Drone airlines - how long?

[yellowperil]

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.

[alserire]

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.

[DaveReidUK]

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.

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.

[ZFT]

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.

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

I do concur with your other comments.

[VX275]

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.


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?

[MathFox]

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.

[DaveReidUK]

Plus the cost of hiring/employing said pilot.

[Hotel Tango]

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

[alserire]

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

I do concur with your other comments.

There's always one.

They're not travelling at 70mph or faster.

[ExXB]

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

[Piltdown Man]

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 (http://avherald.com/h?article=4af4dc97).

[Musician]

... autopilot equipped teslas...
"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) (https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20170912.aspx): "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.

[Capt Pit Bull]

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,

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.

[Heathrow Harry]

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

[yellowperil]

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?

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.

[T250]

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! :}

[Heathrow Harry]

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

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

[yellowperil]

I foresee the evolution firstly from dual to single pilot operation and then to someone that may perhaps be termed a "flight manager". A person who may have quite limited powers for intervening in the normal progress of the flight but whose primary purpose is to be there as someone who is seen to be in charge and who has an equal stake in the safe completion of the flight with the passengers.

Driverless trains and cars may be one thing. Ultimately one has that re-assurance that there will always be some sort of emergency stop lever and you can just walk away from the problem. It will be a very long time before passengers will look at driverless aircraft in the same way.

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...

[Tray Surfer]

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.

[Heathrow Harry]

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

[Piltdown Man]

So all we need is well specified, well designed, well written software, free of bugs running on bug free chips that have a totally reliable power source driven by people or systems that never make mistakes. What's so hard about that?

[Mechta]

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


Meanwhile, every year humans scatter dozens of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes and their passengers across the landscape. But that's ok, because they know what they are doing... :E

[DaveReidUK]

Call me a cynic, but when I fly as a passenger I want whoever is controlling the aircraft to have as much of a vested interest in getting it down in one piece as I have. :O

[Musician]

Actually, computer systems can also "not know what they are doing". They are usually designed around the assumption that they have a complete picture of what is going on, and complete control over the process. When either assumption (or both) fails, the computer will depart its zone of expertise rather abruptly. A well-designed car or train control software can often recognize the problem and shut down until help arrives; an airplane might not have that luxury. ("Is there a software engineer on board?")

[Wheelnut69]

Is there really a solid economic driver to do away with pilots? Yes, pilots are expensive, but put up against the overall cost of operating a large passenger jet, the pilot's costs are, if not insignificnt, minimal.

Better to look for fuel economy improvements or lower maintenance costs.

Plus I think the psycological hurdle of getting aboard a pilotless aircraft will be a step too far for most passengers.

[Piltdown Man]

Mechta - I don’t agree. In fact I’d go along the line that millions of flights have ended incident free purely because there were pilots on board, not in spite of them. Until we grasp what pilots actually do to make up for the deficiencies in aircraft, their systems in the information supplied we haven’t a hope of removing them from aircraft.

[DaveReidUK]

Is there really a solid economic driver to do away with pilots? Yes, pilots are expensive, but put up against the overall cost of operating a large passenger jet, the pilot's costs are, if not insignificant, minimal.

The same was being said 40 years ago about flight engineers.

Look what happened to them.

[Musician]

Pilot workload was reduced through automation so that the pilots could take on the flight engineer's tasks? and for those tasks the pilots can't do, they phone home to base?

[yellowperil]

Is there really a solid economic driver to do away with pilots? Yes, pilots are expensive, but put up against the overall cost of operating a large passenger jet, the pilot's costs are, if not insignificnt, minimal.

Better to look for fuel economy improvements or lower maintenance costs.

Passenger jets cost most when they're on the ground not doing anything, rather than in the air, earning revenue. Pilots don't just cost wages - there's the accommodation down route plus the caps on hours. Have 'em monitoring the systems remotely/centrally and you do away with all that, all for a small anti-social hours supplement to pay to compensate for a 24/7 shift pattern. You could also break the idea that the same pilot (or crew) have to fly the entire trip: 'pilot' A monitors/flys remotely the takeoff, then when his shift finishes, hands over to 'pilot' B who does the landing. Pilot A meanwhile has driven the 20 mins home, and is spending time with his family until his or her next shift starts again in 14 hours time (or whenever).

[DaveReidUK]

Pilot workload was reduced through automation so that the pilots could take on the flight engineer's tasks?

Yes, and the automation was driven, as it almost always is, by economics.

The suggestion that a pilot on board is equally unnecessary is just the logical extension of the same argument.

[Musician]

@DaveReid: no, I believe it isn't. The FE could be made redundant because other humans (pilots) were able to take over their task that automation couldn't take over. If you extend the argument (and the automation), you could maybe also eliminate the FO, but that strategy also relies on pushing some non-automated tasks onto the pilot. In any case, the pilot retains the task of supervising the automatic devices. To eliminate the pilot altogether, you have to a) automate all tasks, not just the "easy" ones, and b) do that to a degree that eliminates the need for on-board supervision, which is presently the fall-back. You can't do it in the same way (reduce workload, reduce the humans) because you have to reduce the workload to zero, moving the computer from its support role(s) into a position of responsibility. That looks like a qualitative difference with unique challenges, and while there may be some economic pressure towards achieving them, it is hard to predict when that's going to happen, if it ever does.

