"Pilotless airliners safer" - London Times article
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Google's driverless test car
Apparently in April 2014 , Google's driverless test car had clocked over one million kilometers safely. A typical road, one could argue, is more complicated than a typical airway ....
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How many safe miles have "non-Google" cars logged in the same time period? To what extent has the safety of Google cars benefitted from enhanced vigilance of the human drivers surrounding them?
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Google car incidents ....
The two incidents that I know of are due to human drivers ! One happened when the car was on manual control by a human driver and the other was when it was hit from behind by an human driver. I wonder what the accident rate for humans would be for one million kilometers ? One must also remember that the Google car is only a prototype.
With this kind of technology, one might envisage single flight crew aircraft where the bulk of the flying will be autonomous, perhaps supervised by ground controllers. The cockpit crew could be "summoned" by the ground controllers to take over if necessary.....
With this kind of technology, one might envisage single flight crew aircraft where the bulk of the flying will be autonomous, perhaps supervised by ground controllers. The cockpit crew could be "summoned" by the ground controllers to take over if necessary.....
I wonder what the accident rate for humans would be for one million kilometers ?
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Developping always scares human being... the history showed it. And today human being did not change about that.
Personnally I am willing to be in a driveless car and would be happy to fly as a passenger in a pilotless aircraft.
Full automation is the futur, less jobs is the futur too, spending our time for more hobbies is also the futur (our politics won't have the choice to admit it soon or late).
Personnally I am willing to be in a driveless car and would be happy to fly as a passenger in a pilotless aircraft.
Full automation is the futur, less jobs is the futur too, spending our time for more hobbies is also the futur (our politics won't have the choice to admit it soon or late).
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Well it looks as if they have found it:-
BBC News - AirAsia QZ8501: 'Six bodies' found in missing plane search
How very sad, but now they can get down to finding the facts.
BBC News - AirAsia QZ8501: 'Six bodies' found in missing plane search
How very sad, but now they can get down to finding the facts.
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Automated aircraft
As with all things, aircraft have and will become increasingly automated. In the future there may be a pilot in the flight deck but that pilot will increasingly be more and more redundant. Systems will evolve to exclude the pilot from nearly every decision. As such, the pilot of the future will be paid accordingly low wages due to the decreased level of control and authority. This is the way of all things of this nature; would an employee of the original Ford Motor Company have visualised his job (and 20 of his co-employees) being done by robots within 100 years? Automation will be the norm, with minimal and lowly paid humans in place to support it.
There will be other, as yet unknown, jobs available. Probably won't have the cachet of telling the pretty young thing at a party that you're a pilot, though.
The world moves on. When was the last time you had to get the stonemasons around to your modern house for some regular repairs?
There will be other, as yet unknown, jobs available. Probably won't have the cachet of telling the pretty young thing at a party that you're a pilot, though.
The world moves on. When was the last time you had to get the stonemasons around to your modern house for some regular repairs?
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There will be other, as yet unknown, jobs available
Full automation is the futur, less jobs is the futur too, spending our time for more hobbies is also the futur (our politics won't have the choice to admit it soon or late).
The "futur" (for jobs) is indeed bleak, at all skill levels.
Unless you are one of the <1% of course.
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"Developping always scares human being... the history showed it. And today human being did not change about that. Personnally I am willing to be in a driveless car and would be happy to fly as a passenger in a pilotless aircraft. Full automation is the futur, less jobs is the futur too, spending our time for more hobbies is also the futur (our politics won't have the choice to admit it soon or late)."
The only way an economy like this has a chance of working is active income redistribution. I doubt you are willing to go there.
Moreover, some of us have been lucky enough to make a living at our hobby. Your apparent acceptance of this tells us that we are all SOL.
Avoid imitations
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Perhaps we are heading rapidly towards "Luddites II".
But this time the power stations might be the target, which, if disabled, will almost instantly bring many things we take too much for granted to a crashing, grinding halt.
But this time the power stations might be the target, which, if disabled, will almost instantly bring many things we take too much for granted to a crashing, grinding halt.
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Well, here's a good reason for pilots to be in the flight deck: Incident: Lufthansa A321 near Bilbao on Nov 5th 2014, loss of 4000 feet of altitude
Haven't read that report, but I can say from personal experience in the left seat I've done 2 autolands in 14 years where the plane threw a major surprise at us below 30' AGL with no FMA warnings or 'scarey red flashing lights' as the media might say..
Luckily we seat there keeping a rather close eye on things...
Luckily we seat there keeping a rather close eye on things...
Freight God
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The reson for a human being on a train to 'supervise' is neither commercial nor psychological. The driver is there for the situations that are not forseen. Such include track works, obstacles, weather conditions and the occasional suicide.
And the unforseen events in aviation are far greater in number than on the ground, regardless of what the 'experts' say. I would go so far to say that each and every flight has unforseen events that are simply handled routinely by an aircrew.
And, yes, any crew needs proper training.
And the unforseen events in aviation are far greater in number than on the ground, regardless of what the 'experts' say. I would go so far to say that each and every flight has unforseen events that are simply handled routinely by an aircrew.
And, yes, any crew needs proper training.
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I have thirty years experience in the IT industry and have worked in most of the large banks in Europe.
Each and every one of them has invested enormous amounts of money, time and energy in their IT infrastructures.
Some of these systems have been very intelligently put together - in some cases I would describe them as being ingenious. They are surrounded by layers of change management, change control and rigorous testing.
They really are very highly-engineered tightly-controlled environments.
They have all failed multiple times over their lifetimes.
Even the core of the mainframe operating system has fixes which are regularly supplied by IBM.
