Originally Posted by
Ian W
Now that it is apparent that crews are not able to cope with some things unless well trained AND airlines are unwilling to pay for the training.
Then the regulator has to make more and better training mandatory.
I would expect that first officers are about to be automated out (is flying with HAL any worse than flying with a 25hour MPL?) and in some cases aircraft will become autonomous.
No, not any time soon. The manufacturers and the regulators know that computers are not anywhere near ready for this.
Note that MCAS was only there because there was a regulatory concern that human pilots could mishandle the aircraft as the control column loads got lighter. MCAS does not operate with the autopilot controlling the aircraft as that is no safety concern.
Exactly. And these requirements for human pilots are still there because the automation can handle even less than humans. The great big question are the unknown unknowns, with which humans can deal most of the time, but computers not. Because these are the things the engineers could not have thought of.
And before people ask: Yes I would fly as pax in an autonomous aircraft.
"You're braver than I thought."
I don't think you've been paying much attention to (a) the abysmal state of autonomous system development. The short form is: even (or rather: especially) the best experts in the field (the safety engineering field, i. e., not the deep learning hubris field) don't know how to assure safety for those to any reasonable degree. We have no clue. To quote a presenter on a recent international system safety conference:
Developers: "Our autonomous system is 99% reliable!"
Safety Engineer: "Great! That's two nines. Only seven more to go!"
... and (b) the number of times human pilots or operators take over and continue on an uneventful flight when a small snag appears and the automation throws in the towel. Because those cases don't make the news. Only when the flight has an eventful ending, as in the cases of the Hudson ditching and BA Flight 38.
Bernd