Planes Without Pilots 460
HughPickens.com writes: John Markoff writes in the NY Times that in the aftermath of the co-pilot crashing a Germanwings plane into a mountain, aviation experts are beginning to wonder if human pilots are really necessary aboard commercial planes. Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit and government agencies are already experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators. 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. "Could we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today's systems?" asks Cummings. "The answer is yes."
Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, "It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations." The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: "A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble." Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own," says Amy Pritchett. "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.""
Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, "It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations." The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: "A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble." Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own," says Amy Pritchett. "If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.""
And airplanes without passengers... (Score:2)
'Nuff said
Perfect security (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone want to guarantee 100% perfect security for ANY wireless communication? Because if we have remotely piloted airliners (either because there's no pilot, or the pilot is suicidal) someone WILL hack into it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone want to guarantee 100% perfect security for ANY wireless communication? Because if we have remotely piloted airliners (either because there's no pilot, or the pilot is suicidal) someone WILL hack into it.
Or 100% reliability for starters: it's 2015 and yet still you can easily lose your WiFi connection while sitting only 3 feet away from the access point.
Re:Perfect security (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. Someone should recommend they not use home wifi routers for the mission-critical communications on commercial airliners.
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>Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
Yes. That's one problem with any sort of mission critical wireless. It can be jammed by people with ill intent.
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Yeah, too bad there's not something called "autopilot" that could take over if communications are lost. Sadly, as we all know, the instant communications are lost, the plane will explode.
Re:Perfect security (Score:4, Interesting)
As I recall, the pilot landed that one safely because the plane had a mechanical backup system (an air turbine) that gave him minimal hydraulic power—and also because he was an experienced glider pilot who probably got more miles out of his starting altitude than most professionals (or computer systems) could have.
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The question is not whether we could build a plane that could fly itself safely, we already build plenty of those, they're called 'drones' and any modern airliner can be specced with options to fly itself from gate to gate on an ordinary day including typical bad weather. The question that is not being properly addresse
Re:Perfect security (Score:5, Interesting)
Jamming not Hacking (Score:5, Interesting)
someone WILL hack into it.
It's worse than that - all they need to do is jam it which would be trivially easy to do. For example if you put powerful transmitters into a van, parked it somewhere on the approach path to a busy airport and turned it on you would suddenly have craft who were on approach lose all control and by the time authorities tracked down the van and shut it off who knows how many planes would have crashed.
Remote control planes with passengers on are a stupendously bad idea. There is no way I'm flying on a plane which is not under the control of someone onboard whose life also depends on the plane landing safely. Even with such a strong motivation as that we have seen disaster happen - how much more likely will it be if the pilots are sitting remotely and have even less at stake? Suddenly things like disgruntled employees crashing planes becomes imaginable.
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Right, as if autoland doesn't exist?
Re:Perfect security (Score:5, Informative)
You have a large high power radio transmission tower (or the ability to jump airgaps into ATC transmission networks), and you also have the ability to break whatever message authentication / validation encryption system that such a remote piloting system would use? Cool! Followup question: are you the NSA, or is there another organization that I need to be worried about? Last question: wouldn't it have been about a hundred times easier for you just to buy a couple MANPADs?
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I wonder, however: How come I get shot down every single time I make a similar comment/observation about autonomous, driverless, manual-control-less cars? It's really not that different.
Anyway.. If they want the ability to remote pilot commercial aircraft, that might not be a bad thing at all in emergency situations, so long as every effort is made to ensure the security of the system against hacking -- but there must still be a human pilot. Otherwise wh
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Instead of having airlines staff the flight deck back up again to previous levels (i.e. reinstating the flight engineer, or adding a third pilot), cue the snake-oil salesmen with the same pitch - irresistible to airlines - which got us into this mess.
"Shame about that last crash...
"You know, you _CAN_ increase safety _AND_ lower costs
"How? Well, for starters, one less pilot on the flight deck...
Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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80% of accidents are pilot error [bbc.com]. I think the further we move toward automation, the better. Getting the pilot physically out of the plane is a major hurdle that one has to step over in that regard.
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That figure must probably be read like "80% of accidents could have been prevented if pilots had reacted in exactly the right way when some unforeseen technical failure occurred ..."
