"Pilotless airliners safer" - London Times article
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Dan Winterland
Quote: The cost of certifying pilotless airliners will outweigh the cost savings of taking out the pilots. Especially bearing in mind you will have to have higher qualified operators on the ground and one person trained to take over in flight if required, so the numbers will not reduce significantly. Unquote
I think you got that right. Most of the UAV missions I see could be better done at lower cost with powered airplanes. Consider a proposal I just saw for powerline patrol using drones. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use a Cessna 150 with a pilot than go to all the trouble of certifying a UAV (which won't be cheap) and having to still have an operator on the ground a likely additional people to verify traffic avoidance.
I've been looking into UAV operations and it seems to me that the real reason for UAV operations would be dealing with a hazardous environment for the crew. Most of these applications are military in nature. I could see a civilian use for high altitude communication relay where the mission would call for long loiter at high altitude.
Frankly, I don't think we have to worry based on cost.
I think you got that right. Most of the UAV missions I see could be better done at lower cost with powered airplanes. Consider a proposal I just saw for powerline patrol using drones. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use a Cessna 150 with a pilot than go to all the trouble of certifying a UAV (which won't be cheap) and having to still have an operator on the ground a likely additional people to verify traffic avoidance.
I've been looking into UAV operations and it seems to me that the real reason for UAV operations would be dealing with a hazardous environment for the crew. Most of these applications are military in nature. I could see a civilian use for high altitude communication relay where the mission would call for long loiter at high altitude.
Frankly, I don't think we have to worry based on cost.
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I would bet - the single pilot airliner will be the next logical step.
I would bet - the single pilot airliner will be the next logical step.
Step by step the first officer will only be a paytofly before becoming a captain. Economically it's as if as the company operated a single pilot aircraft.
You are implying that pay-to-fly or young cadets are not able to fly, but are simply taken from the street and sat in the cockpit. No. They still have to have a licence to fly commercial passenger transport flights, which involves many months - sometimes years - of study and exams. As well as passing all these, they still have to have demonstrated sufficient skill, knowledge, and ability to control the aircraft and conduct a flight to a safe emergency landing in the event that the other pilot becomes incapacitated. And they must do this without flying into high ground, or swerving off the side or end of the runway, so they need to intelligently select a suitable airfield, with weather conditions within limits. Until a new First Officer proves this ability to the satisfaction of several very experienced training Captains, that First Officer will not be allowed to fly on line without a third safety pilot present in the cockpit.
So; the Swanwick ATC computer workstations autonomously went off-line, meaning that ATC had to go manual. The fault which caused the shut down had apparently never shown itself, despite the system having been in daily use assisting the safe control of thousands of flights per day.
So what say the 'computerphiles' now? How about passenger airliners - or any flying device without human pilot(s), suddenly shutting down, resetting, or going off-line while airborne over London, or any other habitation?
As a commercial pilot, I have been to a Swanwick ATC liaison day and seen what happens with a computer shutdown, (not for real - in their ATC simulator). Lots of very experienced human controllers get very busy all of a sudden, sorting the situation out manually, with pieces of paper.
This is a classic illustration of why computers never will be allowed to have executive control over anything directly involving human safety.
So; the Swanwick ATC computer workstations autonomously went off-line, meaning that ATC had to go manual. The fault which caused the shut down had apparently never shown itself, despite the system having been in daily use assisting the safe control of thousands of flights per day.
So what say the 'computerphiles' now? How about passenger airliners - or any flying device without human pilot(s), suddenly shutting down, resetting, or going off-line while airborne over London, or any other habitation?
As a commercial pilot, I have been to a Swanwick ATC liaison day and seen what happens with a computer shutdown, (not for real - in their ATC simulator). Lots of very experienced human controllers get very busy all of a sudden, sorting the situation out manually, with pieces of paper.
This is a classic illustration of why computers never will be allowed to have executive control over anything directly involving human safety.
Last edited by Uplinker; 13th Dec 2014 at 12:42.