But yeah, maybe in the future we'll see camera drones doing the walk-around check on the aircraft.

[PAXboy]

Look at the legal arguments around "If a self driving car crashes and kills someone - who is to blame?"

[DaveReidUK]

@DaveReid: no, I believe it isn't. The FE could be made redundant because other humans (pilots) were able to take over their task that automation couldn't take over. If you extend the argument (and the automation), you could maybe also eliminate the FO, but that strategy also relies on pushing some non-automated tasks onto the pilot. In any case, the pilot retains the task of supervising the automatic devices. To eliminate the pilot altogether, you have to a) automate all tasks, not just the "easy" ones, and b) do that to a degree that eliminates the need for on-board supervision, which is presently the fall-back. You can't do it in the same way (reduce workload, reduce the humans) because you have to reduce the workload to zero, moving the computer from its support role(s) into a position of responsibility. That looks like a qualitative difference with unique challenges, and while there may be some economic pressure towards achieving them, it is hard to predict when that's going to happen, if it ever does.I didn't say eliminate the pilot, I said eliminate the on-board pilot.

[ExXB]

It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.

Liability issues has been settled in the U.K. for self-driving cars. It will be the manufacturer who will be responsible. This likely will be followed in other jurisdictions.

[MathFox]

Is there really a solid economic driver to do away with pilots? Yes, pilots are expensive, but put up against the overall cost of operating a large passenger jet, the pilot's costs are, if not insignificnt, minimal.

Better to look for fuel economy improvements or lower maintenance costs.

Plus I think the psycological hurdle of getting aboard a pilotless aircraft will be a step too far for most passengers.
If you can distribute the cost for two pilots over 400 sold tickets there is very little economic drive... The costs for two pilots in a 19 seater with 12 sold tickets are more significant.
So economically pilotless small planes are more interesting. For cargo planes the psychological hurdle is not relevant and here goes a similar argument but then based on pilot wages per kilo cargo. And getting rid of the pilot allows another 100kg or so extra cargo in the plane.

So looking at current operations, I expect that the small mail runs (<1000kg max load cargo planes) are the first candidates for drone-replacement, but there also is an option to go to smaller (50-100kg load) unmanned planes (that can't even fit a pilot).

[AerocatS2A]

All good in theory MathFox, but in my experience small aircraft and freight operators are the least likely to have the inclination to invest heavily in brand new, state of the art, pilotless aircraft. If anything they tend to have relatively old machines and would be more likely to follow the pilotless trend some 20 years after the fact once the pilotless aircraft become available cheap on the used market.

[jack11111]

In "2001, A Space Odyssey", there were 2 pilots AND flight attendants. Pan Am, wasn't it.
.

[Lookleft]

It takes how long to get a brand new design from the drawing board into service? When Airbus or Boeing announce that they are developing an autonomous airliner that would take at least 20-30 years to enter service then I am not going to lose sleep over it. Most of the conversation is based on the false assumption that the two pilots are reading the paper and pressing the "land now" button.

[yellowperil]

Most of the conversation is based on the false assumption that the two pilots are reading the paper and pressing the "land now" button.

False assumption or merely unkind stereotype? Anyway, the question is whether the paper reading and "land now" button pressing needs to be done at the front of the aircraft, or whether it can, and indeed will, be done remotely.

Seems to me, some of the arguments put forward against the idea echo those of the hand loom weavers, and things didn't come out too well for them.

[Musician]

Mechanical looms had limitations (thread count, colors) over hand weaving. Turns out, these limitations didn't matter so much. We're still discovering what the limitations of computer systems are--in aviations, some of these discoveries have already cost lives.

[yellowperil]

Whereas the known limitations of human beings don't cost lives?

Here's an interesting article (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/10/american-trucker-automation-jobs) on the possible impact of automation on the US trucking industry - how long before we're replacing 'truck' with 'plane' and rehearsing the same arguments all over again?

[AerocatS2A]

how long before we're replacing 'truck' with 'plane' and rehearsing the same arguments all over again?

Personally think it's so far out that we really don't know what the world will look like. I don't expect my career to be threatened by it and I have another 20 years left.

[Musician]

yellowperil, it's not the limitations that cost lives (well, they do, too, sometimes), but the discovering of them. The more you rush into this, the more limitations you're going to discover rather than anticipate--in a situation where you can't just stop the vehicle and wait for help.

One known limitation: we already know that humans need some time to get their bearings when entering an unfamiliar situation, so when a plane calls a remote pilot for help, that better be some minutes before pilot input is needed: but if the plane is going to try and anticipate that, there are going to be a lot of false alarms, which are going to lead humans into treating alarms as not so serious.

The unexpected challenge in avoiding accidents with the Google car has been to prevent other cars from hitting it: it needs to conform to human expectations when moving in traffic, or a fender-bender can result. If you do not research beforehand how automated planes can intermingle with traditional aircraft in congested airspace, you're going to have some avoidable accidents.

Before we know of the limitations, can we really make an informed decision on whether it's worth it? You can dodge the question by saying "it's going to be inevitable", then you don't need to have a discussion on the merits; but you could be making a bad choice. (Well, it won't be bad for the tech companies driving the change--their bottom line is going to be assured.)