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
No, pilot error means that they didn't do what they were supposed to do in a given predefined situation. And even many of the others were human error, on the ground side. Actual hardware faults as a whole are a very small minority of plane crashes.
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But that is exactly the issue at hand. Sure we can automate the plane, but it still needs to interface with air traffic control. The next thing you know a air traffic controller crashes a plane into a mountain for some psychotic reason.
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Which translates to "The pilot didn't do what they were supposed to do in the predefined situation that took us a month to determine was the case".
In other words, first you have to determine what the situation is, and that's not always trivial, even in retrospect.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
>80% of accidents are pilot error
That doesn't tell the whole story. How many accidents were averted due to human intervention?
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When humans make mistakes, they are generally far more rational and adaptable than a computer when it comes to recognizing them and making corrections. When a computer fucks up, it will usually chug right along on a clearly irrational path until some human steps in and reboots the fucking thing.
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Mod parent very negative.
1) "Pilot error" much of the time means, "A committee of a dozen or more people, spending days to months looking over the evidence, employing a cadre of technical experts and judging with hindsight what should have been done, has concluded that the single person or pair of people should in the few seconds/minutes available have made a different decision which may have led to a better outcome".
In the absence of pilots, this would just be "programmer error" as software doesn't have th
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1. Pilot error is very specifically, the pilot not doing what pilot training says they're supposed to do - and what a computer would have done - in the given, predefined, pre-analyzed situation. Unanticipated situations are not classed as pilot error.
For example, Lauda Air Flight 004. There was a procedure for recovering in the event of an unanticipated thrust reversal event (which occurred on the flight). The pilot carried it out to the best of their ability but was unable to recover before the plane broke
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Air France Flight 296 was crew error [wikipedia.org]. And the body count was "3". The only thing the fly-by-wire system did was prevent their attempt to pull up before they had the speed to actually pull up; the plane was already doomed because they were too close to the trees before they realized their mistake.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
80% of accidents may be due to pilot error, but probably close to 99% of all would-be crashes due system failures do not turn into an accident because of pilot intervention, and therefore never make it into the accident statistics. Take the pilots out, and you'll see at least an order of magnitude more crashes unless technology improves drastically.
I'm a pilot, I've never had a crash (like the vast majority of pilots), but I've had several situations where automation failed (either completely shutting off or doing something unexpected and dangerous) and a crash would have resulted if we hadn't taken over.
In fact, there are lots of crashes that are attributed to pilot error not because the pilots were the only cause for the accident, but because some system failure occurred that should have been handled safely by a well-trained pilot and somehow wasn't. We are expected to handle these problems, so if we don't, it's our fault (and rightly so).
Take Air France 447 for example, airspeed sensors iced up, autopilot disconnected, other flight crews in the past had had the same problem but handled it well, these pilots got confused and crashed. Probably goes into the statistics as pilot error, but without pilots the plane would have crashed anyway. Every time, including on those flights where the crew did handle the situation correctly (even with inadequate procedures for this particular failure at the time) and landed safely.
Another example, the Turkish Airlines flight that crashed short of the runway in Amsterdam. The plane was flying on autopilot, yet it's "pilot error" because the pilots should have immediately reacted when the autothrottles pulled the throttles back to idle and the airspeed decayed rapidly. Caused by a malfunctioning radio altimeter which let the automation think the plane was low above the runway and it was therefore safe to pull the throttles back for touchdown. There's a reason why we have an initial training and a yearly recurrent training for automatic landings. Haven't had the training? Manual landings only.
So no, automation is not safer than human pilots. Not by a long shot, at least not yet. And given the slow pace of technological advancement in aviation, it will be a very long time before it will be.
Take military drones, for example. Their mission is not exactly complicated: in relatively nice weather, take off, fly a predetermined route, drop some bombs, fly back and land. There aren't nearly as many drones as airliners flying around, yet drones crashes happen all the time, it's not even news.
