10 ms·

Planes Without Pilots

66 points by carlchenet 12y ago

rlpb 12y ago
So instead of an environment where terrorists have to individually hijack individual aircraft and overpower the pilots, we're going to have an environment where terrorists can crash multiple planes at once with a single hack? I get the impression that we'll be swapping low frequency incidents that kill hundreds with even lower frequency incidents that kill magnitudes more instead. But the frequency will be so low that we'll pretend it doesn't exist and slowly cut down on safeguards and failsafe mechanisms until the first corresponding catastrophic incident occurs.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  depends on how paranoid we want to get, still I think it is easier to hack a pilot than a computer. with a computer system you could have 3 or more systems all getting a vote before action is taken and each of those 3 could be written by 3 separate companies using unique security and code. all sorts of fun could be had trying to make a system unassailable by bad guys but in the end, if someone wants to cause harm they will. if they wanted to kill more people the plane would never leave the ground, likely you don't need a plane at all, those luggage areas are very crowded at peak hours
  - rlpb 12y ago
    > ...with a computer system you could have 3 or more systems all getting a vote before action is taken and each of those 3 could be written by 3 separate companies using unique security and code. You could have this. But what are the chances that this will happen in practice, instead of a general reduction in this kind of measure in the interests of cost-cutting? Humans are notoriously bad in assessing risk for unlikely events. If an accident hasn't happened, then this tends to become a justification to compromise and cut costs even when the sample size is too small.
jkot 12y ago
Great, now single person will crash thousands of airplanes. I will trust pilot over agency, because his ass is in the airplane.
ghostberry 12y ago
Some of you seem to be worrying this would allow terrorists to crash a thousand aircraft at once. I don't think that's likely. Why would you even make this software accessible from the ground? On the plane, you replace the pilot with software that does the pilot's job. Built into it, you have a bunch of rules, such as don't fly out of range of a place to land, don't fly into terrain, don't fly into other aircraft, etc.. All these safety rules are fixed and can only be modified by engineers on the ground. The only orders that the plane receives from the ground are fly from here, to there at altitude X. If terrorists hack air traffic control and send all aircraft out to sea, the planes will detect they don't have sufficient fuel for the journey, and will turn back. If the planes detect they're flying too close to other aircraft, they will turn away. All terrorists would be able to do in this situation, is cost a lot of time and money.
- melling 12y ago
  I don't think it's likely that a pilot would commit suicide by crashing a plane either.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    He should have never been in a position to execute such a mass murder. The EU has now changed their rules on cockpit safety.
    - uptown 12y ago
      I'm convinced a determined pilot or co-pilot could crash most planes, even with another person in the cockpit. Their rule is better, but I don't believe it eliminates the problem.
      - happyscrappy 12y ago
        The copilot specifically researched and exploited a weakness in EU cockpit access controls. It is good that they have adopted US style protocols but sadly a little too late.
javindo 12y ago
Whilst I am a huge advocate of advancing research in AI, I think we are a very long way off it being safely feasible in flight. Flight is a process so insanely complex and susceptible to random change and failure that we simply don't have the requisite provable AI in place yet to support it. A good example of where, even the highest level of automation in an aircraft, failed to assist in an emergency was Qantas Flight 32 [1]. A physical failure on the plane caused sensor and control failures, something rendering AI almost completely useless. Admittedly, humans can also have failures and this has lead to many crashes before, however humans have also used exemplary skill, experience, and abstract problem solving to correct mechanical failures in aeroplanes countless other times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32
- DennisP 12y ago
  How about this: every crew member has a wireless button. If two of them push the button, the AI irrevocably takes over and lands the plane at the nearest airport. Pilot locks self in cockpit and heads for the mountain? Push the button. If the AI would crash the plane one time in a thousand, and the pilot would intentionally crash the plane one time in a million, then this system reduces risk to one in a billion. It helps against terrorists too. They have to disable almost the entire crew at once, or they'll have a nice leisurely ride to a waiting SWAT team.
  - frik 12y ago
    Yes, good idea. But the ground control should then supervise the AI of the aircraft and takes over control if needed. Otherwise a sensor defects could have consequences, like Lufthansa Flight 1829.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      If you allow external control, there's also risk of an external hack. It might work out if external control is only possible after the button is pushed; that would still allow for a hack coordinated with onboard attackers, but maybe that's giving terrorists too much credit. But I'd be happy relying on the steep odds against hardware failure happening on the same flight as human attack, as long as we can keep those variables reasonably independent.
infinotize 12y ago
