"Pilotless airliners safer" - London Times article

[slowjet]

Got in here a bit late and apologies if already mentioned, but, I love the robot pilot that exhorts everyone to sit back and relax ; "Nothing can go wrong". click, "Nothing can go wrong", Click, "Nothing can go wrong", click.......................yeah you get it Great thread and we professional pilots know it will never happen. But, headlining stuff sells books and articles. That's all he was after. Relax chaps, I recall my Dad telling me that automation was fantastic, "When you become a pilot, push a button & your seat comes out, push a button & your control column comes out, push a button & the Hosty comes out, push the hosty & your teeth come out !" . Geeez, he was right.

[Herod]

qwertyuiop, My original post was.

The caption to the picture says "The 2009 Hudson River heroics could have been performed by a machine". OK, how do you programme a machine for "Ooops, we've just lost both engines. We can't turn back, we can't make Teterboro. I know, let's ditch in the Hudson"? It wasn't just Sully's flying skill that saved the day, it was his HUMAN decision-making.

The bit about automatic systems was inserted by another poster, with whom I do not agree.

[ahdguy]

Bottom line is there will be pilotless passenger aircraft in the next 20 years. As much as you say "who would want to fly in a pilotless aircraft", the fact that people are willing to be hearded like sheep and cramed into a cheap low cost carrier fighting and scrumming for a seat, all to save $5 is all the evidence you need for the cost reduction.

[Faire d'income]

It is ironic that author of that article uses AF447 as his main argument for pilotless aircraft.

How were the automatics getting on before they disconnected themselves and forced the hapless F/Os to get involved?

[joema]

Originally Posted by Tourist

I think you are all delusional.

Various Militaries are already utilising unmanned and autonomous fixed-wing and rotary vehicles at war....This is orders of magnitude more difficult for a computer than operating an airliner...The difficulty level between a vehicle operating in a war zone and one flying airways between airfields with approach aids is astronomical.

You said An *unmanned* military vehicle vehicle. Yes that can be done, in fact could be done years ago.

The topic is airliners. At any moment there are probably 5,000 IFR flight aloft in the US alone, maybe carrying 250,000 people. The challenge of developing an unpiloted airliner with sufficient redundancy for passenger operation is huge. Then you must integrate that into the airspace, presumably with many (eventually hundreds or thousands) of unpiloted airliners.

If a military drone crashes in a war zone -- tough luck. If an airliner (piloted or not) crashes, that's bad news.

The challenge is not getting one unpiloted airliner to fly a demonstration route with a safety pilot monitoring. The challenge is developing the entire aircraft and ATC system with sufficient redundancy and proven safety for all conceivable conditions. That is a gigantic challenge -- as far beyond any military drone as Everest is above the plains.

[Tourist]

Joema

I don't think you quite understand the relative difficulties involved.

That Blackhawks is flying low level over unknown terrain and picking a unplanned route to a landing site that it is surveying itself before landing.

That is absolutely extraordinary.

Flying an airway to an instrument landing is easy. TCAS RA currently uses a man in the machine but there is no reason to, in fact I know for a fact that one major British Airline has worked out that more than 50% of TCAS RA actions carried out by their pilots have been erroneous. A computer would not make those mistakes.

Going on about the Air France Crash misses the point entirely. That aircraft was not designed to be pilotless, so did not carry systems designed to fly without them.
That generation of aircraft works on the principle that a pilot will sort it out. They totally failed to.
An modern integrated computer system would never have got confused in the first place. Losing only pitot info would be trivial.
People seem to think that the systems in an Airbus are in some way modern. Your average KingAir cockpit is light years ahead nowadays, and both are a century behind an iPad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4

The technology in these quad copters is now so cheap and light it can be put in throwaway toys. They are able to sense each other and their surroundings and work in formations without human input. If you cannot see how this relates to airline flying and that they are light years ahead of human abilities then ask the red arrows how hard they have to work to accomplish similar but simpler formation tasks.

[Tourist]

Incidentally, I am a military helicopter pilot as well as an airline pilot and I can tell you the relative workload of flying a low level route and approach to an LS at night (the trial in the video is in daylight for the stby safety Pilots not the aircraft. It makes no difference to the computer!)is vastly more work than flying even an old school airliner from A to B

[ve3id]

For those who would say aeroplanes would be better off flying by computer (and I am sure there is none here), I would urge you to read the writings of Professor David Parnas.