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The simple facts are, accident rates on planes have gone way down as the amount of automation has gone way up. Computers are simply more reliable than pilots. The fact that most crashes come down to pilot error is a big problem, despite how you present it (ground error being probably the next most common). A computer will always follow the checklist for the right response to a given problem ("some system failure occurred that should have been handled safely by a well-trained pilot and somehow wasn't."). Pil
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It would be even more confusing to a remote pilot.
What, you mean the remote pilot would have crashed harder?
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No, meaning that some of the times that the remote pilot got confusing responses, the remote pilot would crash when the local pilot would not.
Possibly true, but there have been plenty of crashes where the on-board pilot was confused by his senses, or in the heat of the moment unable to correctly priotiritize conflicting alarms, where a remote pilot might have better perspective, or more opportunity to as for a second opinion, so I think that could work both ways.
Personally, I would feel safer with a fully automated plane than one that's remotely operated. And that's not even considering the possibility of remotely hijacking the plane or the remote link failing.
On that, we agree. If not fully automated, then at least implement a "refuse to crash" system that just will not allow the pilot to fly a plane into the ground or whatever.
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The plane would calmly throttle up and abort landing, the same way pilots would be trained to do? What do you even think you're saying here?
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
A point very important you make. Automation is great for instances where sensor data is accurate and a proscribed course of action can be safely followed. More automation can be useful in such cases. However, it's the edge cases where the pilot's judgement is needed to safely operate an aircraft. The USAir 1549 is an excellent example, as is United Flight 232. Could a remote pilot glide a 767 to a safe landing, and avoid cars on the abandoned runway that the copilot happened to know existed, as happened with Gimli Glider? As with many highly complicated devices, automation is a great tool to help the operator in routine, and some casualty, operations; however when things go not as planned and a new twist is added to the scenario you need judgement, not rote rules, and judgement is sorely lacking in automation and difficult to do if you are thousand of miles away and only know what the sensor data feed tells you.
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Is a glide path into a river something beyond the capability of automation? I'm skeptical, but this isn't my field.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a technical issue, it's a policy issue: A computer will conclude 'no runways within range, you are all going to die.' A human can conclude 'Screw the procedures, I'm going to try a high-risk controlled crash into a river and hope for the best. No other options.'
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Why wouldn't it go: "no runways in range, consult chart for alternate landing zones"? I'm thinking that the Hudson (or any other large body of water) would be on the alternates chart.
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The problem is that the aircraft is unlikely to be capable of evaluating the safety of those alternate landing zones. It couldn't coordinate with authorities on the ground easily to clear a road, for example, and rivers often have boats on them. It might be possible but it would be pretty hard to program an autopilot to land anywhere other than a runway, which has ILS and other landing aids, in a manner that doesn't sent it crashing into buildings or otherwise just cause a bigger disaster.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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Theoretically, it can do that. Practically, somebody has to figure out all the possible emergency options ahead of time, along with how to rank them by desirability, for the computer to choose one. An experienced pilot can reason through his options based on his experience and knowledge of the actual situation facing him. A computer has to be preprogrammed with all possible options and how to rank them by someone who has to imagine all the possible situations before they happen.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The decision tree to get to the idea of putting the aircraft down onto anything other than a runway with a CAT I, II or III landing system is beyond automation. Without ILS, the computers on board the aircraft had no idea what the ground infront of them looks like, other than "its there".
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Wouldn't an automated plane have a different sensor suite? I don't think we are talking about inflating the automatic pilot from Airplane! and calling it a day.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
What sensor suite would that be? Even military systems find it inordinately difficult to discriminate between ground targets amongst ground clutter, and thats with human guidance.
Currently an aircraft cannot find and airport and land without external input, be it GPS, ILS or other such systems - and thats to a well defined landing point. A computer would have to identify a safe location to ditch, make decisions based on available data and extrapolated data, and then actually perform the ditching.
Another point to make about the Hudson ditching was that it was only successful because the pilot specifically skipped a load of stuff in the checklist and told the co-pilot to fire up the APU, because he knew there wasn't going to be enough electrical power from the engines and RAT to give him full command authority - he would lose things like flaps and spoilers, meaning his options would be much more limited. If he hadn't done that, chances are he wouldn't have made it even to the Hudson.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You are talking about billions of sites across the globe - and sites would be dependent on weather, local conditions, change of use etc etc etc. What if on that fateful day, one of the Hudson's ferries happening to be in the way but there wasn't enough power available to allow the use of the forward radar? What if the field pre-chosen had suddenly turned into a camp site? Or had a combine harvester and a fuel bowser parked in the middle of it. What if the Hudson was iced over?