This topic resurfaces every so often, usually with no particular context, but now as a knee-jerk after the horrible and preventable Germanwings incident. Here is Patrick Smith's (formerly of Salon's Ask the Pilot column) comment from the NYT article: >>> I'm an airline pilot, air travel blogger and author. This pilotless planes discussion is something that comes up all the time, and it never fails to raise my blood pressure. One of the main issues is that people greatly misunderstand the capabilities of EXISTING cockpit automation, and have a vastly exaggerated sense of what it can do -- the result of articles similar to this one, which take at face value the claims of researchers, aerospace academics and tech aficionados who often have little sense of the operational realities of commercial flying. Over and over and over we hear about how "automatic" planes are. Yet in truth flying remains a very hands-on operation subject to tremendous amounts of pilot input. It's perhaps a different KIND of input than in the old days: instead of gripping the steering yoke as would've been the case in the 1930s, you're working the various autoflight components, flight management system, etc. But the automation only does what the pilots TELL it to do: what, when, where and how. The other day I worked a flight up from the Caribbean. We had bad weather the whole way, a holding pattern, and had to fly a low-visibility Cat-2 approach. The cockpit was so busy that after we landed my voice was hoarse. Now imagine somebody dealing with the complexities of such a flight from a room thousands of miles away, with dozens of other planes stacked up. Patrick Smith Boston
- return0 12y ago
  How much of this work job could be automated? And how much is not being automated, precisely because people believe it shouldn't be automated, while it can readily be? In the case of germanwings, could an emergency system be in place that would just not let the plane go near the ground when its data made it certain that it was riding onto a mountain? Shouldn't we be asking for more automation in planes/cars/ships instead of dismissing it? I think these are valid questions, regardless if they upset some seasoned pilots.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    I think the more important question is, what happens when the automation fails in some way (e.g. sensor problems)? If the pilot cannot override the automation, then you end up with planes that fly themselves into the ground (see http://avherald.com/h?article=47d74074 http://avherald.com/h?article=47d74074 for a recent example of this - fortunately the pilots did figure out how to override the automation and regain control.) If he/she can, then 4U9525 would've crashed anyway. The more automation there is, the more edge cases and failure modes there will be, and another danger is the complacency it can encourage: the less often pilots have to manually fly the plane, the more likely it is they'll forget how to do it when they really need to.
socialist_coder 12y ago
Wow, for being on HN this thread sure is filled with Luddites. Humans are inherently more error prone than computers, once properly programmed and designed. AI and machines might not be better now, but they will be eventually. And the only way to get there is to start small and work our way up. In my opinion, right now we're at the limit of safety provided by letting humans run things. We can't really make those systems more safe than they are right now. We need a paradigm shift. Letting computers run the show is uncharted territory. Right now, AI pilots/drivers are in their infancy. Comparing an infant to a mature system is a short sighted comparison. You need to take the long view- what would these systems look like after a decade or two of iteration? It's like not anyone is saying we should do this RIGHT NOW WITH NO GOING BACK! Of course not. Let's try it in drones. Let's try it in cargo planes. Let's try it in military planes. If it ever seems like it won't work, we can always change course. But not even wanting to try??? Come on, that isn't in our DNA.
- tormeh 12y ago
  >properly programmed and designed And therein lies the problem. HN commenters know how fragile technology is.
- aaronem 12y ago
  > We can't really make those systems more safe than they are right now. True, more or less. > We need a paradigm shift. Really? Perfect safety is a pipe dream, and the rule of diminishing returns applies here as everywhere else. Compared to modern aviation, the early days were just chock-full of accidents and incidents, because we hadn't encountered the 90% cases in order to solve them. Happily, we've solved those cases and more, which is how we come to have the luxury of confusing edge and corner cases, like deliberate CFIT (e.g. Germanwings 9525), with major safety issues. Introducing full-on, pilotless cockpit automation is going to have the same high incident rate that early aviation did, for the same reasons -- we just don't know enough about the problem domain to account for the 90% cases, so we're going to have to see them fall out of the sky and hit the ground before we know how to solve them. And, of course, there's also the fact that pilotless aviation can't actually solve all the edge and corner cases of piloted aviation, but only some of them. It'd make deliberate CFIT a thing of the past, sure! But deliberate CFIT, and things like it, aren't the only reasons why a commercial aircraft falls out of the sky. Sometimes it's maintenance error; sometimes it's equipment failure; sometimes we don't even know what happened. Pilotless aviation won't address all of these cases. Eventually, I don't doubt, we would achieve the same excellent safety record with pilotless aircraft that we see right now with piloted ones. The question boils down to whether, in order to address a subset of the corner cases in piloted aviation, it's worth accepting the costly process of working out the 90% cases in pilotless aviation. I really do not think it's Luddism to regard the tradeoff there as not worth making.
omegant 12y ago
