Originally Posted by
moosepileit
How do you integrate manned and unmanned aircraft into and out of the same runways at current capacity flow?
The controlled choas of max rate landings and departures at KEWR and similar come to mind.
Will ATC have to change? Who will fund that?
Is there enough bandwidth at enough rate globally? If not, who will pay for this? CPDLC is not fast enough for terminal operations, is it? The latest and greatest is probably not up to the task.
Pilotless planes today are not autonomous, someone does the taleoff and landing locally and those that are more automated get a huge airspace restriction around their launch and recovery.
In an unmanned combat vehicle, the weight that was the crew and life support systems becomes increased payload and firepower- do we see those first? Pilot, seat, etc weigh equal a few more missiles and have reduced physical limitations in play.
Pilotless passenger and even cargo aircraft will be clean sheet designs, yet will need all the air condtiing and pressurization systems, so they have pay for themselves just in labor costs, not weight saved and payload gained. Attractive in some principles, but someone new gets to work all the unglamorous bits of the duty.
Each paper gain comes with fresh vulnerabilities.
How will single pilot come into play? Will that also be a fresh generation of aircraft? How will that interact with ATC and bandwidth needs? Who funds that stepping stone? Customers? Governments?
I've worked for nearly forty years in IT, having taken a doctorate along the way.
Systems routinely encounter critical failures. That's the way they are. Not simply that, but they must be maintained. Situations occur which require a patch; the specific situation was not considered at the design stage.
I've worked exclusively on mainframes. With at leas one vendor the sequence number of PTFs rolled past 99,999. A PTF is a programme temporary fix.
Now, you're an airline operator. A mail arrives. It links to a PTF. It is marked "HIPER", meaning high impact and pervasive. The software support contract with your supplier specifies that it must be supplied or your support lapses.
Do you apply it immediately to your fleet and let them fly immediately? What if it introduces a different aberrant behaviour?
The problem is that it might not be just one of your fleet which fails. It could be many.
I must repeat that if you don't maintain software currency your system *will* in time fail. Other users will encounter failures not yet suffered by you, and it may involve circumstances that you may meet in the future.
Hell, systems developed over decades to process something as simple as a bank balance fall over.
It's not simply that I wouldn't fly in an autonomous plane; I would refuse to have any part in any such development project.
Don't get me started on AI.