As for the APU, the issue is that it simply was way down on the checklist - and a lot of things on that checklist can't be done in parallel etc Just because a computer has a speed advantage, doesn't mean it can use it. It was a concious decision from the PIC to fire up the APU out of checklist order. You don't find concious decisions coming from computers.
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"Wouldn't an automated system have "ditch" sites programmed in?"
Yes, if it's programmed to do so.
"It wouldn't need to be smart enough to identify a river - just know that the river is there."
No, the one that needed to be smart enough is the programer, and if the programer is that smart he'd immediately ditch it as an option since he wouldn't now in advance if the river is frozen, deep enough, sustained traffic at the moment of the accident, etc.
The fact is that the automated system would need to be as fast
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
You think he was steering that thing like the Wright Flier? The A320 is a highly automated plane. The decision to land in the Hudson was his, but everything else was fly-by-wire - yes, in glide mode too. You can't overrule it on the A320. Everything involved in keeping the wings level and nose at the gentlest possible angle that wouldn't stall was managed by the flight computer - which is why the plane didn't flip when it hit the water.
The chief engineer of the A320 project actually referred to the plane as "pilot-proof". If Sully had done absolutely nothing from the time the plane lost power, you know what would have happened? Apart from the plane heading to the Hudson, everything else would have been the same. The plane would have done its best to maintain its original trajectory and kept itself stable as long as it could without losing altitude. Then it would automatically have lost just enough altitude to keep it from stalling, keeping itself flying level for as long as physically possible. If Sully in such a situation had started jerking up on the controls trying to get altitude that the plane wasn't capable of achieving, you know what would have happened? Nothing. The plane would have ignored him.
The pilot in a modern plane like the A320 doesn't manage, and isn't even allowed to manage, the finer details of flying. The plane does that. The pilot is only there for general overarching strategy. The plane makes it happen.
Even when crashing.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Fly-by-wire isn't what you think it is. It simply means there are no mechanical linkages.
2) Airbus' computer-over-human approach is no panacea and it has resulted in numerous near-disasters, one of the most recent ones [bfu-web.de].
3) Even Airbus isn't religious about this approach. Read up on Alternate Law and Direct Law [airbusdriver.net].
4) Had Sully not maneuvered USAirways 1549, it'd have landed in the middle of housing [wikimedia.org].
5) Water landings require you to do a flare & float to stall just feet above the water level to minimize airspeed. If he had not done this, the airplane could have easily smashed itself apart, since an A320 power-off glide rate of descent is around 1500 fpm. Water isn't soft at these kinds of speeds you know.
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Sigh,
It looks like you dont know what "fly by wire" is. Fly by wire is simply replacing mechanical controls (as in pneumatics, cables, pulleys and so forth) with electronic ones (as in sensors and solenoids). Modern cars are the same with "drive by wire". It simply means your go pedal isn't attached to
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
But it was. It kept the plane stable within the flight envelope so it wouldn't stall at low speed it flew, limiting the angle of attack to a safe one even when the pilot used his side stick for maximum nose pitch up. It helped to lessen the pilot's workload during the landing.
You can read it all up in the NTSB report of the accident:
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigat... [ntsb.gov]
For example this:
or this:
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Air France 447 was one of those incidents.
But who's to say a remote pilot would have done any worse? Everyone died on that flight, so how much worse could the remote pilot have done? Air France 447 isn't the only crash to take place because of clogged pitot tubes. There was also Birgenair 301 and a couple others.
There seems to be a perception that a remote pilot would somehow do a worse job than someone on the flight deck. Until there's actual experimental data to support that claim it's not a valid
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crash to take place because of clogged pitot tubes
I read that as "clogged pilot tubes." Well then yeah, automation would totally solve that problem! One fewer pilot clogging the tubes!