Commercial pilot here. I´m currently flying A320 like the Germanwings one. I´ve also flown B737-800 and MD-80. Every time there is an accident or a tragedy the human factor steps in. Everybody thinks that replacing the human factor with technology will improve safety hugely. I can understand the point, but I don´t see that happening in some decades. Airplanes have a problem that automatic cars or trains don't have, you can not failsafe them with a "STOP EVERYTHING NOW & HERE" system. In a case of fire or any other big emergency or computer failure, you simply perform an emergency stop to a side and you are out of your self driving car in 10 sec (the worst could be that your bricked car is now creating a traffic jam), unfortunately that's not the case with an A320. It´s true that we don´t manually fly the airplane most of the time, and that 80 or 90% of flights are mostly routine that could be automatized somehow. But there are certain days, certain flights, certain airports (and this can be the same Airport that yesterday was perfectly standard) were you need to make decisions that a computer can not make. When you start encountering big thunderstorms in the radar, and not a possible way out, short final wind-shear or other limit edge operation, strange behavior or malfunction of the on board computers, systems or instruments, corrupted or missing navigation or performance data (or flying to Russia were you can not trust , in other words, unexpected situations were there are not clear rules to apply, just your experience an understanding of the basics, and a bit of that Capt. Kirk essence somebody named in other comment. You need a really powerful and independent AI to face the fuzzy decisions that need to be made in a weekly basis. This AI needs to have independent control over the flight computers and controls, independent artificial vision, independent navigation skills not related to the normal rute computer, and a way to know when to skip safety rules completely. If you try to substitute it with a simple AI, you end with problems like the one that didn't make the general media but could have ended with a Lufthansa crashing on the Pyrenees this last November, if it hadn't been pilot intervention ( http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/558483-iced-aoa-sensors-send-a321-into-deep-dive.html http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/558483-iced-aoa-sensors-s... ). The failure was of a system that exists purely to prevent pilot error. This system almost sent the A320 in to the ground. Just because the pilots were at the cabin and disconnected the air data computers a tragedy was averted. Unfortunately this happens often enough, but doesn't make the news. The A320 model is 30 years old, it had at the beginning a number of fatal accidents due to the same computers that were intended to improve safety (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148 ), but we are still dealing with automatic errors like the one of the Lufthansa ( the angle of attack fins get locked and the computers think that you are in a stall, the auto correct the stall with a dive that you can not correct manually, you need to disconnect 2 of the 3 air data computers to disable this saving behavior). Of course there is also a whole lot of money to be lost in sales if a model is declared dangerous, so complex accidents tend to be attributed mainly to the pilots, after all they can no longer give their opinion after the crash. If something, the tendency has gone too far in to automatizing the flight. Flying manually tends to be less and less part of the requirements of big carriers, getting to a dangerous point: in some countries in Asia piloting skills are almost non existent (Korea, Vietnam, China). In China for example (at least in a couple of Airlines where a number of friends are flying) flight officers are not even allowed to land or take off the airplane, that means that if the captain has a heart attack there is a hight probability of the plane crashing. Once this flight officers are promoted to captain, they'll have almost no manual skills for flying the airplane. This doesn't mean that safety systems are not useful or necessary, they really are, and they must be improved and to help the safety of the operation, but they can not be an end in themselves. Returning to making a plane pilot free, you may remove humans from the inside of the plane, but they are going to be designed, build, programed, operated and maintained by humans in a human environment. I don´t see how you are going to get rid of the human error factor any time soon even if you had the perfect AI right now. Remotely controlling or even assisting pilots is a big no no, way too easy to perform a huge attack of docens of planes at a time, using just a laptop and some human engineering.
mcguire 12y ago
"NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. "In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to 'beam' into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse." As I currently understand the procedures, the pilot and co-pilot of commercial aircraft alternate responsibility for the aircraft during their work-day. For example, if the pilot takes off on one flight, the co-pilot will perform the take-off on the next. Removing the co-pilot from that alternation would significantly increase the workload of the pilot.
- TrevorJ 12y ago
  Seems like that would open up the attack surface a whole heck of a lot since ill-doers wouldn't need physical access.
mdekkers 12y ago
Bring on the robot pilot overlords! I, for one, would feel significantly safer with a computer flying a modern large capacity aircraft, linked with a computer organising the overall air-space. Accidents can, and will, still happen, but I am convinced that they will be less frequent, and not due to stupid reasons, like homicidal pilots. We can always have a team of stand by remote operators around the clock that could take over a flight if need be. Queue handwringing pilots complaining that they cannot possible be replaced...

