"Pilotless airliners safer" - London Times article
 

Today's Times newspaper carries a substantial opinion piece by Matt Ridley with the subtitle "Irrational fears about pilotless planes must eventually give way to the evidence that they are better and safer".

This isn?t your captain speaking. It?s a robot | The Times
For those who can't get access to the article I'll post the text separately.

Ridley is quite a respected "right wing" journalist and former banker, author of books under his nickname of "the Rational Optimist".

I have sent a response to the Times shown below, this is written for the general readership and almost certainly won't be published......



"Matt Ridley normally makes sense, but he has a peculiar blind spot about automatic systems, especially in aviation. He says events likes Sullenberger's Hudson ditching are rare compared to "human error" catastrophes. But the action of pilots regularly prevents many completely unforeseen "human errors" becoming newsworthy catastrophes. Aircraft are astonishingly complicated physical machines exposed to extremely complicated conditions. Does he think they design, build, certify, and maintain themselves? Every aspect of their existence and operation involves humans on the ground, who are just as fallible as pilots. The 2010 Qantas A380 uncontained engine failure and 2008 BA B777 double engine failure are only two among the most spectacular of a catalogue of "impossible" events, the vast majority of which have never reached Ridley's attention precisely because pilots succeeded in preventing them becoming catastrophic.

It's relatively easy to remove humans in ground transport: in the worst case it just stops and you get out. Try that in an aircraft and see what happens. Ridley might wonder why no airliner has automatic takeoff, which is truly trivial compared to landing. Simple: there's no business case as no-one wants the product liability for the consequences of events that definitely WILL occur but in combinations that were never anticipated.

When Northern Rock so devastatingly crashed into the financial depths, like dozens of other financial institutions, Matt Ridley himself was at the controls. Banking deals only with abstract "stuff" and remains firmly bolted to the ground, and we all know just how wonderful the entire banking system, with its almost unlimited reliance on computers, has been in the last decade.

Pilots are human and they do make mistakes - just like every other group in a highly complex industry. The airline industry needs to do a lot better at balancing the combination of automation and on the spot human intervention. Unfortunately, unlike bankers and journalists, pilots rarely survive when they are unable to correct mistakes, whether their own or someone else's. It's a lot more rational to remove bankers from the financial system than consider airline pilots the biggest danger to the public, and Ridley should check his opinions for reality as he so often advises others to do.

Well spoken.
Remove the bankers.

Text of Ridley article
 

(Mods: is this OK? Understand if not allowed for copyright reasons.)

Irrational fears about pilotless planes must eventually give way to the evidence that they are better and safer.

The Civil Aviation Authority is concerned that pilots are becoming too reliant on automation and are increasingly out of practice in what to do when the autopilot cannot cope. We now know that a fatal Air France crash in the Atlantic in 2009 was caused by confused co-pilots reacting wrongly when the autopilot disengaged during turbulence. They put the nose of the plane up instead of down.

But there is another way to see that incident: the pilot was asleep at the time, having spent his time in Rio sightseeing with his girlfriend instead of sleeping. When roused as the plane stalled, he woke slowly and reacted too groggily to correct the co-pilots' mistakes. Human frailty crashed the plane, not mistakes of automation.

Human error, or sabotage, also seems most likely (though we cannot yet be sure) to have disabled and diverted the Malaysian Airlines jet that vanished over the Indian Ocean in March. Human action certainly caused 9/11. For every occasion on which a Chesley Sullenberger brilliantly and heroically landed a plane on the Hudson River after a flock of geese went into the engines, there have been many more where people caused catastrophe. Human error is the largest cause of crashes in the sky, as it is on the ground.

That is, I suggest, why we will embrace the inevitability of pilotless aeroplanes at some point in the not so distant future. Already, automated systems are better at landing planes than pilots, even on to aircraft earners: they react quicker. Drones are crashing less often when allowed to land themselves rather than be guided in by ground-based pilots. Even Hudson River heroism could possibly be automated. I confess I am probably an outlier here and that most people will be horrified by the prospect of boarding pilotless planes for a while yet. But I think they will come round.