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You are implying that pay-to-fly or young cadets are not able to fly, but are simply taken from the street and sat in the cockpit. No. They still have to have a licence to fly commercial passenger transport flights, which involves many months - sometimes years - of study and exams. As well as passing all these, they still have to have demonstrated sufficient skill, knowledge, and ability to control the aircraft and conduct a flight to a safe emergency landing in the event that the other pilot becomes incapacitated. And they must do this without flying into high ground, or swerving off the side or end of the runway, so they need to intelligently select a suitable airfield, with weather conditions within limits.
They may have studied (ticked boxes on paper) but they are not truly experienced (piston, turboprop then jet).
Let's start with pilot-less freight planes. Plenty business to be found
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I don't think Pilotless aircraft for passengers will replace the infrastructure we have now. The current risk is acceptable and can only improve with technology. Eventually, they might be implemented for different requirements such as low-level short distance city 'taxi' travel - but I would suggest that's centuries away.
Where I think we will see them is in the local goods transport area - already being worked on by Google and Amazon.
Where I think we will see them is in the local goods transport area - already being worked on by Google and Amazon.
From today's Wall Street Journal:
All large commercial jets for passenger and cargo service world-wide now fly with at least two pilots in the cockpit. A new study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Rockwell Collins Inc. will focus on the provocative idea that co-pilots could remain on the ground, remotely assisting solo aviators on the flight deck during the busiest parts of flights, said John Borghese, Rockwell’s vice president of its Advanced Technology Center.
Oh, I wonder what Rockwell's interest is.... No doubt it will be a very long report and will make no difference. Money well spent, not. Unacceptable to the crew, unacceptable to the passengers, unacceptable to the insurers. Why bother? Move to JB?
Mr. Optimistic, the article is behind the WSJ pay wall, so I tried to respected that by keeping the excerpt brief. However the jest of the article is that NASA foresees a critical pilot shortage in the next 20 years. Single pilot airliners would obviously help alleviate any such pilot shortage (no comment on the reality basis of such an upcoming shortage).
R-C would be a logic choice for such a NASA funded study, given they are responsible for much of the current flight deck automation systems.
BTW, roughly 25 years ago while I was in the middle of a major flight test program (new engines on the 767), I was a bit surprised that during weekend flight testing the right seat pilot was often quite young and raw. When I asked about it I was informed that the right seat pilot was really only there to get the plane home if the left seat pilot became incapacitated. Oh, and the left seat pilots were always top notch (at the time it was usually John Cashman - later to become the Chief Boeing test pilot). Most of the Boeing test pilots are top notch stick and rudder guys - I've been on a number of cheek-clenching flight test maneuvers and they've always pulled them perfectly (think holding a 747 in a 20 degree yaw 5k above ground level for 30+ seconds, taking a 767 from 80 deg. left bank to 80 degree right bank at the max roll rate, or seemingly endless hours of stalls and 'wind up turns' (I'm not prone to motion sickness, but 3+ hours of wind-up turns did the trick)). Am I ready to ride along while a computer did all that unassisted, without human backup? Hell no
But letting a computer put the aircraft on the ground if that great FT pilot becomes incapacitated? I'm not sure I'm ready to dismiss that.
R-C would be a logic choice for such a NASA funded study, given they are responsible for much of the current flight deck automation systems.
BTW, roughly 25 years ago while I was in the middle of a major flight test program (new engines on the 767), I was a bit surprised that during weekend flight testing the right seat pilot was often quite young and raw. When I asked about it I was informed that the right seat pilot was really only there to get the plane home if the left seat pilot became incapacitated. Oh, and the left seat pilots were always top notch (at the time it was usually John Cashman - later to become the Chief Boeing test pilot). Most of the Boeing test pilots are top notch stick and rudder guys - I've been on a number of cheek-clenching flight test maneuvers and they've always pulled them perfectly (think holding a 747 in a 20 degree yaw 5k above ground level for 30+ seconds, taking a 767 from 80 deg. left bank to 80 degree right bank at the max roll rate, or seemingly endless hours of stalls and 'wind up turns' (I'm not prone to motion sickness, but 3+ hours of wind-up turns did the trick)). Am I ready to ride along while a computer did all that unassisted, without human backup? Hell no
But letting a computer put the aircraft on the ground if that great FT pilot becomes incapacitated? I'm not sure I'm ready to dismiss that.