66 points by carlchenet 12y ago

rlpb 12y ago

So instead of an environment where terrorists have to individually hijack individual aircraft and overpower the pilots, we're going to have an environment where terrorists can crash multiple planes at once with a single hack? I get the impression that we'll be swapping low frequency incidents that kill hundreds with even lower frequency incidents that kill magnitudes more instead. But the frequency will be so low that we'll pretend it doesn't exist and slowly cut down on safeguards and failsafe mechanisms until the first corresponding catastrophic incident occurs.

Shivetya 12y ago
depends on how paranoid we want to get, still I think it is easier to hack a pilot than a computer. with a computer system you could have 3 or more systems all getting a vote before action is taken and each of those 3 could be written by 3 separate companies using unique security and code. all sorts of fun could be had trying to make a system unassailable by bad guys but in the end, if someone wants to cause harm they will. if they wanted to kill more people the plane would never leave the ground, likely you don't need a plane at all, those luggage areas are very crowded at peak hours
- rlpb 12y ago
  > ...with a computer system you could have 3 or more systems all getting a vote before action is taken and each of those 3 could be written by 3 separate companies using unique security and code. You could have this. But what are the chances that this will happen in practice, instead of a general reduction in this kind of measure in the interests of cost-cutting? Humans are notoriously bad in assessing risk for unlikely events. If an accident hasn't happened, then this tends to become a justification to compromise and cut costs even when the sample size is too small.

jkot 12y ago

Great, now single person will crash thousands of airplanes. I will trust pilot over agency, because his ass is in the airplane.

ghostberry 12y ago

Some of you seem to be worrying this would allow terrorists to crash a thousand aircraft at once. I don't think that's likely. Why would you even make this software accessible from the ground? On the plane, you replace the pilot with software that does the pilot's job. Built into it, you have a bunch of rules, such as don't fly out of range of a place to land, don't fly into terrain, don't fly into other aircraft, etc.. All these safety rules are fixed and can only be modified by engineers on the ground. The only orders that the plane receives from the ground are fly from here, to there at altitude X. If terrorists hack air traffic control and send all aircraft out to sea, the planes will detect they don't have sufficient fuel for the journey, and will turn back. If the planes detect they're flying too close to other aircraft, they will turn away. All terrorists would be able to do in this situation, is cost a lot of time and money.

