Drone airlines - how long?
 

Right now we've got military drones targeting 'persons of interest' in certain parts of the world, while in civvy street people are already travelling on automated light rail systems and buying autopilot equipped teslas. Other self driving cars and trucks will soon be on the roads, even delivering your amazon parcel or dominos pizza.

Given the level of automation and computer control in today's cockpit anyway, going the whole automated hog seems a relatively small leap in terms of technology, if not public perception, whereas the cost savings could be huge. The military would probably need to initiate - firstly on cargo, then on transport because they don't have to rely on commercial appeal, but can simply command people to do something. The bean counters would push it through the civvy operators, and if you could pass on enough of those costs in the form of significantly lower ticket prices for unmanned flights vs manned ones, the pax would line themselves up - the current crop of loCo operators being a case in point to the depths to which people subject themselves in pursuit of a bargain.

Appreciate this is somewhat the wrong sort of place to be espousing this sort of thing, but I reckon the change could happen within a generation: we'll soon get to a tipping point, and it could be sooner than we think. Or should it be that automation only happens to unskilled manual roles, not skilled professional, even educated ones such as professional pilots?!?

Uber will remain as popular even when its drivers are automated - it'll probably be more so as the robot won't have any dubious background checks to pass (or fail) on, as long as the price is less than a normal cab. Sure, they'll always be the refuseniks but they're the minority - the same thing will happen in the air. As MOL says of RyanAir, their bookings are full of poeple who swore they'd never fly with them again.

All it would take is one fatal accident........

I won't ever get into a motorised vehicle that is not driven/flown/operated by a human being.

Unlike many others I've never given O'Leary a penny and I never will.

That was undoubtedly true in the past, but those days are long gone.

A government that exposes its armed forces to undue and unnecessary risk runs the risk of being hauled through the courts if and when things go pear-shaped - Google "Snatch Land Rover", for example.

So don't expect the military to pioneer the development of pilotless passenger aircraft.

How do you move around airports? Most Airport shuttle trains are driverless.

I do concur with your other comments.

The drone airliner will be controlled by a human, just not one sat up front. In these days of locked cockpit doors how do the passengers actually know there is a crewed cockpit for sure?

You think too big... Unpiloted planes are great to move small cargo loads, leaving out the pilot and his/her seat gives another 100 kg of cargo capacity. So I would see potential in the small mail-run business or as delivery service (10 kg cargo load directly to the front lawn).

If you want to transport people, you need a cabin, probably pressurized, and facilities (galley, toilet). Adding a pilot is like adding a dedicated chair and some flight controls.

Plus the cost of hiring/employing said pilot.

No doubt it will happen one day. Life has taught me never to say never. However, not in my life time.......I hope!

There's always one.

They're not travelling at 70mph or faster.

Driverless cars will happen first, but it won’t take much longer than that.

If flying was just poling an aircraft around this sky this would have happened years ago. Erm... possibly. Fortunately, Messrs Honeywell, Thales etc. can be relied upon to produce bug ridden, rickety software that can be relied upon to produce unexpected results. Communication is not reliable enough to guarantee an uninterrupted connection which means that the aircraft will have to have the ability to fly autonomously. But to save a load of typing, tell me how a drone aircraft would deal with this.

"The first known fatal accident involving a Tesla engaged in Autopilot mode took place in Williston, Florida, on May 7, 2016." -- "Against a bright spring sky, the car’s sensors system failed to distinguish a large white 18-wheel truck and trailer crossing the highway" -- "kept his hands off the wheel for extended periods of time despite repeated automated warnings not to do so"

NTSB press release (Sep 12, 2017): "The Tesla driver’s pattern of use of the Autopilot system indicated an over-reliance on the automation and a lack of understanding of the system limitations." This sentiment comes up fairly often on PPRuNe, it seems; I would venture it also applies to people advocating fully automated cockpits.

You must be joking.

That automation is only certifiable BECAUSE of having humans on board to set it up, monitor it, and take over when necessary.

like engineers, radio operators and navigators - it won't be Big Bang - a gradual erosion is much more likely

eg start with an automatic system but 2 crew....

then it works so you drop one of the crew...

then it works so you drop the other crew............

that's what they 've done/are doing on the railways

"Evidence based Crew Levels"...................... by then people will be iusing auto cars/buses/trucks - it'll be an obvious change - and if it knocks £ 10 of a flight to NY or LA they'll all be for it

Quite - I should have made that clearer in terms of what I was envisaging. There will be a level of human oversight: to check everything's set up correctly before pushback for example, but the majority of the monitoring of the aircraft's systems will be done from a portacabin in Luton or Hounslow, rather than a little room at the front of the plane.

Portacabin? w t f :confused:

Why so derisory about it. I'm sure it'll be at the least a glorified OCC 'Ops Centre' similar to what the future of ATC will be with remote towers.

Imagine that eventually the remote ATC controllers (or robots) and the remote control pilots (or robots) will sit in one room, maybe the role will merge etc. etc. even more savings! :}

Cirrus have a big emergency lever....................

you could geta BIG parachute in the cockpit & crew sleeping area..........

I'm with you on the evolution, less so on the timeframe. Maybe my question should have been 'what percentage discount would get passengers onto a pilotless aircraft?' I reckon somewhere between a third and a half would get you to a critical mass...

Never, I hope.

As, once again, humans seem hell bent on doing them selves out of a job.

The number of people employed in the direct operation of the airlines fleet is massive, and if drone airlines take off, then all the people that will put out of work will be immense.

A £ 10 difference seems to be the threshold for people giving up on something decent and taking the cheap option in the airtravel business