[esa-aardvark]

I'll fly in an unmanned aircraft when the CEO of the airline will sit in the adjacent seat.
Not just once, but everytime.

[Heathrow Harry]

why does it have to be a new design?

It's all an issue of integrating the current electronics and sensors TBH and the decision taking software in the black box -

It'll probably be the 737-5000

[Mechta]

Mechta - I don’t agree. In fact I’d go along the line that millions of flights have ended incident free purely because there were pilots on board, not in spite of them. Until we grasp what pilots actually do to make up for the deficiencies in aircraft, their systems in the information supplied we haven’t a hope of removing them from aircraft.

Piltdown Man, you are of course right that many incidents have been averted by action on the part of the crew. However if that number is matched by the number of incidents caused or contributed to by the crew, then we are no better or worse off than in a robot airliner.

Mathfox, The saving of 100kg is a bit of an underestimate. Once you take the pilots out, you can get rid of this little lot:
instruments
cockpit controls
switches
armoured cockpit door
flight crew rest compartment
pilots' seats
pilots' luggage
pilots' oxygen supply
all air ducting
all cockpit glazing
windscreen wipers

In other words, strip the cockpit out completely and there is room for another two or three rows of seats. What's more, the area currently occupied by the windscreens can now be the most aerodynamic profile possible, which has got to save a good few tons of fuel each year. Eventually, unless passengers can be persuaded to pay a premium for a view out the front, all airliner's cabins will be like the lower deck of a 747.

If its a cargo aircraft, you won't need the toilets or galley either, unless carrying racehorses and their stable hands, and the latter can probably use the straw like their charges anyway.

[Lookleft]

Mechta you are making a lot of false assumptions to support your argument.

Piltdown Man, you are of course right that many incidents have been averted by action on the part of the crew. However if that number is matched by the number of incidents caused or contributed to by the crew, then we are no better or worse off than in a robot airliner.

No-one knows how many incidents have been prevented by the crew. You would have to go through every airlines database of safety reports to determine that. You can't just assume its the same number. There is a reason that air travel is the safest mode of transport and its not just the technology. You also can't just assume that autonomous 2D vehicles can be easily replicated in a dynamic and often volatile 3D environment. People who know nothing about the airline environment often quote that "Aeroplanes are so sophisticated they can land themselves!" True, but in a very limited environmental window and they still can't get themselves into the air automatically. Until software can't be corrupted, hacked or changed then autonomous airliners are just a tech nerds fantasy.

[AerocatS2A]

You'd have to do more than go through incident reports. I don't write a report every single time I rescue the aircraft from its dumb automatics.

[Heathrow Harry]

Mechta makes some valid points

I'm old enough to remember when the pages of "Flight" were full of navs ,radio ops and engineers using exactly the same arguments now appearing here. If you can't show how many flights you may have saved you have no facts to argue against the bean counters and management both of whom would loveto dump everyone

[Musician]

Ironically, some of the improvements that could make autonomous drone flights safe would also make human-piloted flights safer: ILS on every runway, automated traffic awareness not only in the air, but also on the ground, including general aviation.

[Lookleft]

I'm old enough to remember when the pages of "Flight" were full of navs ,radio ops and engineers using exactly the same arguments now appearing here.

The bottom line with removing all the other crew HH was that there were still humans on the flight deck. As an example of how a third crew member did save the day look at the accident of the Ansett 747 in Sydney. Despite the FE being confused about the configuration of the landing gear he was the one that prevented the flight crew from trying to go around after the T/R were deployed.

The challenge to the tech heads is can they guarantee that the software required to operate autonomous airliners will be 100% reliable and unable to be hacked into?

[ExXB]

The challenge to the tech heads is can they guarantee that the software required to operate autonomous airliners will be 100% reliable and unable to be hacked into?

Er, can they guarantee today that the pilot is not suicidal, drunk, a control freak, or incompetent?

I'm looking forward to self driving cars. They will make mistakes, but far fewer than humans.

[Lookleft]

Er, can they guarantee today that the pilot is not suicidal, drunk, a control freak, or incompetent?

No, but put any one of those character flaws in the control room on the ground in a control booth, which some are suggesting, then watch the carnage. With software flaws there are no opportunities to correct them before they manifest themselves. Mental health is a society wide issue and amongst pilots it is being addressed. Drunk and drugged pilots are being sorted with drug and alcohol testing and they are being caught. A control freak? You would have to clarify that as to how that leads to an accident. CRM took care of that problem years ago. Incompetent? All walks of life even, software engineers. I am not saying that human error can be completely eliminated but from what I can tell "software glitches" can be just as fatal and fully autonomous in their manifestation and catastrophic results. Where the pilots came in handy were on aircraft such as the MAS 777 and QF 330 off the coast of Western Australia.

[ExXB]

So don't look for 100% guarantees.

[AerocatS2A]

It doesn't need to be 100%. Technically it just needs to be better than people, but I suspect that won't be acceptable to the public and a significant improvement will be required.

[Heathrow Harry]

The rise of automation in aircraft is very much part of the amazing drop in accident figures even tho' the number of flights has (ahem) soared....

Personally I'd prefer a pilot but I suspect there'll be few on main-line passenger flightsin 50 years time

[Heathrow Harry]

One thing we haven't touched is that many airline managements seem to actively dislike their flight crews. Just look at the way they treat them..... Clearly viewed as grit in the operation.... arguing, moaning striking, need constant management (time and holiday allocation), training and RETRAINING....,sim costs, pensions......