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But there are standard procedures to follow when the sensors give bad results, which were apparently not followed by the pilots on 447. I disagree that these would be more confusing to the remote pilot. The autopilot was smart enough to recognize a problem and disconnect. If there was nothing but an autopilot, it could be set to a fail safe mode. A typical smartphone is probably better equipped than a human when it comes to flying without visual reference points.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
AF 447 would've had a better chance if the idiotic Airbus un-overridable Flight Envelope Protection had not silenced the stall horn when the aircraft exceeded what the FEP thought was a valid angle of attack.
The high angle of attack *was* valid, it was reality, it was happening, and whenever the pilots would push the nose down to correct the stall, the stall horn would come on again, so they would pull the nose up again. Which *erroneously* silenced the alarm.
From the Wikipedia article: [wikipedia.org]
The stall warnings stopped, as all airspeed indications were now considered invalid by the aircraft's computer due to the high angle of attack.[27] In other words, the aircraft was oriented nose-up but descending steeply. Roughly 20 seconds later, at 02:12 UTC, the pilot decreased the aircraft's pitch slightly, airspeed indications became valid and the stall warning sounded again and sounded intermittently for the remaining duration of the flight, but stopped when the pilot increased the aircraft's nose-up pitch. From there until the end of the flight, the angle of attack never dropped below 35 degrees.
You see the problem there? The plane thought for the pilot, and it thought wrong.
FWIW, Boeing's FEP can be completely over-ridden, but not Airbus'. Even with all the benefits of FEP, I think the pilot should always have final say.
Re:Sensors wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
The stall warning was cut off because the readings being fed to it made no sense (they dropped below absolute minimums - the reasoning being that the pilots having sat through 5 minutes of warnings and not changing their approach to flying the aircraft, it won't suddenly fix itself as the horizontal speed drops to zero) - it wasnt cut off because of any automation systems, it was cut off because the readings didnt make any sense.
But it takes more than an avid Boeing fan to actually read the AF447 report.
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Did you read the article I quoted? They flew the airplane all the way to the floor in a stall. Every time they pushed the nose down the stall horn started. Every time they (erroneously) pulled *UP*, it silenced. Absent any visual cues and without cross-referencing instruments, they thought they were making things better by maintaining that attitude.
The point I was trying to make is, if the FEP would've allowed the stall horn to sound when at that high alpha, MAYBE they would've kept pushing the nose do
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Ahh, Wikipedia articles. One minor step up from UTTER AND COMPLETE BULLSHIT.
Try reading the accident reports on both of your chosen examples - they differ wildly from the Wikipedia articles conclusions.
In the case of AF296, the aircraft performed exactly as it should have - if the aircraft had allowed the commanded elevator action, the aircraft would have stalled and come down before the tree line. The issue with AF296 is that the pilot was being a fucking twat, had descended to below the height of local
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There are specific procedures the pilots are supposed to follow when sensors give bad data. The case you cite, the pilots were aware that something was wrong and did not follow the correct procedure.
The problem is that we are living in a sort of no man's land in between manual and automated. Automated enough that the humans don't pay attention, but not automated enough that the systems can handle a multiple fail scenario.
One of the problems with the current situation is that aircraft require BOTH Humans
Gimli Glider (Score:2)
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Not sure about that. Edge cases like this a pilot will trust instincts which can include what G forces you are feeling. Unfortunately that leads to error. A remote co-pilot whose life isn't on the line may make a more rational decision based on all data.
When can we automate society? (Score:2)
And get rid of the large amount of useless bureaucratic sludge slowing everything down? Oh no, automation is only good when *you* lose your job and *they* save money.
Why not both? (Score:3)
I'm still blown away that there is no active ground monitoring of all flight wherever they may be in 2015. We still have planes "disappearing" because nobody knows where they are once they leave the ground.
So instead of having two pilots, why not have a computer monitoring system that actively monitors airplanes with only 1 pilot in it. Any weird actions by the pilot would trigger a warning allowing ground operators to override it. Boom, no more missing planes, or suicidal pilots.
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I kind of agree on the monitoring, but then again it is actually exceedingly rare that planes "disappear", and even in those exceedingly rare cases, monitoring alone wouldn't have changed the fate of the flights in question, so there is bound to be some question about the cost/benefit of such a system.