Last edited by tdracer; 16th Dec 2014 at 03:34.
I think you got that right. Most of the UAV missions I see could be better done at lower cost with powered airplanes. Consider a proposal I just saw for powerline patrol using drones. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use a Cessna 150 with a pilot than go to all the trouble of certifying a UAV (which won't be cheap) and having to still have an operator on the ground a likely additional people to verify traffic avoidance.
One of the strongest arguments for pilotless aircraft is the removal of the pilot from a hazardous situation. An argument that kind of loses its strength for passenger aircraft.
There is a certain irony to this thread (and thank you TD). If there is a perceived problem wrt crew ability, especially in the right seat, what is the most direct solution, wandering off on a high tech solution or, pay the money to train better or recruit better?
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automation is a good tool but doesn't necessarily mean less accidents. You get different accidents. And you can't get round the human factor- automation and its software is still designed by us humans.
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Some of the comments on this thread are so far off base I feel motivated to make my annual pprune post.
First, the mechanics of flight automation. Certainly there are many challenges, and if you lack a doctorate and / or several years of experience in the field you're probably not able to identify many of them. In my experience a higher degree gets you to the point of truly understanding how little you know about a topic. So here are a few opinions from someone who knows just a little about flight automation.
Perhaps 80% of the technical problems of commercial flight automation have already been solved, some of them for many years. The other 20% are harder or more esoteric, but are not necessarily what you would expect. For example taxiing to the gate is one of the more challenging activities (for humans too, sometimes). Problem solving and mitigation is a curious mix of the blindingly obvious and the complex, and has been an active field of research and development for decades.
Many doubts have been expressed about high reliability software. This a reasonably mature field and more a matter of development time and cost than research. Many modern aircraft are already fully reliant on sophisticated software for flight safety. As a pilot you'll be aware of some of these systems, but the majority are silent and embedded throughout the avionics and other aircraft systems. Increasingly there is no such thing as manual handling - software is always in the loop. In the last couple of decades we've become quite good at designing software in such a way that the inevitable bugs do not become critical problems. Bug identification in avionic systems is relatively rare (but the systems are large so the report rate certainly isn't zero). Bugs that are causal or even a factor in a serious incident are exceptionally rare - far more so than pilot finger trouble or mechanical failure.
Please stop talking about a model of the human brain being a gate to flight automation. This is a fallacy. While neural networks are utilised in many fields of pattern recognition (and are present in aircraft systems today, heavily so in military applications), the sophistication of human reasoning is far from a prerequisite of automation. Many disciplines are involved and the catch all term of "AI" could mean anything from a state machine to a knowledge engine. We do not need to wait for the realisation of science fiction for this field to progress.
Flight automation is generally considered a technically easier problem to solve than road vehicle automation. Self driving vehicle developers will claim that their field is a lot harder (but they would). This is self evident to anyone who considers that commercial drones (autonomous, remote piloted and hybrid) have been on the market for years, and flying as research projects for many decades. Self driving cars are still some way off, although dozens of research vehicles are on public roads right now with a human minder. Although cars lack the degrees of freedom of an aircraft, their basic operation is nonetheless more complex to automate due to the complexity of terrain, a less predictable environment and the immediacy of criticality with many failure modes.
It was mentioned that you can't just stop an aircraft when it has a problem - true, and that's a good thing. If you can maintain a sensible attitude you may have seconds, minutes or even hours to solve a problem. Given that the human strength for problem solving is in troubleshooting unplanned issues, there remains the possibility of human fall-back in such events, even if this is remote. Automation is already more appropriate than human handling for short decision-time events. That the immediate response of an AP to a problem is to disengage is a reflection of a design approach developed in the 1950s. In more recent times we've been flying research aircraft with unconventional control and sensor inputs for many years and it's safe to claim that automation would have a greater chance of recovering an aircraft with damaged control response than a human pilot.
