Airbus pitches pilotless jets -- at Le Bourget
 

AP Interview: Airbus is ready for pilotless jets - are you?

(with not-so-subtle reference/implication to pilot performance re: the 737 MAX crashes)

https://apnews.com/d8d911a9f1844df1a314a42c346e74a4

Who would have thought a salesman making such a statement /sarc


So Christian please explain why aircraft manufacturers, will only 'eventually' de-carbonise, when other industries have already transtioned and even the IMO International Maritime Organisation will be fossil fuel free inside fifty years.
Maybe because that won't please airlines and much better to pitch something that calms the frayed nerves of IR managers at airlines world wide.

Single-pilot operation? Possibly, as technology advances. Single occupant behind a locked door? Cross me off the passenger list.

Pilot less planes or one pilot?

Trust my life on a computer or one guy up front behind locked doors?
That is the day will start taking the boat again if they still exist.
Computers fail. It is code type in by a programmer. All considerations have to be type in.

I program and know that things are missed or not thought of and then what? We put in a quick fix.

at that time the boats and the trains will likely be automated too :E

Yes, but they are not so dependent on the law of gravity

Automation won't kill you because it makes a mistake, because it's gone nuts, because it feels suicidal or it's just having a real bad day. Automation will kill you because someone got the design wrong, or the implementation, or failed to account for the situation in the design, or... essentially all the ways transport and engineering can kill you today anyway. Or maybe you just ended up on the wrong side of the trolley problem - that one'll be new.

One guy behind a locked door? Not sure. I may take the automation instead. Maybe that's the intention, to make that appear to be the choice.

I suspect the biggest hurdle will be getting a salesperson who will be capable of selling tickets on one of these a/c. We have seen recently that technology has eliminated a lot of causes of accidents but has substituted new causes. A lot of pax decide to entrust their lives to the skill of aircrew on the basis that said aircrew enjoy living as much as they do. A computer doesn't understand the concept.

Emeritus

They're all at it!
Looks like Boeing landed a "pilotless" KC 46 there as well, if the landing was anything to go by;

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...s-airshow.html

https://youtu.be/PzRGsZJkjUY

:ok:

Aircraft are much easier to fly than cars are to drive . . . there will come a point when an automated system will be statistically safer than using pilots . . . neither will ever be 100% safe . . . the real question is, which one is safer at a point in time ? . . . Views of the flying public will rapidly change IF fully autonomous aircraft are shown to be safer than using pilots as part of the control system . . . it is inevitable that this will happen at some point . . . whether it is cost effective is a different matter.

I'll be long gone before full automation will be used on commercial passenger airliners. I imagine that if and when the day comes, it will first be on cargo aircraft for a good many years before the final step of fully automated passenger operations. Future generations will see it as quite normal. Now, if it was to come in next year, I would most definitely change my mode of transport!

Errr...on what do you base that? A pilot is thinking and acting (or at least monitoring) in 4 dimensions (the conventional 3 plus time). A car driver is only in 2. In fact, if you accept that a car is following a road, he is only in 1; straight ahead.

Auxtank - no it definitely takes a pilot to stuff it up that badly and still get away with it.

Not a good test. An autonomous aircraft facing the exact same situation might simply return to La Guardia without drama.

Not to say Sully that didn't do a superb job -- he absolutely did -- but computers are much better than humans in such situations. I.e., problems with clear constraints where an immediate solution can be computed. There would be no hesitation, no need to query ATC about possible options, no "can we make it to Teterboro?" back-and-forth, etc., all wasting precious seconds.

No, just cut the price enough and the loco pax will line up.

Of course, pilotless is just the start. Look how much we could save by going cabin-crewless too!

One thing you could say is - if airspace is totally controlled - the advantage in autonomous flying is all the aircraft are under the same control system, going to a small number of known destinations on a coordinated and published schedule. Commercial aircraft can be relied upon to obey the rules of the road so to speak. The challenge in cars is blending autonomous cars, that will presumably be (an big if!) acting rationally, mixed in with drunk texting yahoos taking selfies, sheep wandering across the road, etc etc.
Off the two, autonomous aircraft will be "easier" to develop, but the consequences of failure are more severe. In cars you could be right 99% of the time and still be much safer than what we have. In aircraft your threshold is much higher because you start with a much higher bar. The public seems to accept carnage on the road, but not in the air.
In the end I very much doubt it will be worth getting rid of pilots for all sorts of reasons, public acceptance being the biggest. I can think of a lot of good reasons to get rid of drivers! I personally think fully autonomous vehicles will be limited to well defined infrastructure.
20driver

Perhaps 'the AF447 test' ?