Dr. Parnas was the man who finally convinced Ronald Reagan to drop his 'Star Wars' idea because, and I quote: "it would be impossible to write an application of sufficient quality that it could be trusted to prevent a nuclear attack"

The same situation is true in an aeroplane. It is not the computers that we need to worry about, for they are triplicated (save the possibility of a Byzantine failure) but the ability of our programmers and software engineers to accurately envisage and write software to handle all possible failures.

So what we need is a group of pilots with 20,000 hours of experience that want to go through six years of University education to become software engineers. Then we might be 99% sure of catching all the possible combinations of holes in the Swiss cheese.

[wiggy]

Tourist

Incidentally, I am a military helicopter pilot as well as an airline pilot and I can tell you the relative workload of flying a low level route and approach to an LS at night (the trial in the video is in daylight for the stby safety Pilots not the aircraft. It makes no difference to the computer!)is vastly more work than flying even an old school airliner from A to B

I don't think many of us would disagree with that, I certainly wouldn't...but that still brings us back to who/what handles any decision making processes involved....

[Tourist]

The one thing that humans are currently better than computers at is the totally new situation.
That is unlikely to change.

The question is how many of the world airline crashes are currently caused by something new?

Most are caused by the same old mistakes and failures.

What computers are exceptionally good at is following instructions without error.

ie, if A happens then do B

You can program them all to be brilliant.
Humans have the good (Sully) the bad (Air France) and the ugly (Asiana)

Once a mistake has been made once, it can be programmed to not happen again.

Wetware does not have that benefit.
Every generation needs to be trained and make the same mistakes along the way.

Computers will make mistakes.
Airliners will crash.
They don't have to be perfect to make it worthwhile, they just have to be better than humans.

Incidentally, people talk about the Sully flight or the BA 777 as if they are good examples of why you need a pilot but actually they are perfect examples of where a computer would be better.
A computer can be programmed with glide profiles whereas a human is learning on the job for the very first time. A computer can fly accurately a perfect angle of attack. It can have the data available instantaneously as to whether it is more advantageous to raise flap or not at a particular height. Exactly when to flare with the engines off. Exact distance from the stall. It knows the exact distance the current glide angle will give it before touchdown. etc etc etc.
A computer can carry out enormous numbers of tasks simultaneously. It can do the ditching checks at the correct moment.
It will not get excited or flustered.
It will perform the same every time.

Computers are used in space vehicles now not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

[Tourist]

wiggy

That helicopter is making the decisions for itself.

[MG23]

Originally Posted by Tourist

Computers are used in space vehicles now not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

More like they're used because a lot of maths is involved, but the maths itself isn't particularly hard if you have the time to do it. Buzz Aldrin could do orbital rendezvous with a sextant, but a computer could do it faster and more easily. The AGC landed the Apollo 11 LEM on the Moon with only a few k of RAM and a CPU with less than 1% of the power of a modern mobile phone, but it couldn't see the crater it was about to land in. The shuttle computers flew the re-entry on most missions because hitting a runway in a glider from 15,000 miles away was... tricky... but it couldn't manoeuvre around other traffic in the air. And Columbia might have been lost on the first test flight if no humans were on board, because the shuttle's hypersonic performance was programmed wrong and the crew had to fly part of the re-entry manually.

One of the reasons the SpaceX Dragon is berthed on the space station rather than docking by itself is the proven low reliability of automated docking systems... something that never prevented a manual shuttle docking.

[Tourist]

Pilotless airliners will have whole new failure modes and accidents will happen, but think of all the failures that will be consigned to the past.

No more drunk pilots.
Bottle to Throttle: A Short History of Drunk Pilots - Businessweek
No more Greek Airliners flying around with Hypoxic pilots
Helios Airways Flight 522 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No more vestibular/somatogravic crashes
Crashed 737 pushed into dive during go-around - 11/19/2013 - Flight Global
Air India Flight 855 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No more pilots pressurised to fly/approach when they should not.
2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No more runway incursions due to misunderstandings with human operators.
Tenerife airport disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No more tired pilots
Colgan Air Flight 3407 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


An example of the sort of malfunction that people think of as where you need a human pilot is the Sioux City/ DHL Iraq scenario.
United Airlines Flight 232 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2003 Baghdad DHL attempted shootdown incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The aircraft loses all control over its control surfaces.