As to your proposed solution, there are obviously a lot of factors to be weighed up. Personally I'd tend to feel that the whole remote-piloting thing might introduce as many problems as it solves; not only do
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I kind of agree on the monitoring, but then again it is actually exceedingly rare that planes "disappear", and even in those exceedingly rare cases, monitoring alone wouldn't have changed the fate of the flights in question, so there is bound to be some question about the cost/benefit of such a system.
You're right. It may not change the outcome or prevent an accident, but determining exactly where an accident occurred helps immensely when trying to unearth other clues provided by black boxes and other relevant hardware. We certainly struggled with that last year, but with the appropriate technology planes would not stay missing.
The cockpit of the future (Score:3, Funny)
It's a very old joke by now but...
The cockpit of the future will have two seats - for a pilot and a dog. The dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything.
The pilot's job is to feed the dog.
They can be effective (Score:2)
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I don't think they landed very well at all.
Some of them didn't bother to learn how [theguardian.com].
A month later, they (Atta and Al-Shehhi) spent another $1,500 for three hours of flight simulator training at the SimCenter, near Miami. An instructor said they concentrated on turning aircraft, rather than practising the more difficult manoeuvres of take-off and landing, which he thought was unusual.
and we will need basic income to cover the people (Score:2)
and we will need basic income to cover the people automated out of a job or we can kind get the same thing with people who will get locked up just for room / board / doctors at a much higher cost.
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and we will need basic income to cover the people automated out of a job
Airlines are already complaining about a shortage of pilots today. This will take years and people growing up will have the opportunity to pursue something else, like, I don't know, the technology for automating aircraft. And those military drone pilots will have an almost direct path into civilian employment, assuming that they can get over Macho Grande.
Technology can indeed fail (Score:3)
Such as the pilot's control hardware, indicators, windscreens, oxygen supply....
And I know some people will just go, "Well, what if the pilot or copilot on the ground goes rogue and takes over?" The obvious response is that they'd be operating in a secure facility with dozens of other people and extensive supervision; nobody is ever going to just let any random person secretly take over a plane without anyone else knowing. And no, ATC systems are not net connected. I work in an ATC center, when I need to look something up online while trying to debug a problem I have to use my cell phone or go back to my office.
Probably the simplest solution to all of this would just be an additional entry to the CPDLC standard, and the hardware changes necessary to support it: one that locks out the pilot from all control and switches the autopilot on, set to the last flight plan agreed to by both ground and the pilot. One would of course have to make sure that there's no way for the pilot, while he's still in control, to sneakily break the datalink communication stream fast enough that ground wouldn't have time from the onset of suspicious activity to send the command.
Having highly reliable communications would be critical for any pilot-override or remote piloting system. In each case, any cutoff in communications should force on the autopilot as per above until communications could be reestablished.
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And no, ATC systems are not net connected.
And neither were the centrifuges in Iran
Re:Technology can indeed fail (Score:5, Insightful)
As a pilot, I would never fly an aircraft which has a remote capability to take control away from me. As a passenger, I would never fly in an aircraft in which remote control could be taken away from the crew. I don't even think the "remote copilot" is a good idea. There are a lot of good reasons to fly with a crew of 2... it's not just workload and risk of incapacitation. When things get weird, it's good to have another person to bounce ideas off of. United Airlines Flight 232 is a great example of that, and there are plenty more.
This isn't the first time we've seen suicide by the crew, but it's extremely rare (I can think of maybe 5-6 in 40 years). It sucks to be the people in the back when that happens, but it also sucks when an airplane drops on your house and kills you and your family. I'm as worried about one than the other which is: not very. We can improve the situation some: better screening of crew, USA style "always two people in the cockpit" rules... To suddenly decide that we can't trust the crew despite the fantastic safety record aviation has is just ludicrous.
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You're on a tech site... which means a good percentage of the folks here would agree that the damn airplane should be smart enough not to crash---even if the pilot directs it right at the mountain---the damn airplane should just refuse to destroy itself (yes, there's that remote possibility of sensor malfunction where the pilot "knows better"... well... those don't malfunction as often as humans, and also, we can build better and more sensors... we can't build better humans).