A terrorists dream perhaps?

Vulnerable to hacking and hence potentially utterly appalling consequences.

A real live person (preferably 2) at the helm when I fly please.

BSD.

I'd like to know how a fully automated system would have dealt with the Cathay CX780 fuel contamination with one engine stuck at high thrust and the other at idle? How do you program that scenario? Ok, you don't, you have remote control. So it's not actually fully "automated", you have just moved the human decision maker to a different location. Still completely capable of making a Human Factor screw up. Humans have been covering for, and saving computers in aviation or a long time, the manufacturers may not even be aware of the extent and nature of this problem, see the Therac 25 report below and the operation of the fail safe mechanical interlock in opposition and protecting to the software command lethal dose. Two humans are the fail safe in aviation, we save a lot more than we kill.

The computer accidents history is replete with Human Factor screw-ups, they just occur in the coding cubicle, not the interface with the real world. A close read of the first documented computer accident, the Therac 25 and some of Nancy Leveson's other work on comparing the introduction of Software and the introduction of the High Pressure Steam powered era accidents and how to encourage public confidence should give anyone pause for thought about the future of aviation automation. Her contention is the software is the laggard and it's reliable operation is subject to enormous, drum roll please, Human Factors.

As Leveson sagely notes, the Steam business couldn't move forward until regulations had caught up with the boiler makers technological advancements and those regulations were driven by public outrage at the deaths and maiming caused by poor quality products.


We have already had an inkling of the public's tolerance for accidents in this sphere with the 737MAX - two. Two accidents of a pilotless aircraft and the entire effort will be put in jeopardy. There are enormous risks by actually proceeding toward a commercial product

Is that your considered opinion? :}

I made a wisecrack years ago about full automation, with a couple of actors up the front . . . and then added, oh, there already is. Don't worry, just based on jealousy.

The reality is, aircraft of the future will set out with a computer driving that knows the details of every tall thing in the world, the weather everywhere, and a full memory, not only of every accident but the post accident analysis. It will be one smart cookie. Two, better make that two smart cookies, plus a spacesaver in a box somewhere.

Not quite. He does have a point. In some ways it's easier to write software to fly an aircraft than to drive a car. There is very little to crash into up in fresh air. There are endless things to crash into on your average street. And that lady with a pram isn't broadcasting ADS-B, so good luck programming your collision avoidance.

Oh yes. My addendum above didn't mention the projected vectors of every flight in the world.


50 years ago there was the story of a transatlantic flight made with only one human - a press reporter. It was repeated for so long that I began to wonder if there was any truth in it, but I doubt it, they would have been using valves/tubes in that era. (of the flight)

You've just described high speed trains carrying hundreds of passenger at a time. Although, if the driver of one of those decided to punch through a red signal, auto braking systems would engage and cant be over ridden. Everyone lives and the driver is carted off by Police. Anyone ever considered why we don't have driverless trains? I guess the point is that just because we have the technology to automate our transport systems, doesn't mean it is the most sensible thing to do. The fact is that automated systems all have failures at some point whether it is power, sensor, actuator, command signals or an external influence. Of the latter it is impossible to program a response to the unknown event and because of that it is simply unacceptable to put hundreds of peoples lives at risk on a pilotless or single pilot commercial airliner. How many times would the collective experience of this forum be able to recount events where if it wasn't for the skill of the crew in managing a dynamically changing, multi-headed emergency, all would have perished. Humans don't have artificial intelligence, thank God! This salesman for Airbus cant be serious, can he?

Me too, I wouldn't fly on a Single Pilot Commercial Jet.
Maybe a ground based pilot alongside the single pilot, checking that everything is done correctly?
But then why not just have two pilots in the cockpit.

And of course standing room only. This is where MOL enters stage right dressed as a pantomime horse.

What is funny is the press leaping on a story like this, even to have a sketch of the folk all lined up holding onto straps.