Then just think of those lovely, quiet, obedient machines. Buy it and that's it... even updates itself...... and the bosses can concentrate on screwing cash out of the SLF and their bonus package......

I said 50 years...... maybe 20 will be more accurate........

[PAXboy]

The way that modern (so called) management treat their pilots is the same way mgmt treat staff in most other lines of work. over the last 25/30 years the 'cut everything to the bone' 'shareholders first' 'my bonus next' 'staff and customers nowhere' has become the normal process.

In due course, the cycle will move on but not soon.

[ExXB]

Paxboy. If it does move on it will only be to change the order. It will be 'my bonus first', shareholders - whatever, staff and customers - what are those?

[KelvinD]

Hmmm. Take a look at the Ryanair thread here:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/600731-ryanair-uses-all-runway-7.html
If so many pilots are unable to agree on how to successfully drive a 737 and where and when to actually take off, what chance a computer getting it right every time?

[Heathrow Harry]

that is the point of ourse "so many pilots unable to agree"

A machine will do the same every time........................

[ExXB]

Hmmm. Take a look at the Ryanair thread here:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/600731-ryanair-uses-all-runway-7.html
If so many pilots are unable to agree on how to successfully drive a 737 and where and when to actually take off, what chance a computer getting it right every time?

Well, about 100%, if it has been programmed correctly.

[Musician]

Assuming the environment doesn't violate the assumptions made by the programmers.

[PAXboy]

Yes, my first thought was 'Sudden rain squall that contaminates the runway'. But the landside human responsible (be it local for a remote airfield or at a large hub) will then tell the computers about the change in take off / landing parameters and the contamination and it'll all be wonderful. :8

[Heathrow Harry]

It'll be automated - pick it off from an automated electronic ATIS system

And sensors wiil check you ARE accelerarating/de-accelerating properly

[T250]

Ah yes, the ATIS with the AUTO-METAR such as in use at Heathrow, spewing out '///CB' whatever the hell that is? Never any CB around, yet always published.

[Musician]

So you don't actually need to hack the drone to bring it down -- it's enough to hack automated weather information or its sensor system.

[Heathrow Harry]

Thinking about it I can see the pressure coming from 3 directions:-

1. The military are already looking at drones/unmanned aircraft to deliver supplies over significant distances - that will no doubt include R&D against hacking...... and if they can do it?

2. Amazon etc are looking at delivery by drones - so that leads to scaling up - packages, then van loads, then truck loads......

3. Airline management want a more uniform, controled and lower cost operation

It's going to happen I think - and maybe sooner than we expect......... after Mr B introduces the MoMA it's going to be hard for airframers/engine manufacturers to keep reducing costs by 15% per design iteration and single manned/unmanned will be an obvious way forward

[Musician]

"looking at delivery by drones" makes for good PR, doesn't mean it's going to happen, or that it's even close to ready

[Heathrow Harry]

well it's in trials.................

[AerocatS2A]

Flying cars are in trials. Just because something is in trials doesn't mean it is close to being a reality (doesn't mean its not either of course.)

[GrahamO]

Never, I hope. As, once again, humans seem hell bent on doing them selves out of a job.

No, what humans want is not to be held hostage by other humans having an argument with another human and themselves becoming a casualty.

e.g. train driver and employer in dispute - its the travelling public who suffer the most inconvenience and they are not a party to the dispute.

Automate train operation like the vast number of metro's in the world and thats one more self-entitled, overpaid train driver put of the loop.

Although like you, I doubt that aircraft will be fully automated in this century as a train can coast to a stop safely in most circumstances whereas the end state for any significant aircraft failure is 'death of passengers'.

[Musician]

https://jrupprechtlaw.com/amazon-drone-delivery-3-major-legal-problems-amazon-prime-air
Conclusion:

Many have written on this topic because they see the technology taking off. They see the progress in the technology that many have made and assume that drone delivery will be allowed soon. They get the “West Coast” mindset where they think if enough money and technology are thrown at the problem, it will be fixed regardless of the law. Additionally, most writing on or marketing drone delivery do not understand all the legal issues.

Aviation is an “East Coast” industry where the laws out of D.C. will heavily influence the business. Aviation is an extremely regulated environment. The faster the companies operating in this area realize that fact, the better off they will be so that they can actually do these types of operations.

Amazon still has a long way to go before drone delivery can be experienced in real life by the American public, not just as a short clip on the internet.



XKCD (https://xkcd.com/1897/) (Randall Munroe, CC BY-NC 2.5): "Crowdsourced steering" doesn't sound quite as appealing as "self driving."

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/self_driving.png

[Heathrow Harry]

" what humans want is not to be held hostage by other humans having an argument with another human and themselves becoming a casualty."

most humans want a flight that's as cheap as possible IMHO

[DaveReidUK]

Most humans have never set foot in an aeroplane, nor will.

[vikingivesterled]

The world need a buss-sized drone that can replace short flights, specially for transport across water. A passenger drone travelling around 200 km/hr could easily outcompete commercial airlines where flight time for a jet is 1 hour or less due to a drone could take off and land from small spaces near a parking lot with more convenient locations than an airport.

