patient alive is created, is its intent to aide or replace a doctor? Of course not. People would never agree with replacing doctors with machines completely. Looking to eliminate drivers on the ground is one thing, because ground transportation is far more dangerous than air transportation. I agree with driverless cars because we already have the data and vehicle trips thanks to mapping data and technology mean they are predictable to a certain degree. Air travel is the safest kind of travel there is, fatalities and accidents have been consistently going down year after year, the number of accidents with fatalities in the last 10 years on Western commercial airlines can be counted with both hands. Replacing pilots in commercial aircraft is something that will not happen in my lifetime, or perhaps ever. It is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Not everything can or should be automated for the sake of automating them.

Animats 12y ago

Not yet, but a decade or two out, maybe. It requires much better sensors. For one thing, you need all the gear for automatic driving to get from the runway to the gate. Landing on an airport without ground aids may be necessary in an emergency. What we'll probably see first is larger one-pilot aircraft, able to land themselves in case of pilot failure. Also, unpiloted fighter jets are almost inevitable, simply because modern airframes can pull more Gs than pilots can stand. Boeing is modifying old F-16 aircraft into the QF-16, which is unmanned. These were originally intended for target practice, but DARPA is interested in using them for other purposes.

Evolved 12y ago
The QF-16s are unmanned but they are not computer-controlled. I believe the argument here is for computer-controlled airliners not remotely piloted ones. After what happened to one of our Scan Eagle UAVs[1], the last thing we need is the tragic loss of life and PR nightmare of an unmanned commercial airliner getting hacked and crashed. [1]http://rt.com/news/iran-drone-hacked-downed-353/ http://rt.com/news/iran-drone-hacked-downed-353/
neurotech1 12y ago
QF-16 is "remote piloted" not unpiloted. I don't think the QF-16 has more than basic autopilot (hold heading and altitude) integrated. This is partly due to the QF-16As being Block 15 jets.

speeq 12y ago

Steve Jurvetson wants to disband the TSA. The following text is copied from his post: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/315439026 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/315439026 --- I focused on scenarios for removing all security checkpoints and delays from a customer perspective. Imagine checking in at a kiosk to get your boarding pass, and going though no security lines to board the plane. Bring anything you want with you, but know that the flight is under video surveillance, like retail stores today. I assumed technologies that work in rudimentary form today and will benefit from Moore’s Law. (The only 12-year forecast that I felt confident about is the continuation of the 100-year abstraction of Moore’s Law, bringing a 256x computational advance by 2018). So, I started with the assumption that computer-controlled flight would be possible. It’s a pretty safe assumption given what we already have today. With no cockpit, everything changes. The potential for harm is greatly reduced if the plane cannot be navigated from within. No hijacking. No use of the plane as a weapon. Bombs become the only threat, and a reduced one. Personal weapons? A gun or knife-fight could do more damage in a restaurant, or many large group gatherings. Why bother with a plane where criminal activity will be recorded, and the only people harmed are on board? As for bombs, passive sniffers in a free flowing airport gateway are more plausible than detecting improvised weapons than could be used against a pilot. At the airport, a quick fingerprint biometric would be a natural way to get a boarding pass (as 12 million people have already done in Florida to get access to an amusement park). So even smuggled bombs would have more capture and downside risk for a terrorist cell than other targets. Pie-in-sky ideas: hardening a UAV to bombs should be easier than current planes; smaller planes could lower risk; luggage could fly separately; biologic weapon sensors could trigger a flight path to quarantine, etc.

robertmrangel 12y ago
then somehow someone hacks you fkd

ghshephard 12y ago

I've always wondered why we don't have more sophisticated autopilots for trains. I recognize the importance of having staff on a train to deal with a lot of the engineering, break, track and other equipment issues, but It's unclear to me why the actual driving (braking/acceleration) of the trains is still done by (often bored out of their skulls) train operators. I'm guessing the big element that was missing was sensing track obstacles and braking accordingly - in Singapore/Dubai they have doors limiting access to the track, and in vancouver they have (tending to failure in the winter) track sensors to see if anyone has hopped onto the track.

mpweiher 12y ago

Obligatory reference to "Children of the Magenta Line" http://independentflightinstructors.com/instructors/2011/11/children-of-the-magenta-line/ http://independentflightinstructors.com/instructors/2011/11/... (Automation systems typically tell the pilot where to go with a magenta line, on the G1000 systems I am used to it's an indicator of GPS navigation) From the opening line: "as we look at this accident history, we find that in 68% of these accidents, Automation Dependency played a significant part". So automation certainly is not the solution currently, at least not by itself. It handles a lot of the routine very well, but not non-routine situations, which happen frequently enough. Big events like Captain Sullenberger's Hudson landing have been mentioned, but there are many other smaller situations that occur on a regular basis. On the other hand, automation has been a crucial part of making commercial aviation so incredibly safe and accidents so rare that we no longer really have a statistically relevant sample base. That's an enormous achievement, but automation is only part of the story. The current amazing safety record has been achieved with the current consensus/compromise setup: humans + machines. Most of the problems that happen nowadays seem to happen due to problems at the man+machine interface. Asiana 214 for example would have been fine as a fully automated approach just as much as a fully hand-flown approach, but confusions between the automation and the pilots caused a crash. However, looking at those statistics and saying "we must remove one element" is fallacious, simply because the statistics do not show how many crashes were prevented by having that element aboard. So while these sorts of radical proposals sound good and appear to make a lot of sense when not examined too closely, I would be very surprised if the objectively best solution is not the combination that we have, refined further to smooth out problems at the computer/human interface. Automated trains and cars have been mentioned as examples. Planes are fundamentally different, because with any surface bound vehicle you can, in an emergency, just stop and wait for help. For a train, that's literally it. For a car, you'd probably want to pull over somewhere safe, but if worse comes to worse you can stop in place and hope everyone around you stops as well or avoids you. If you "stop" a plane in flight, everyone on board dies. You have to actively land the plane on a suitable surface at suitable speed and orientation, arguably the hardest part of flying. That's also one reason why requirements for airplane engines are so different than for cars: if a car engine dies, you pull over. If a plane engine dies, you also die unless you find a good place to land in the next couple of seconds or minutes.