melling 12y ago
I don't think it's likely that a pilot would commit suicide by crashing a plane either.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  He should have never been in a position to execute such a mass murder. The EU has now changed their rules on cockpit safety.
  - uptown 12y ago
    I'm convinced a determined pilot or co-pilot could crash most planes, even with another person in the cockpit. Their rule is better, but I don't believe it eliminates the problem.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      The copilot specifically researched and exploited a weakness in EU cockpit access controls. It is good that they have adopted US style protocols but sadly a little too late.

javindo 12y ago

Whilst I am a huge advocate of advancing research in AI, I think we are a very long way off it being safely feasible in flight. Flight is a process so insanely complex and susceptible to random change and failure that we simply don't have the requisite provable AI in place yet to support it. A good example of where, even the highest level of automation in an aircraft, failed to assist in an emergency was Qantas Flight 32 [1]. A physical failure on the plane caused sensor and control failures, something rendering AI almost completely useless. Admittedly, humans can also have failures and this has lead to many crashes before, however humans have also used exemplary skill, experience, and abstract problem solving to correct mechanical failures in aeroplanes countless other times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

DennisP 12y ago
How about this: every crew member has a wireless button. If two of them push the button, the AI irrevocably takes over and lands the plane at the nearest airport. Pilot locks self in cockpit and heads for the mountain? Push the button. If the AI would crash the plane one time in a thousand, and the pilot would intentionally crash the plane one time in a million, then this system reduces risk to one in a billion. It helps against terrorists too. They have to disable almost the entire crew at once, or they'll have a nice leisurely ride to a waiting SWAT team.
- frik 12y ago
  Yes, good idea. But the ground control should then supervise the AI of the aircraft and takes over control if needed. Otherwise a sensor defects could have consequences, like Lufthansa Flight 1829.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    If you allow external control, there's also risk of an external hack. It might work out if external control is only possible after the button is pushed; that would still allow for a hack coordinated with onboard attackers, but maybe that's giving terrorists too much credit. But I'd be happy relying on the steep odds against hardware failure happening on the same flight as human attack, as long as we can keep those variables reasonably independent.

infinotize 12y ago

This topic resurfaces every so often, usually with no particular context, but now as a knee-jerk after the horrible and preventable Germanwings incident. Here is Patrick Smith's (formerly of Salon's Ask the Pilot column) comment from the NYT article: >>> I'm an airline pilot, air travel blogger and author. This pilotless planes discussion is something that comes up all the time, and it never fails to raise my blood pressure. One of the main issues is that people greatly misunderstand the capabilities of EXISTING cockpit automation, and have a vastly exaggerated sense of what it can do -- the result of articles similar to this one, which take at face value the claims of researchers, aerospace academics and tech aficionados who often have little sense of the operational realities of commercial flying. Over and over and over we hear about how "automatic" planes are. Yet in truth flying remains a very hands-on operation subject to tremendous amounts of pilot input. It's perhaps a different KIND of input than in the old days: instead of gripping the steering yoke as would've been the case in the 1930s, you're working the various autoflight components, flight management system, etc. But the automation only does what the pilots TELL it to do: what, when, where and how. The other day I worked a flight up from the Caribbean. We had bad weather the whole way, a holding pattern, and had to fly a low-visibility Cat-2 approach. The cockpit was so busy that after we landed my voice was hoarse. Now imagine somebody dealing with the complexities of such a flight from a room thousands of miles away, with dozens of other planes stacked up. Patrick Smith Boston