I see a drone with:
- About 4 electrically driven propeller pods each side of a bus shaped body.
- 2 petrol engines to create the power, with separate fuel tanks for security.
- Batteries to boost power at takeoff and enough capacity to land safely if engines cut out.
- Each side would have separate controls for 2+2 pods, so if 1 set cut out the drone could still land safely.
- If landing on water the whole unit would be kept floating by airbags.
- Completely automated flight but a single attendant for safety and to control that eveybody has a ticket and handle unruliness.
- Remotely but cable connected pre-programmed flight destination to avoid possible hijackings.
- Flight controlled by gps, safety by radar and lidar.
- Laser based ground scan to find safe emergency landing spots.
- Around 50 passengers per drone for versatility and about 5-7 tons payload.
- Price for each unit would need to be in the Euro 500k to 1 million bracket to be competitive.

Public interest and safety would be satisfied by the buss-drones beeing owned by regulated entities, and production and maintenance could be strictly controlled. A separate commercial drone-buss flying zone could be regulated for around 500-1000 meters above ground level.
A nicer interior "private jet" version of the drone could be developed to replace helicopters and increase the market. Commuter routes into traffic congested city-centers is another market.

[Heathrow Harry]

Short flights are only attractive if you can essentially turn up and go - as with a car or a train. When you have to arrive 90 minutes before the flight and go through all the security hassle they become unattractive. Plus of course the airport doesn't make any money unless they can trap you in the shopping arcade

Short range Bus Drones might work but only if they can operate like a bus - ie independent of large fixed airfields, security etc etc

[Mechta]

- Around 50 passengers per drone for versatility and about 5-7 tons payload.

- Price for each unit would need to be in the Euro 500k to 1 million bracket to be competitive.

...and production and maintenance could be strictly controlled.

The size together with the production & maintenance requirement appear to contradict the price bracket. For example, have a look at the new cost of a 53 seater coach (Euro 300k+).

The problem with quadcopter-type drones when scaled up, is the velocity and noise of the downwash. When V-22 Ospreys were sent to help after the Nepal earthquake, they were rapidly withdrawn when it was found their downwash just added to the destruction.

[Musician]

The problem with quadcopter-type drones when scaled up, is the velocity and noise of the downwash. When V-22 Ospreys were sent to help after the Nepal earthquake, they were rapidly withdrawn when it was found their downwash just added to the destruction.
So operate them over water only.

Now there were those things with downward-directed airflow operating over water that you don't much see any more except where the situation demands amphibious operation... ah yes.. hovercraft. (Top speed is ~150 km/h). They were commercially viable across the English channel until the tunnel was completed.

[Heathrow Harry]

like traveling in a washing machine TBH

[vikingivesterled]

The size together with the production & maintenance requirement appear to contradict the price bracket. For example, have a look at the new cost of a 53 seater coach (Euro 300k+).

The problem with quadcopter-type drones when scaled up, is the velocity and noise of the downwash. When V-22 Ospreys were sent to help after the Nepal earthquake, they were rapidly withdrawn when it was found their downwash just added to the destruction.

Downwash at takeoff and landing would not be a problem in normal operation if you use dedicated hard surface landing spots as suggested, and else fly high enough. And there is a lot of expensive stuff on a coach that would not be needed on a drone, like transmission, brakes and wheels.

In all you would want to keep most gadgets to a minimum to keep weight down, meaning carbon chassie and chairs, cheaper and lighter weight per kw petrol engines, and natural draft aircon.
The lidar, radar and laser stuff will soon be cheap enough to fit on most new cars so that won't be a moneypit either. Just need some additional programming to make it suitable in the air. If I can have radar on my boat for less than 2 grand, why not on my buss.

[Heathrow Harry]

This weeks "Flight" has an article in which Dassault say they are already planning for the day when you'll only need 1 man in the cockpit ............ long-term studies already underway

Sounds like they are thinking they need to design new cockpits with that option in mind.........

[Mr Oleo Strut]

Drone airlines? They're almost here already, surely. Most planes could take-off and land themselves now. Trains, buses and cars do so anyway so it's only a matter of time. I've sat in cars parking themselves and on driverless trains and buses. Do I worry? You bet your life I do, but so far without cause.

A major concern, though, occurs to me. Will people actually need to travel so much in the future? When every home is equipped with interactive 3D multi-screen facilities will anybody need to travel anywhere unless they absolutely have to or want to? Mass-travel will be a thing of the past and holidays won't be necessary when robots and drones at home and away will provide for all our wants and needs leaving us with plenty of time for peeling grapes and sipping G-and-Ts. And it won't be much longer before we're all beaming up and down all over the place.

Good times are coming, they told me years ago, when nuclear power was promised to provide free electricity and computerization access to unlimited leisure. That worked out well, didn't it. After all, it was nicely predicted in Bladerunner years ago!

[double_barrel]

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.


That is a strange attitude given that most fatal accidents are caused by human beings.

I am sure that the increase in automation will continue until we reach a situation without an onboard pilot rather soon. I cannot think of a recent situation in which a human being has saved a flight by unusual intervention (although I am sure that some will argue that happens every day), but plenty where inappropriate human intervention has been fatal. Fly-by-wire means that all the feedback mechanisms are already in place, so the hardest technical part is done.