In both these events the pilots pulled off superhuman acts and got the aircraft home intact or nearly intact.
We would all, I think, agree that this is human piloting at its best.

This from Scientific American shows that to a computer, this is almost mundane.

"Crippled but Not Crashed

Neural networks can help pilots land damaged planes

By Mike Corder

On July 19, 1989, as United Airlines flight 232 cruised over Iowa, the fan disk of the tail engine on the DC-10 broke apart, and the debris cut through all three of the plane's hydraulic lines. Because the pilots could not move any of the jet's control surfaces--the ailerons on the wings and the elevators and rudder on the tail--a horrific crash seemed inevitable. But by carefully adjusting power to the two remaining engines, the crew managed to maneuver the plane to the Sioux City airport. Although the jet flipped over and caught fire after hitting the runway, 184 of the 296 passengers and crew members survived.

The pilots of flight 232 proved that it was possible to control a modern airliner using only the engines. And this discovery led some innovative engineers to wonder if they could program flight computers to achieve the same feat, making it easier for a crew to safely land a heavily damaged aircraft. This research has been gradually progressing over the past 15 years, and the technology could be incorporated into commercial and military planes in the not too distant future. To judge how well these computer-controlled flight systems perform, I decided to see if they could enable a moderately experienced pilot like myself to fly a crippled jet.

But first, a little background. On early aircraft, the control stick and rudder pedals were directly connected to the control surfaces with wires or rods or cables. But as planes got faster and larger, pilots found it hard to move the stick. So engineers added "power steering," connecting the cables to hydraulic servos that amplify the pilot's efforts. Then, with the advent of the digital age, aircraft makers developed control systems that feed the input from pilots into a computer. This so-called fly-by-wire system can greatly improve an airplane's performance. For example, a fighter jet may fly well when lightly loaded but not so well when it carries bombs on its wings. With a computer in the loop, the control rules can be modified to make the plane behave more consistently. Fly-by-wire also allows the creation of safeguards: if a pilot tries to do something that would cause the aircraft to break apart or plummet to the ground, the computer can ignore the inputs and take the plane only to the edge of the flight envelope.

Shortly after the crash of flight 232, Frank W. (Bill) Burcham, Jr., then chief propulsion engineer at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., began an effort to develop software that would enable jet engines to compensate for damage to a plane's control surfaces. Initially the research was considered too far-out to be funded, but a few engineers at Dryden volunteered their spare time. The project, which became known as Propulsion Controlled Aircraft (PCA), eventually received a small budget and proceeded to flight tests with an MD-11 jet. On August 29, 1995, the PCA team brought the plane in for a smooth landing at Edwards Air Force Base using only the computer-controlled engines to maneuver the craft. The NASA engineers felt they had demonstrated that airliner safety could be significantly enhanced just by modifying a plane's software. Unfortunately, none of the aircraft manufacturers chose to adopt the technology.

A few years later researchers in the Intelligent Flight Control (IFC) group at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., followed up on the PCA work by developing a system that would allow the computer-controlled engines of a damaged aircraft to work together with any control surfaces that remain functional. The system is based on neural-network software, which mimics the behavior of the human brain by learning from experience--the network's connections strengthen with use and weaken with disuse. The neural networks in the IFC system compare the way the plane should be flying with the way it actually is flying. Differences may be caused by inaccuracies in the reference model, normal wear and tear on the plane, or damage to the aircraft's physical structure. The networks monitor these differences and attempt to minimize them.

For example, if you want to make an undamaged airplane climb, you pull back on the control stick, which raises the elevators. But if the elevators are not working, the IFC system will raise both ailerons to lift the airplane's nose. (Ailerons typically move asymmetrically, with one rising as the other falls.) If this maneuver does not correct the error or if it reaches the limits imposed to prevent the aircraft from rolling over, the IFC system uses the thrust of the engines to achieve the desired pitch.

The Ames researchers tested their system by inviting professional airline pilots and NASA test pilots to fly in the lab's simulator. First, the pilots operated the simulated aircraft under normal conditions. Then the researchers mimicked a variety of failures and observed how the pilots reacted using different types of control systems. In almost every case, the IFC system performed better than a conventional fly-by-wire control system. When the engineers simulated the failure of all tail controls, only half the pilots could safely land the plane using the fly-by-wire system, but all of them made it back to the runway using IFC.