I've posted variations of this many times - I have little doubt that we'll eventually end up with pilotless commercial aircraft. I also foresee a future where not only are fully autonomous cars common, driving a car yourself will be expressly banned aside from a few areas set aside for dinosaurs like me that actually enjoy a brisk drive through the countryside.
That being said, I also believe we are still decades away from that future - far enough I doubt I'll live to see it.
Airbus said a lot of stuff in that press conference that I have issues with - I wonder if he'd actually talked to his engineers before spouting off about going completely to hydrogen powered aircraft. I know people that have looked at that, and the problems are tremendous - especially where to put the fuel. In order to have a reasonable density of hydrogen, it needs to be liquid, which means really, really cold, and even then then density is so low that it takes a massive volume to fly even a few thousand miles - you're not just going to stick it in the wings... You're talking a massive volume that needs to be kept cryrogenically cold for long periods of time. Materials that can handle that level of cold for extended periods, and reusable thousands of times is also a problem. Not to mention all the inefficiency in using a cryogenic fuel as well as obtaining large quantities of hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner (currently most hydrogen fuel is created by stripping the hydrogen off of hydrocarbon fuels).

Oh but we do. For trains, Fully Automated Operations (FAO) have been the reality since Kobe New Transit in Japan achieved Grade of Automation 4 -- the highest possible -- way back in 1981.

FAO trains have no drivers at all. Human attendants (if present) are mainly for customer service. Many of these trains operate 24/7 as part of the most complex systems in the world (typically large city metro / commuter light rails) and achieve the absolute highest safety records.

A prime example is the Copenhagen Metro, which was designed to be fully automated from day 1. At peak the Metro carries 12,000 passengers per hour. It was awarded the World's Best Metro for three years in a row (2009-2011).

In fact if you visit Airbus in Toulouse you might notice that all of the metro trains in the city are fully automated. Today FAO GoA 4 trains operate in 40+ cities / 20 countries around the world, including the Sydney Metro Northwest line that just opened last month.

Tell that to BHP....

You do. Many systems are driverless. Even leaving the Driver's on board, you are still reliant on automated signalling systems, supposedly fail-safe and they still have problems. As Futurama pointed out, Sydney just opened their new Metro system, and are planning on extending it into the southwest in years to come, with contracts being let to commence the installation of ATO-capable signalling on their heavy-rail network.

Rio Tinto is moving some of the heaviest trains in the world thousands of miles daily, with no driver's within cooee. They are not without their teething problems, but the system appears to be proving itself reliable enough to continue with thus far. If it was that bad or unreliable that it was hurting their bottom line, they would get rid of it in a heartbeat and reintroduce manned trains.

On the flight deck one human, one dog.

Dog bites human if he touches anything

Interesting thoughts, but really, think it though...

On a CATIII autoland, what exactly does the crew have to do? drop the gear?

I watch landings all the time, who cant tell when the ac lands on auto vs a pilot?

On DEP, once weight off wheels....again, retract the gear?

There are fully autonomous aircraft, some sizable ones, including helos, fuelers, and armed with ****, that fly sorties 24/7.....

Looking at that AB concept, with the driver in the front baggage area, kicking back, surrounded by screens, I would love to kick back in that space with that view...

We learn to fly in the sim, but cannot possibly fly by large screens in front of us...really, sign me up!

Really, I am telling you, especially with drivers of experience, forget the whole BS of getting to the airport, whatever hours, and the rest of the bull****, sign on remote, and see the same thing, well, even more, and fly it remote...

(why do you think there is an ADSB-In port?)

Look at the positives...

Have you read the report you referenced? "An immediate decision would have been required to complete a successful turnback, and even that was questionable (paraphrasing) ". An immediate decision isn’t necessarily the most appropriate. Scenario..pilotless aircraft has to force land in a field a) full of children or b) a field full of animals, which would it chose? I know what a human would do...

That's my whole point. :ugh:

An "immediate decision" for a human being is an eternity for a computer. By the time Sully noticed something was amiss, an autonomous system could have considered thousands of scenarios, computed the best course of action (having the highest probability of success), and initiated a safe turn back to La Guardia, all without much drama. This is exactly what computers are good for.

What exactly are they good at? The leading type of AI, neural nets are exceptional of taking a closed problem and solving it eg AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero
(AGZ). However, these problems were not solved on the fly, they took extensive computational resources to generate it's own training data in the case of AGZ it was a 40 day process simulating playing itself to generate the dataset.

However, neural nets need extensive clean training data, either from the real world or by simulation. There was no extensive corpus of air returns with double engine damage for A320's unlike the millions of recorded games of Go for Alpha Go training. Even Sully's effort represents a single instance that is effectively useless for future algorithmic training. Billions of simulations would be necessary just to replicate & solve this exact scenario on this day. For self driving cars they actually model intersections and do billions of simulations to generate the training data to enable self driving: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars.

There are many things that computers can do exceptionally better than humans, but solving novelty is not one of them using the current leading AI technology.