The biggest problem I guess is that in most automated systems, if all else fails, and the computers have no idea what is happening, they can just stop! In aircraft systems the equivalent is to just hand back control to a human, whose response is often slow and inappropriate.

To take the crazy example of AF447, everyone died because the system was 'conservative', the philosophy of "if in doubt ask a human to sort it out" was a disaster. You can argue that is because the human crew were too reliant on their systems and when suddenly presented with confusing data they had almost literally forgotten how to fly. So is the solution less automation so they keep their hand in and crash a few aircraft in the process ?! Or more automation until the crew become passengers ?

[Musician]

That is a strange attitude given that most fatal accidents are caused by human beings.
That's a bogus argument, especially as
a) many systems are stil being controlled by humans, so many more accidents based on numbers alone
b) accidents involving automation and humans are usually blamed on humans in that model, not on automation

Computer systems usually have a narrow, well defined area within they which they can operate safely; venture outside of that area, and performance drops off far more sharply than a human's performance will.

On AF447, the autopilot encountered a condition it could not resolve and turned itself off. Had it not turned itself off, what would have happened? What would have occurred if it had adjusted its operation to the erroneous inputs? What would happen if it did that every time it now turns itself off, where humans save the situation? Was the inability to cope with the situation an inherently human problem, or was the introduction of automation in the cockpit a contributary cause?

Are human interface issues the failure of humans to operate machinery, or is it the failure of automation to cooperate with humans?

I've been reading comp.risks (https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/) on and off for almost three decades. It's about Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems, and as you may guess, those are almost all automation risks (the occasional laptop catching on fire notwithstanding). This includes aviation topics.

My personal takeaway is that whenever an automated system assumes that it a) has a complete picture of the situation, and that b) it has complete control, the time will come when either one of these assumptions is no longer true, and then the system will fail. The problem is that these assumptions make a computerized system easy to design. It is hard to design a system that is able to recognize when its inputs may be bad, and that its outputs may be bad as well, and still deal with it. (The approach to the system itself being bad is usually "put three of them in, if one is off, disable it". Bonus points if the three systems are not identical (because otherwise they would simply show the same errors in some cases), but of course that requires three times the effort.)

And then there's malicious interference: it's hard to get a pilot to crash an airplane; once you have found a way to do it to the computer, you can easily do it to all of them. So that's another thing that will cause fatal automation accidents to go up when automation spreads to more critical systems; but since the accident was caused by a malicious human, it'll appear on the other side of the statistics yet again.

You also need to consider the question: if the same effort was spent on making automation safer was spent on giving huamns the tools to make their own activities safer, what would the result be?

Arguments by statistics may seem simple and convincing, but when you delve into the issues, you're going to find that no statistic tells the whole truth.

[double_barrel]

On AF447, the autopilot encountered a condition it could not resolve and turned itself off. Had it not turned itself off, what would have happened? What would have occurred if it had adjusted its operation to the erroneous inputs? What would happen if it did that every time it now turns itself off, where humans save the situation? Was the inability to cope with the situation an inherently human problem, or was the introduction of automation in the cockpit a contributary cause?


OK, to take just that point. The system detected anomalous inputs and reverted to 'alternate law', ie handed control back to the humans. Of course, as it was designed it may not have successfully handled the situation if it had retained control (although the dumbest rule could hardly have done worse than the human crew). But a fully automated system would not have just 'surrendered' it would have looked at other sources of information. It would have been immediately obvious that the pitot tubes were sending nonsense data by comparison with multiple other sensors. It would be trivial to have designed a system to cope seamlessly with temporary loss of airspeed data. This was not done because the 'safest' option was assumed to be 'if in doubt, give it to the humans'.


Of course, it could be argued that this was itself an automation failure, ie had the crew been hand flying it, there would have been no incident. But that gets into a very circular argument!

[Musician]

It would have been immediately obvious that the pitot tubes were sending nonsense data by comparison with multiple other sensors.What are those sensors, and what are their failure modes? There were already multiple pitot tubes, but it did not help.

[double_barrel]

What would/should the crew have done when the system dropped to alternate mode ? How might they have determined what the aircraft was doing and how to respond? In fact the correct response was to do nothing, which they failed to do. It would not be hard to program a system to do better than that :-)

Alternatives? $0.1 accelerometer would have been enough ! So would GPS or simple interpolation. The system 'knows' the attitude and what the engines are doing, it knows the ground speed now and what the airspeed was a few seconds ago. Of course those do not give the actual instantaneous airspeed, but it would not require an especially smart system to detect that the airspeed data was simply missing and to use other sources of data to make an approximation that would have been good enough to keep the aircraft flying until the airspeed data stream returned. I don't know if pitot tubes have ice detection as well as anti-icing - in fact, I think if I was to design a pitot ice detection system it might look for anomalous readings or big pressure drops across critical parts!!

Of course you should now be asking how the system decides which set of data to trust if all the redundant but not truly independent members of a system drop out - eg all the pitots or all the GPS (plus both alternative GPS-like systems) which might conceivably give spurious but matching values under some circumstances. I don't think it is hard to manage such circumstances.

And of course, under some highly unusual circumstances, the system gets it wrong and everyone dies. How is that different from today's arrangement?