Of course some accidents that might be mitigated by a human may have a less satisfactory outcome with automation. It seems likely, however, that a greater number of accidents may be avoided through the application of automation. As such I believe that many of the systems required for automation of the complete flight profile will be incorporated into human piloted aircraft anyway, as part of the natural development of avionic systems. Actually this has been happening for years, and would happen more quickly if there were greater cost benefit (aircraft don't crash often enough to offset the cost).
Which brings us on to the motivation to remove the pilot. If automation can be deployed with an improvement (or at least no reduction) in accident rates then it's my belief that safety will not be a factor. Neither will it be a motivator for the reason just mentioned, unless the cost starts to be offset by insurance savings. Crew reduction, however, is certainly a factor. It's been said repeatedly that the cost of the flight crew is insufficient to justify the cost and complexity of automation, but that was not the case with navigation and flight engineering. Those roles are redundant for commercial benefit and this was made possible by the development of automation. That automation is not as complex as an unmanned flight deck, but 40 years ago the challenges were nonetheless substantial.
For me, the most relevant predictor of flight automation is the rail industry. Let's be clear about the technology - all aspects of rail operation can be and have been fully automated. Even so, the majority of modern rail systems have an on-board human driver. In some cases the human is fully redundant and is not actually driving the train, but is present for passenger perception and/or commercial concerns. The most commonly cited justification is for emergency response, as if one man can effectively marshal several hundred passengers in the event of an accident. Even if this were the case, a train manager would be a cheaper and more appropriate role to execute this function.
Surely flight automation will face this same hurdle. Perhaps few outside of the industry believe it right now, but I'm confident that the technology could be feasible within the next couple of generations of avionics. It could happen more quickly if there was demand. However I find it hard to believe that passengers and trade unions will accept this development easily. I think it likely that we'll see assisted and then fully automated road cars before we see an unmanned flight deck. Although the road car problem is harder to solve, the benefit is visible and huge - a large proportion of road deaths can and will be prevented. Perhaps that will reassure passengers that public transportation can also benefit from automation.
Until that happens the role of the pilot is going to become increasingly dull, as the reach of flight automation continues to grow. Perhaps the role of co-pilot will become the first casualty once automation and captain can be considered each other's redundancy.
All IMHO.
First, the mechanics of flight automation. Certainly there are many challenges, and if you lack a doctorate and / or several years of experience in the field you're probably not able to identify many of them. In my experience a higher degree gets you to the point of truly understanding how little you know about a topic. So here are a few opinions from someone who knows just a little about flight automation.
Perhaps 80% of the technical problems of commercial flight automation have already been solved, some of them for many years. The other 20% are harder or more esoteric, but are not necessarily what you would expect. For example taxiing to the gate is one of the more challenging activities (for humans too, sometimes). Problem solving and mitigation is a curious mix of the blindingly obvious and the complex, and has been an active field of research and development for decades.
Many doubts have been expressed about high reliability software. This a reasonably mature field and more a matter of development time and cost than research. Many modern aircraft are already fully reliant on sophisticated software for flight safety. As a pilot you'll be aware of some of these systems, but the majority are silent and embedded throughout the avionics and other aircraft systems. Increasingly there is no such thing as manual handling - software is always in the loop. In the last couple of decades we've become quite good at designing software in such a way that the inevitable bugs do not become critical problems. Bug identification in avionic systems is relatively rare (but the systems are large so the report rate certainly isn't zero). Bugs that are causal or even a factor in a serious incident are exceptionally rare - far more so than pilot finger trouble or mechanical failure.
Please stop talking about a model of the human brain being a gate to flight automation. This is a fallacy. While neural networks are utilised in many fields of pattern recognition (and are present in aircraft systems today, heavily so in military applications), the sophistication of human reasoning is far from a prerequisite of automation. Many disciplines are involved and the catch all term of "AI" could mean anything from a state machine to a knowledge engine. We do not need to wait for the realisation of science fiction for this field to progress.
Flight automation is generally considered a technically easier problem to solve than road vehicle automation. Self driving vehicle developers will claim that their field is a lot harder (but they would). This is self evident to anyone who considers that commercial drones (autonomous, remote piloted and hybrid) have been on the market for years, and flying as research projects for many decades. Self driving cars are still some way off, although dozens of research vehicles are on public roads right now with a human minder. Although cars lack the degrees of freedom of an aircraft, their basic operation is nonetheless more complex to automate due to the complexity of terrain, a less predictable environment and the immediacy of criticality with many failure modes.