So what's it like to fly a plane equipped with neural networks? At the invitation of Karen Gundy-Burlet, head of the IFC group, I recently spent several hours in its lab to see the system firsthand. I am a private pilot with no experience flying larger aircraft. The IFC simulator was set up to represent a very big plane: the U.S. Air Force's four-engine C-17 transport jet. The simulator features a large wraparound screen to show the animated landscape and a mockup of a glass cockpit, which replaces the traditional flight gauges with flat-panel color displays.

Gundy-Burlet set me up on a 12-mile final approach to the San Francisco airport and let me embarrass myself trying to get an undamaged plane to the ground. Don Bryant, a retired U.S. Navy fighter pilot who works with the IFC group, was polite enough not to openly laugh at my ham-handed attempts to control the craft. My biggest problem was my unfamiliarity with the glass cockpit, which is only now starting to appear in private planes. I spent more time staring at the simulated display trying to find familiar values such as airspeed and altitude than I did actually flying the aircraft. That said, I got a basic feel for how the undamaged plane flew.

Then Gundy-Burlet reset the simulator to the initial location and said, "Captain, I'm sorry, but you've lost all the control surfaces on the tail." Both the elevators and rudders were inoperative, which would probably be a death sentence for an amateur pilot in the real world. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the simulated aircraft was pretty controllable. I made a few gentle turns to get a feel for the plane while also trying to stay on the right heading. The damaged jet was sluggish in roll and pitch, but its behavior seemed more natural once I slowed down my steering. This change was undoubtedly facilitated by the neural networks, which were training themselves to compensate for the damage. As the networks adjusted to the new conditions, the plane kept getting easier to fly. Within a few minutes, I was able to safely land the simulated craft, although it did stray from the runway.

The overall experience was fairly tame, almost ordinary. It was only later that I recognized the true magnitude of this advance. A private pilot who had never flown a large aircraft was able to land a heavily damaged four-engine jet without killing anybody (in a simulation, at least).

How quickly might this technology see actual use? NASA researchers plan to flight-test the IFC system on F-15 fighter jets and C-17 transport craft over the next two years. The earliest adopters will most likely be the makers of military aircraft. Damage-compensating flight controls should be particularly useful to pilots who fly aircraft that get shot at from time to time.


Mike Corder is a freelance writer in Santa Cruz, Calif., who is building a Van's Aircraft RV-7A plane in his spare time."

This is a bit long and years old but makes the point.
This technology is now flying.

[Tourist]

MG23

Yes quite correct, at the time those early systems were in place, the computers were not quite up to some of the tasks as well as the humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igla_(s...docking_system)
The Russians seem to have solved the problem in 1965 and then updated...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurs_(docking_system)

and we followed along...
ATV completes final automated docking / Human Spaceflight / Our Activities / ESA

[Tourist]

I could add :-

No more rule breaking.
No more forgetting to check NOTAMs
No more not carrying enough fuel.
No more suicide-by-pilot
No more Hijack? (possibly different mode? Time will tell)
No more pilots distracted by hosties/wife/pretty view

[Tourist]

Not to flog a dead horse, but.......

Northrop Grumman X-47B - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This thing autonomously operates from an aircraft carrier in amongst manned operations.
It airborne refuels.


To do the same takes years of training and millions of dollars for a human, and very few humans are up to it.
These tasks requires a far higher standard of piloting than flying an airliner and vastly more flexibility.

Compared to the requirements for carrier aviation, airliners are childs play.

The hurdle for unmanned airliners is not technology.

The hurdle is passenger perception.

[MATELO]

It airborne refuels.


To do the same takes years of training and millions of dollars for a human, and very few humans are up to it.

Speak for yourself... I nailed it first time.

[MG23]

Originally Posted by Tourist

The Russians seem to have solved the problem in 1965 and then updated...

I believe you'll find Kurs has had several docking failures with ISS. If I remember correctly, in some cases they were able to retry and dock, while others required them to use some kind of remote manual control system.

But, for some of them, I may be confusing it with Mir. Didn't they actually hit Mir and damage one of the modules during one docking attempt?

[joe two]

can somebody give that tourist a coke ?

[Tourist]

Matelo

Obviously, Naval Aviators are amongst the few!!