Shortsighted linke always (Score:2, Interesting)
A pilot saves all passengers by emergeny landing in the Hudson river, and everybody prÃzises the virtues of human pilots. A pilot Mills himself and 149 passengers and crew, and promptly we should geht rid of human pilots.
Drone Airline? (Score:2)
Let me get this straight...the thought is to propose a drone-based airline? While it may be mostly auto-pilot, there's a human remote co-pilot to watch over things, just in case. So, how many planes does this one co-pilot watch? What's the lag time between aircraft and their remote-cockpit? How fast do the backup remote-comm systems kick in when the primary is getting wonky? And what keeps the remote co-pilot session from being hacked/co-opted and then turned into a remote drone-weapon?
I ..just don't th
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It takes to start a discussion about drone airlines is one suicidal pilot who deliberately flies into a mountain.
All it will take to end the discussion on drone airlines is one hacker / angry operator who makes the plane fly into a mountain.
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Or the one angry operator in charge of 8 planes at once, who makes 8 planes fly into the ground.
Skin in the game (Score:2)
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Simple, just have a sergeant-at-arms in the control room whose responsibility is to shoot the operator if the plane he's remotely controlling crashes.
cause of intent (Score:2)
Whatever people invent some other people are gonna try to exploit it, and in some cases they will succeed. .. whatever.
To successfully prevent people murdering other people you need to treat the cause of that intent. Or at least start thinking about it instead of just forcing another dumb law or trying to put a camera in the cockpit, remote control
In 20 years there will be so many laws and regulations it will be impossible to live.
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People have been warning about the ever increasing number of laws for decades, and yes we long ago passed the threshold you fear. We simply live with more laws than we can comprehend, and many are paid no heed. Sadly though we are all likely guilty of multiple offenses on a daily basis, so be careful what you say or the system might decide it is worth the bother to look a few up and prosecute you.
We'll never learn (Score:4, Insightful)
And when the first plane crashes due to a bug in the pilot software, we all start wondering again if removing the pilot was a wise decision.
This whole Germanwings plane crash shows, again, one important thing: people suck at dealing with risks. Several hundred thousands of flights went well. The last incident with a pilot causing a plane to crash was back in 1995. The Germanwings plane crash was an incident. We must learn to treat it that way, as an incident. No reason to panic and start changing policies, rules and procedures. With every change, new risks and new ways of things to go wrong will be introduced. When that happens and you again make changes, you end up in a loop of changing things. The result: the changes will cost a lot of time, energy and money while the risks are not reduced.
We need to start accepting that risks are part of our life. Unacceptable risks need to be dealt with, but more important: acceptable risks should be accepted, even when they occur!!!!
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Indeed. Statistically, this is a complete non-risk. Investing anything into preventing a repeat is making things less safe, as the money is not spent to increase security elsewhere. And then there are unintended consequences, like the "secure" cabin door.
Race to the bottom much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just put two reasonably competent people in the cockpit at all times and stop trying to f**k an extra penny out of every dime, you cheap chiselling b*st*rds.
Right now many feeder airlines are barely paying a living wage for their junior cockpit staff, so stop pretending that the personnel costs are going to put you out of business. You're certainly not passing along the recent fuel cost savings to us sardines.
(I haven't had my coffee yet, so that's my excuse for the "negative tone" in this post.)
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Does not work for this (but there is no real risk here anyways): Pilot 1 clonks Pilot 2 over the head to much the same effect.
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Just put two reasonably competent people in the cockpit at all times and stop trying to f**k an extra penny out of every dime, you cheap chiselling b*st*rds.
Right now many feeder airlines are barely paying a living wage for their junior cockpit staff, so stop pretending that the personnel costs are going to put you out of business. You're certainly not passing along the recent fuel cost savings to us sardines.
Pretty much any pilot working for a regional airline is a brand new pilot fresh out of flight school. That's with essentially no experience, just their ratings. A little Googling shows that after their first year, an FO at expressjet makes over 30k a year at almost $35 an hour at a 75 hour per month guarantee. To put that in perspective, the ground crew at my airline have to work for 4.5 years before they make that much. Many pilots live in crash pads that cost them $200-400 a month, utilities included.