It was mentioned that you can't just stop an aircraft when it has a problem - true, and that's a good thing. If you can maintain a sensible attitude you may have seconds, minutes or even hours to solve a problem. Given that the human strength for problem solving is in troubleshooting unplanned issues, there remains the possibility of human fall-back in such events, even if this is remote. Automation is already more appropriate than human handling for short decision-time events. That the immediate response of an AP to a problem is to disengage is a reflection of a design approach developed in the 1950s. In more recent times we've been flying research aircraft with unconventional control and sensor inputs for many years and it's safe to claim that automation would have a greater chance of recovering an aircraft with damaged control response than a human pilot.
Of course some accidents that might be mitigated by a human may have a less satisfactory outcome with automation. It seems likely, however, that a greater number of accidents may be avoided through the application of automation. As such I believe that many of the systems required for automation of the complete flight profile will be incorporated into human piloted aircraft anyway, as part of the natural development of avionic systems. Actually this has been happening for years, and would happen more quickly if there were greater cost benefit (aircraft don't crash often enough to offset the cost).
Which brings us on to the motivation to remove the pilot. If automation can be deployed with an improvement (or at least no reduction) in accident rates then it's my belief that safety will not be a factor. Neither will it be a motivator for the reason just mentioned, unless the cost starts to be offset by insurance savings. Crew reduction, however, is certainly a factor. It's been said repeatedly that the cost of the flight crew is insufficient to justify the cost and complexity of automation, but that was not the case with navigation and flight engineering. Those roles are redundant for commercial benefit and this was made possible by the development of automation. That automation is not as complex as an unmanned flight deck, but 40 years ago the challenges were nonetheless substantial.
For me, the most relevant predictor of flight automation is the rail industry. Let's be clear about the technology - all aspects of rail operation can be and have been fully automated. Even so, the majority of modern rail systems have an on-board human driver. In some cases the human is fully redundant and is not actually driving the train, but is present for passenger perception and/or commercial concerns. The most commonly cited justification is for emergency response, as if one man can effectively marshal several hundred passengers in the event of an accident. Even if this were the case, a train manager would be a cheaper and more appropriate role to execute this function.
Surely flight automation will face this same hurdle. Perhaps few outside of the industry believe it right now, but I'm confident that the technology could be feasible within the next couple of generations of avionics. It could happen more quickly if there was demand. However I find it hard to believe that passengers and trade unions will accept this development easily. I think it likely that we'll see assisted and then fully automated road cars before we see an unmanned flight deck. Although the road car problem is harder to solve, the benefit is visible and huge - a large proportion of road deaths can and will be prevented. Perhaps that will reassure passengers that public transportation can also benefit from automation.
Until that happens the role of the pilot is going to become increasingly dull, as the reach of flight automation continues to grow. Perhaps the role of co-pilot will become the first casualty once automation and captain can be considered each other's redundancy.
All IMHO.
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Until that happens the role of the pilot is going to become increasingly dull, as the reach of flight automation continues to grow. Perhaps the role of co-pilot will become the first casualty once automation and captain can be considered each other's redundancy
I wonder how "the computers" would have handled this situation, not to mention pax "announcements" in such a situation if FULLY dependant on computers.
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Shame to have wasted your annual pprune post then, egsc.
The role of the pilot is never dull. He is responsible for the "conduct of the flight".
The flight still needs to be conducted, whether it requires manual flying input or not. Automation merely releases some of his capacity for use in other essential areas of the safe and efficient conduct of the flight.
There always was much more to flying than waggling control surfaces.
Until that happens the role of the pilot is going to become increasingly dull, as the reach of flight automation continues to grow. Perhaps the role of co-pilot will become the first casualty once automation and captain can be considered each other's redundancy.
The flight still needs to be conducted, whether it requires manual flying input or not. Automation merely releases some of his capacity for use in other essential areas of the safe and efficient conduct of the flight.
There always was much more to flying than waggling control surfaces.