[yellowperil]

You also need to consider the question: if the same effort was spent on making automation safer was spent on giving huamns the tools to make their own activities safer, what would the result be?

No, you don't, as this will never be a valid question. The effort is only spent on automation in the short term as it lowers cost in the long term. Money is the motivating factor, not safety. Aviation is made relatively safe, not absolutely safe, as the safest form of aviation is not to aviate at all.

The 2 person cockpit of today will shrink to the one person cockpit of tomorrow, as surely as it shrank from 3 to 2. The survivor might retain the title captain, but they'll be increasingly deskilled into some sort of 'flight manager' overseeing the flight in general, whilst the responsibility for dealing with unexpected events takes places on the ground.

True autonomy is still a while off, but high levels of automation and remote operation and oversight is far closer, and driven by reasons of cost alone.

[vikingivesterled]

The problem with only having 1 pilot aka a captain on board is, how do you make people captains. Where do they get their training and hours of practice for the 1 person cockpit. Will the training happen on the ground in real flight simulator like environments And they who are not found suitable to proceed to take on multiple simultaneous remote controlled flights, will be offsided to yellowperil's "Flight Manager" position in the sky.
At least that way the ground based pilots could have regular job hours close to their place of home and without having their days extended by regular unforeseen circumstances. The flight(s) in progress would just be handed over to the next shift, like in air-traffic control.

[Musician]

Alternatives? $0.1 accelerometer would have been enough ! So would GPS or simple interpolation. The system 'knows' the attitude and what the engines are doing, it knows the ground speed now and what the airspeed was a few seconds ago. Of course those do not give the actual instantaneous airspeed, but it would not require an especially smart system to detect that the airspeed data was simply missing and to use other sources of data to make an approximation that would have been good enough to keep the aircraft flying until the airspeed data stream returned.
The existing system already detected that the input was bad. The problem is that unless you can determine why the input was bad, it can't be trusted from that point on: it might look as expected, but still be off, just by less.

Your alternative sensors can't replace air speed data: inertial speed or GPS speed is ground speed, which is fine for navigating, but for aviating you need the air speed because it determines how close to the limits the plane is: how close to a stall, how close to being overstressed?

"Do nothing" might have been "keep air speed constant by applying power", which is what it was doing before the autopilot turned itself off. That's pretty much what the pilot did, isn't it? And if you change the system behaviour to "do nothing", you may have changed it for situations where it shouldn't have changed (any programmer knows that fixing a bug often introduces new bugs). What you say is "easy to manage" is in fact hard to manage. It is easy for humans, but hard for computers, which is my point.

[cflier]

End of the day...they won't be the ones who decide if this stuff really takes off or not....Plenty of other factors to consider...Regulations, political and social factors all will have a influence.

Ultimately if people aren't comfortable with fully autonomous planes, Airlines won't be too keen on buying them, and r&d may take a different direction. Plenty of people worry about flying now, even thou they wont think twice about the drive to the airport...good luck trying to get them on some autonomous airliner. It would take a brave airline to try it.


In my opinion, it would be wise to keep 1 person up front. Crashes tend to be expensive and bad PR. But if the apparent "experts" are right in regards to a massive amount of jobs being automated in whatever amount of years ...I'd say the pilots job as it is currently would be more at risk of airlines losing sales, then layoffs due to a massive amount of the population being out of a income and unable to travel as opposed to being automated....Sometimes you have to wonder about the wisdom of all this automation and where it ends up...no point automating everything if no one has a income to buy stuff and companies ending up shooting themselves in the foot.


Who knows. Nobody has a crystal ball. Maybe one day, there will only be one pilot up front on short haul...Timeframe-anyones guess. But just because something is new, doesn't necessarily mean it is going to be the next big thing...Crystal Pepsi?

[double_barrel]

The existing system already detected that the input was bad. The problem is that unless you can determine why the input was bad, it can't be trusted from that point on: it might look as expected, but still be off, just by less.

Your alternative sensors can't replace air speed data: inertial speed or GPS speed is ground speed, which is fine for navigating, but for aviating you need the air speed because it determines how close to the limits the plane is: how close to a stall, how close to being overstressed?

"Do nothing" might have been "keep air speed constant by applying power", which is what it was doing before the autopilot turned itself off. That's pretty much what the pilot did, isn't it? And if you change the system behaviour to "do nothing", you may have changed it for situations where it shouldn't have changed (any programmer knows that fixing a bug often introduces new bugs). What you say is "easy to manage" is in fact hard to manage. It is easy for humans, but hard for computers, which is my point.

Actually in this particular (admittedly trivial from an engineering standpoint) case it is rather straightforward to manage. If you can describe the circumstances you can program them into the system. You have already said that the system correctly determined that airspeed indication was faulty, so your primary concern has been dealt with. It would be very easy to have set it up to allow it to keep control and make a best guess at actual airspeed based on other parameters. As the crew should have done - they had no more information but should have looked at the vast array of other information available to them and simply managed attitude, why would it be dangerous to have left the computer to do no more than that?

True, in a fully automatic system I would want to look at the nature of the backup sensors - eg multiple identical pitot tubes were not actually independent of each other as they all had the same characteristics.

The crew failed because of 'startle' - computers don't suffer from that! Having totally screwed-up the situation the crew were further confused by the very interesting stall warning signal that disappeared when the airspeed fell below what the system considered possible in flight - it was actually correct, they were not flying when the stall warning went silent, they were falling like a brick, but there is a lesson there when considering more automation.

