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> 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 drea
by 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.
- icebraining 12y agoI disagree. The physics of flying the plane are the same regardless of who is flying it, and we can have as much training data as we want. Unlike with early aviation, you know have a base metric to measure against (human pilots), and so you can detect and analyze when the automated pilot decides differently and why, all in a simulated environment.
- aaronem 12y agoIf simulation were perfect, no one would need real flying hours for licensure or type qualification.
- icebraining 12y agoThey aren't perfect for humans, who can't replace their eyes for direct video feeds and their internal ears for accelerometer readings. It's hard to simulate a plane for a human, because you need to make physical stuff that acts and sounds and feels like the real thing. For computers, the same isn't true, because you can inject a recorder between its sensors and its "brain" and then disconnect the sensors wholesale and feed input data directly using just software.
- eric_h 12y agoAgreed, but part of the benefit of real flying hours is to expose the human pilot to situations of fear and stress (and to learn how to deal with that). A computer, on the other hand, has no need to be trained to deal with those particular emotions.