return0 12y ago
How much of this work job could be automated? And how much is not being automated, precisely because people believe it shouldn't be automated, while it can readily be? In the case of germanwings, could an emergency system be in place that would just not let the plane go near the ground when its data made it certain that it was riding onto a mountain? Shouldn't we be asking for more automation in planes/cars/ships instead of dismissing it? I think these are valid questions, regardless if they upset some seasoned pilots.
- userbinator 12y ago
  I think the more important question is, what happens when the automation fails in some way (e.g. sensor problems)? If the pilot cannot override the automation, then you end up with planes that fly themselves into the ground (see http://avherald.com/h?article=47d74074 http://avherald.com/h?article=47d74074 for a recent example of this - fortunately the pilots did figure out how to override the automation and regain control.) If he/she can, then 4U9525 would've crashed anyway. The more automation there is, the more edge cases and failure modes there will be, and another danger is the complacency it can encourage: the less often pilots have to manually fly the plane, the more likely it is they'll forget how to do it when they really need to.

socialist_coder 12y ago

Wow, for being on HN this thread sure is filled with Luddites. Humans are inherently more error prone than computers, once properly programmed and designed. AI and machines might not be better now, but they will be eventually. And the only way to get there is to start small and work our way up. In my opinion, right now we're at the limit of safety provided by letting humans run things. We can't really make those systems more safe than they are right now. We need a paradigm shift. Letting computers run the show is uncharted territory. Right now, AI pilots/drivers are in their infancy. Comparing an infant to a mature system is a short sighted comparison. You need to take the long view- what would these systems look like after a decade or two of iteration? It's like not anyone is saying we should do this RIGHT NOW WITH NO GOING BACK! Of course not. Let's try it in drones. Let's try it in cargo planes. Let's try it in military planes. If it ever seems like it won't work, we can always change course. But not even wanting to try??? Come on, that isn't in our DNA.

tormeh 12y ago
>properly programmed and designed And therein lies the problem. HN commenters know how fragile technology is.
aaronem 12y ago
> We can't really make those systems more safe than they are right now. True, more or less. > We need a paradigm shift. Really? Perfect safety is a pipe dream, and the rule of diminishing returns applies here as everywhere else. Compared to modern aviation, the early days were just chock-full of accidents and incidents, because we hadn't encountered the 90% cases in order to solve them. Happily, we've solved those cases and more, which is how we come to have the luxury of confusing edge and corner cases, like deliberate CFIT (e.g. Germanwings 9525), with major safety issues. Introducing full-on, pilotless cockpit automation is going to have the same high incident rate that early aviation did, for the same reasons -- we just don't know enough about the problem domain to account for the 90% cases, so we're going to have to see them fall out of the sky and hit the ground before we know how to solve them. And, of course, there's also the fact that pilotless aviation can't actually solve all the edge and corner cases of piloted aviation, but only some of them. It'd make deliberate CFIT a thing of the past, sure! But deliberate CFIT, and things like it, aren't the only reasons why a commercial aircraft falls out of the sky. Sometimes it's maintenance error; sometimes it's equipment failure; sometimes we don't even know what happened. Pilotless aviation won't address all of these cases. Eventually, I don't doubt, we would achieve the same excellent safety record with pilotless aircraft that we see right now with piloted ones. The question boils down to whether, in order to address a subset of the corner cases in piloted aviation, it's worth accepting the costly process of working out the 90% cases in pilotless aviation. I really do not think it's Luddism to regard the tradeoff there as not worth making.