[PAXboy]

As has been said before, cargo flights will try this first.

[Musician]

I have multiple issues with your post, DB.

First of all, the automation can get it wrong. There's a list of incidents on the Wikipedia ADIRU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_data_inertial_reference_unit) article, e.g. Malaysia Airlines Flight 124, which the autopilot would have happily crashed, but for the humans in the cockpit.

You assert that automation would have gotten it right on AF447. But the reason the pilot pitched up was the information provided by the automation:
"The A330 static ports are located below the fuselage mid-line forward of the wing. On the A330-200 in particular, as a result of the position of teh static pressure sensors, the measured static pressure overestimates the actual static pressure. One of the first effects after AF447'spitot tubes became obstructed was that the internal altimeter corrections were recalculated as if the airplane was flaying at lower speeds. This resulted in false indications of a 300 foot decrease in altitude and a downward vertical speed approaching 600 feet per minute." (Bill Palmer, "Understanding Air France 447")
So what would the autopilot have done if faced with a descent like that? I'd say, about the same thing the humans did. Also note that because the ADIRU altitude is slowly pulled onto barometric altitude whenever there's deviation, this descent wouldn't have looked like a sudden jump. Bill Palmer also says, "You've heard that the crew did not react to the stall warning. But, you'll see that they reacted exactly how they were taught to - it just didn't do any good." (understandingaf477.com (http://understandingaf447.com/))

"make a best guess at actual airspeed based on other parameters"-- well, there is the Back-up Speed Scale (http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/505799-airbus-back-up-speed-scale-buss.html), but it's not supposed to be used above FL250. The fallback is pitch/thrust tables, but I'd assume these are only useful when the aircraft isn't about to stall.

Automatic systems can have a "startle factor" as well (disregarding for a moment the questionable assertion that the AF447 crew were "startled"). For one, the AF447 ADIRU was "startled" into computing a bad vertical speed, without being aware of it. For another, reset an IRU and it becomes useless. Now count all the various ways technical systems can fail and not be aware of it...

The main problem though is this: "If you can describe the circumstances you can program them into the system." And that's not adequate. With humans, you can describe situations to them, and solutions, and when they're faced with something unknown, they'll look for analogies in their knowledge and apply them as best as they think appropriate. (This includes selection end execution of trained procedures.) This means that humans perform best in familiar cricumstances, they don't always perform optimally, but their performances falls of gradually as circumstances go outside of the norm.

Most computers can't reason like that (and those that can aren't fully understood). A computer's actions are guided by rules. Now think about bureaucracy and how inappropriate its rules can be in certain situations that they weren't made for. You are creating the rules for a certain set of assumptions, and if you are really rigorous, you identify these assumptions and "do nothing" when they don't hold. Since a computer can't do nothing, unless it turns itself off, that's what it does at present. But if a system that can't turn itself off because there is no pilot, it needs to follow rules that were not made for the situation it finds itself in, and it is then when the behaviour of the automatic system deteriorates sharply, because it has no way to select which rules it should be following and thus follows even the nonsensical ones. The behaviour that emerges from the interplay of a complex system of rules is always somewhat unpredictable.

So you make some rules for situations you found, and you add them to the system, and now you have a complex system of rules (including those that deal with the various types of failures that might occur), and you're going to stumble upon a situation you hadn't considered where the behaviour generated by those rules results in a failure, possibly with many passengers aboard.

Your suggestion of "add some code for each nonstandard situation we know about" leads to an unstable, unmanageable software system with unpredictable performance in critical cases. (This is true for all software systems, ask any software engineer.) Well, "unpredictable" is not entirely true, because you can fall back on statistics, but then you need a large number of samples to have reliable data, aka learn from experience, which means you can't predict the safety of the system in advance.

yellowperil made the point that automatic systems are not inherently safer, but they're seen as cheaper than human-controlled systems and so there's money that can be profitably invested to make them safer than human aviation, which would then enable their introduction. This means that the argument "drone flight is safer than human flight" goes out the window; it is only true because we want it to be, and it suffices for the stakeholder to make it appear to be true, and they're motivated to make it appear to be true at the least cost to them. I think that is cause to be suspicious.

For advanced weapons systems, it is true that they're often demonstrated in controlled conditions (aka where the assumptions made by the designers are ensured to be true), and even then tests often fail. (I think for one of the recent cruise missile attacks on Syria, only about half of them hit anything. There go your fully automatic drones.) The same goes for software security for Internet-connected systems: once a hacker can engineer a situation that breaks the designer's assumptions, the system is often able to be compromised. But when the system was demonstrated, it certainly looked capable.

Will there be drone airlines in the future? Possibly. But they're definitely still a long ways off.

[PAXboy]

Coincidentally in todays Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/artificial-intelligence-risks-gm-style-public-backlash-experts-warn

Artificial intelligence risks GM-style public backlash, experts warn.

Researchers say social, ethical and political concerns are mounting and greater oversight is urgently needed

Noted that air regulation is going to be significantly stronger than for AI cars but, the problem is the same.

[yellowperil]

Dunno what you made of the rest of the article, but to me it bore little resemblance to that clickbait headline you've quoted....