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Hint: Most pilots pay for their medicals out of their own pocket.
And pilots rea
The airlines must not believe the tech is there (Score:2)
If they did, they would already have automated cargo planes.
Remote link failure imply stand alone operation (Score:3)
Remote operation imply data transfer, usually by radio, and this is the weakest part of the system. To ensure that the aircraft stay in safe operation without remote link, it fist must be able to sustain stand alone operation, including landing before running out of fuel.
Concentrating control to a single point will increase the risk, concentrating control to a remote point will add an another layer of risk. The only solution is to allow distributed control, and this imply that each aircraft is able to operate safely by itself without remote control.
If you are not convinced, just imagine that a remote control point is unable to operate for some reason: you have now dozen of flight without co-pilot and there need to all land as soon as possible, raising a another wave of problems.
Nonsense (Score:2)
I have wondered already, why the reckless ideas didn't poped up early and where invalided by sane arguments:
* remote control means == remote attack vector/system error, could crash a thousand planes at once
* humans can react indvidually on unknown problems (wrong and right, but at least they can)
* never ever a sane person will give his life to a computer (did anyone trust windows? linux? macos?)
* planes are not cars, if a computer on a car "fails" it will probably crash, if it fails on a plane *it will cras
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Sometimes do you read headlines and think what the fuck?
One black swan and they go crazy... (Score:3)
What about a bit of actually professional risk management? That one says this is an event that is exceptionally rare and that hence does not need countermeasures. The very extent of the press-coverage shows how exceptionally rare it was.
Seems to Miss The Point (Score:3)
Polar routes (Score:2)
Having supported NASA Global Hawk missions over the poles, I can tell you that high bandwidth satellite communications becomes dicey over the poles. We would fallback to Iridium... which was less than ideal and totally unsuitable for command and control. This was not a huge issue, should the plane have lost C2 comms it would simply return to base.
I suspect this will be a lot like cars (Score:2)
I guess we'd need to see the statistics for the failure-rate of drone flights, not just for 'mission terminating'-level incidents, but for every crack-up on landing etc that would cause passengers problems. Compare this to the failure-rates of flights that are human-piloted, including to some degree the number of 'cockpit events' where a pilot's human reflexes and situational awareness avoided an incident entirely.
Most likely, it's not even close. Planes are still staggeringly safer in the hands of human
Horse, cart (Score:4, Insightful)
90%+ of comments here have been regarding lack of onboard pilots with commercial passenger flights.
Naturally, the first offboard pilot flights would be with cargo only. And that is way more relevant and less sexy discussion.
Makes no sense whatsoever (Score:3)
The number of people saved over the years by pilots doing things with airplanes that no computer system (or remote operator) could ever have done vastly outnumbers the number of people killed because of deliberate actions by pilots.
Examples of such heroic flights where lives may not have been saved without pilots in the cockpit include:
US Airways Flight 1549
British Airways Flight 9
Air Canada Flight 143
British Airways Flight 38
Northwest Airlines Flight 85
TACA Flight 110
United Airlines Flight 232
Reeve Aleutian Airways Flight 8
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(one in a million pilots homicidal? replace pilots with computers!).
I just got a flashback to the opening scenes of Wargames [imdb.com], when the Pentagon's response to the humanity of their nuclear launch commanders was to replace them with an automated system. They expected the automated system to be perfect, and a much better alternative to squishy emotional humans. I mean, it's TECHNOLOGY, right? What could possibly go wrong?
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Right, because system designers are idiots who are going to design the system suchly that a single rogue operator can take control of a dozen planes in a couple minutes time with nobody noticing and being able to stop him?
Even regular ATC centers are secure facilities with dozens of people - let alone any special "emergency situation" centre. Any attempt to take control of a plane from a pilot due to a thread that the pilot may be suicidal or a terrorist would be a Really Big F'Ing Deal that not only would
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Yes, we have numeruous examples of light rail trains that have been very safely operating for decades.
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Aircraft have clear line of sight to the sky pretty much anytime they are not in a hanger. Main issue is that induces a lot of lag (to geo stationary at least). You could order an AI around but flying when you need to react quickly is not going to happen.