I'd prefer to be flown by a sentient being, despite the fact that it is sentient beings responsible for the above failures.
Each and every one of them has invested enormous amounts of money, time and energy in their IT infrastructures.
Some of these systems have been very intelligently put together - in some cases I would describe them as being ingenious. They are surrounded by layers of change management, change control and rigorous testing.
They really are very highly-engineered tightly-controlled environments.
They have all failed multiple times over their lifetimes.
Even the core of the mainframe operating system has fixes which are regularly supplied by IBM.
I'd prefer to be flown by a sentient being, despite the fact that it is sentient beings responsible for the above failures.
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I'm delighted to use advanced automatics every day. But even if an airliner could be made fully automatic they would still need an onboard decision maker. I'm struggling to remember a flight where everything performed so flawlessly that my presence wasn't necessary. Indeed if military experience is anything to go by, unmanned types have, by far, the worst accident rate of anything currently flying.
Not a good use of the scientific method you chirped about a few pages back.
More recently, the AD covering the A320 AoA signal fault was to address a death dealer that has to be overcome by fleshy cockpit occupants.
The 30+ known Unreliable Airspeed anomalies that didn't lead to crashes (this ref is to AF 447) were overcome and mitigated by fleshy cockpit occupants.
The toxic cultural environment of today, toxic culture within an organization driven by the min max imperative (as the airline industry seems to be in a general sense), and the potentially toxic cockpit culture within a given crew on a given day are symptoms of a belief systems: the primacy of rules and of if / then statements.
If you want to look at root causes for a safety case, look at culture (writ large) and culture (organizational).
I'll put this to you, Tourist, that the overmathematicization of modern ivilization has led to a min/max attitude that ended up in events like Calgon, and is cousin to the belief that "if we just had another law" or "if we just had another rule" we'd make it better. In some ways, use of those tools has made something like automotive design, fuel efficiency, and road network management better. Min-Max, sadly, leaves out most people, since most people exist within the 3 sigmas of the bell curve. Most people aren't min, and aren't max.
The post provided a few pages back about the Y2K discovery process in a serious IT system should give you pause in your belief in computer programs as anything other than tools for meaty, fleshy, human beings.
As to military flying: I got to use a variety of kit, from CR2's to tube radios to NDB's to some pretty fancy digital cockpit devices by the time I left Naval Aviation.
The one common factor in them all (save the CR2) was that now and again, you had to turn the sumbitch off and turn it on again as a trouble shooting step when it acted up. That was the meat system, me, overcoming the machine system in order to get it to work.
For those systems that you couldn't, like the engine power sharing system for the 2 T-700 engines on a Seahawk, it was a bit frustrating to note that a comparatively simple control system like that took years to trouble shoot by the engineers and patent holders of the systems and sub systems involved to get spurious inputs out of the system that led to, among other things, un-commanded engine shut downs in flight.
At one point while this electronic mess was being untangled by the card carrying smart guys, the Pacific Fleet curtailed certain hover training evolutions. That's right, for a while some of our training that involved hovering over water, which is a fundamental helicopter thing, was taken off the books until some of the electronic problems were identified and overcome.
In the decades since then, I have been very impressed with the reliability improvements of both turbofan and turboshaft engines: impressive work by Rolls, GE, Pratt, etc.
Exceptional reliability doesn't equal fault proof. Whatever one-off event occurs becomes a sensation, it seems, just as a rare one-off with Germanwings has evoked a reaction that may or may not be in proportion to the root causes of that crash.
Compared to a control system top to bottom for a passenger aircraft, the logic / control system for these remarkable modern engines is primative.
No thanks, your brave new world doesn't sell. The root cause is more likely to be the dehumanization of the person in the cockpit than the presence of the person in the cockpit. The question isn't "what was a human doing in that cockpit" but "what was that particular human" doing in that cockpit that day? Each day, humans in the cockpit do a great job at getting folks from point A to point B. As Dr Deming might suggest to you, from a statistical analysis point of view, if you make systems modification decisions based on outlier rather than sound statistical basis, your systems change won't improve your product.
Your crazy FO example is an outlier.
When someone says "pilot error" and doesn't have the experience of ever investigating a crash where pilot error may be a factor, the typical failure to assess "did the system he was in set him/her up to fail" requires deep digging and attribution. The OP article, written by someone who doesn't understand that, wasn't worth the bandwidth it used.
Back to the rule and law obsession, and its attendant legalism and lawsuit crazy cultural cousin: the corporations who build, the agencies who govern and monitor, and the operators who run the business are heavily incentivized by money to NOT open the kimono due to liability concerns when something goes wrong.
Easier to do as was common in the sheep and goat herding society of the ancient Hebrews: find a scapegoat and sacrifice him or her. Even better is to convince some of the sheep that it's in their best interest to not even exist.
My, how far we humans have come, culturally.
NOT!
Thread Starter
When will we see these pilotless commercial aircraft...?
Interesting item on BBC website today
What's putting the brakes on driverless cars? - BBC News
pointing out the many obstacles to autonomous cars.
A lot are "2-dimensional" versions of issues that will have to be solved in 3 dimensions before the pilotless commercial airliner can be considered feasible. While many technical issues can be resolved by throwing more and more computing power at them, the really hard ones are not.
What's putting the brakes on driverless cars? - BBC News
pointing out the many obstacles to autonomous cars.
A lot are "2-dimensional" versions of issues that will have to be solved in 3 dimensions before the pilotless commercial airliner can be considered feasible. While many technical issues can be resolved by throwing more and more computing power at them, the really hard ones are not.