omegant 12y ago

Commercial pilot here. I´m currently flying A320 like the Germanwings one. I´ve also flown B737-800 and MD-80. Every time there is an accident or a tragedy the human factor steps in. Everybody thinks that replacing the human factor with technology will improve safety hugely. I can understand the point, but I don´t see that happening in some decades. Airplanes have a problem that automatic cars or trains don't have, you can not failsafe them with a "STOP EVERYTHING NOW & HERE" system. In a case of fire or any other big emergency or computer failure, you simply perform an emergency stop to a side and you are out of your self driving car in 10 sec (the worst could be that your bricked car is now creating a traffic jam), unfortunately that's not the case with an A320. It´s true that we don´t manually fly the airplane most of the time, and that 80 or 90% of flights are mostly routine that could be automatized somehow. But there are certain days, certain flights, certain airports (and this can be the same Airport that yesterday was perfectly standard) were you need to make decisions that a computer can not make. When you start encountering big thunderstorms in the radar, and not a possible way out, short final wind-shear or other limit edge operation, strange behavior or malfunction of the on board computers, systems or instruments, corrupted or missing navigation or performance data (or flying to Russia were you can not trust , in other words, unexpected situations were there are not clear rules to apply, just your experience an understanding of the basics, and a bit of that Capt. Kirk essence somebody named in other comment. You need a really powerful and independent AI to face the fuzzy decisions that need to be made in a weekly basis. This AI needs to have independent control over the flight computers and controls, independent artificial vision, independent navigation skills not related to the normal rute computer, and a way to know when to skip safety rules completely. If you try to substitute it with a simple AI, you end with problems like the one that didn't make the general media but could have ended with a Lufthansa crashing on the Pyrenees this last November, if it hadn't been pilot intervention ( http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/558483-iced-aoa-sensors-send-a321-into-deep-dive.html http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/558483-iced-aoa-sensors-s... ). The failure was of a system that exists purely to prevent pilot error. This system almost sent the A320 in to the ground. Just because the pilots were at the cabin and disconnected the air data computers a tragedy was averted. Unfortunately this happens often enough, but doesn't make the news. The A320 model is 30 years old, it had at the beginning a number of fatal accidents due to the same computers that were intended to improve safety (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148 ), but we are still dealing with automatic errors like the one of the Lufthansa ( the angle of attack fins get locked and the computers think that you are in a stall, the auto correct the stall with a dive that you can not correct manually, you need to disconnect 2 of the 3 air data computers to disable this saving behavior). Of course there is also a whole lot of money to be lost in sales if a model is declared dangerous, so complex accidents tend to be attributed mainly to the pilots, after all they can no longer give their opinion after the crash. If something, the tendency has gone too far in to automatizing the flight. Flying manually tends to be less and less part of the requirements of big carriers, getting to a dangerous point: in some countries in Asia piloting skills are almost non existent (Korea, Vietnam, China). In China for example (at least in a couple of Airlines where a number of friends are flying) flight officers are not even allowed to land or take off the airplane, that means that if the captain has a heart attack there is a hight probability of the plane crashing. Once this flight officers are promoted to captain, they'll have almost no manual skills for flying the airplane. This doesn't mean that safety systems are not useful or necessary, they really are, and they must be improved and to help the safety of the operation, but they can not be an end in themselves. Returning to making a plane pilot free, you may remove humans from the inside of the plane, but they are going to be designed, build, programed, operated and maintained by humans in a human environment. I don´t see how you are going to get rid of the human error factor any time soon even if you had the perfect AI right now. Remotely controlling or even assisting pilots is a big no no, way too easy to perform a huge attack of docens of planes at a time, using just a laptop and some human engineering.

mcguire 12y ago

"NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. "In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to 'beam' into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse." As I currently understand the procedures, the pilot and co-pilot of commercial aircraft alternate responsibility for the aircraft during their work-day. For example, if the pilot takes off on one flight, the co-pilot will perform the take-off on the next. Removing the co-pilot from that alternation would significantly increase the workload of the pilot.

TrevorJ 12y ago
Seems like that would open up the attack surface a whole heck of a lot since ill-doers wouldn't need physical access.

mdekkers 12y ago

Bring on the robot pilot overlords! I, for one, would feel significantly safer with a computer flying a modern large capacity aircraft, linked with a computer organising the overall air-space. Accidents can, and will, still happen, but I am convinced that they will be less frequent, and not due to stupid reasons, like homicidal pilots. We can always have a team of stand by remote operators around the clock that could take over a flight if need be. Queue handwringing pilots complaining that they cannot possible be replaced...