Driverless ground transport will help to assuage our fears. I took a driverless train between terminals at Heathrow last week, and Transport for London has begun tendering for driverless Tube trains, to predictable fury from the unions. Prototype driverless cars are proving better and safer than anybody expected. It cannot be long before they seem preferable to an occasionally distracted, risk-taking, radio-playing or grandee-teasing taxi driver.

Google's prototype self-driving cars have now covered more than 700,000 miles on public roads with only one accident — which happened when a human took the controls. They may be commercially available after 2017. Testing of self-driving cars will begin on British roads next month.

Getting out of a driverless ear, after a restful journey working and reading, then telling it to park and come back when you need it, would bring the luxury of the chauffeured plutocrat within reach of ordinary people. Driverless lorries on the motorways could be confined to night-time operation, leaving the roads clear for cars in the day.

In the air, small drones are now commonplace and not just in the military. The "Matternet" is a plan to use them to supply the needs of remote areas with few roads in poor countries, leapfrogging poor infrastructure as mobile phones leapfrogged the lack of landlines. Once drones can refuel each other in the air, they should quickly take over (for instance) searches of the ocean when planes or boats are lost — so as to put fewer lives at risk.

The next step would be that cargo planes would fly without human beings aboard. The sticking point will be air-traffic control's reluctance to sanction such planes landing at airports in built-up areas. At the moment, drones and piloted aircraft are kept apart in separate zones. If you live under a flight path it is comforting to know that the planes overhead are piloted by people with every incentive to land safely: with "skin in the game". The existence of a "ground pilot" who can take control of a plane from the ground, as drone operators can do now, would be of little comfort to such people, let alone to passengers on a plane.

But pilots' wages and training costs are one of highest contributors to the cost of flying, after fuel, and if pilotless planes can fly safely for years without passengers, objections to them carrying passengers will gradually fade. An ordinary aircraft is now regularly flying between Lancashire and Scotland with nobody at the controls (though there is a crew on board to take over if necessary). The offspring of a seven-company consortium called ASTRAEA, it uses radar, radio and visual sensors to detect and avoid hazards.

Are we approaching the era when it will be more reassuring to know that there is not a human being in the cockpit than to know that there is? We might find it comforting to know that the cockpit was wholly inaccessible to terrorists and that the machine within it had not spent the night drinking.

It is true, as the CAA has spotted, that we currently have an uncertain mixture of people and machines flying planes, with a danger that the former are getting out of practice and confused. But since accident rates are low and falling, there is no evidence that this partial automation has been a problem, or that going further towards full automation would not help.

Perhaps robotic surgery holds a lesson. Justin Cobb, a distinguished professor of orthopaedic surgery at Imperial College London, tells me that his engineers build into his experimental robots — which carve out, via keyholes, slots in your knee or hip bones of just the right size and shape to fit the necessary implants — what is little more than an illusion of control by the surgeon. The surgeon is allowed to move the tool about, but only within a certain boundary. Beyond that, the robot's software prevents the tool straying.

So an automated aeroplane might allow the pilot to play with the joystick and the switches, but only within limits. Thus can the pilot retain what is left of his dignity and the passenger indulge what is left of his irrational fear of submitting his life to a machine. Imagine a future hijacker or suicidal pilot finding the controls of the plane refusing to obey orders. Like Hal in the film 2001, but in a good way: "No, Dave, I can't let you crash this plane."

So in practice, despite the cost, we will keep pilots around in the cabin even if there is not much for them to do, and surgeons in the operating theatre, farmers in the cabs of tractors, teachers in the classroom, lawyers in the courts, and columnists on newspapers.

Here's an excerpt from 'How Airliners Fly', first published in 1997:

<<Although subsonic cruising speed has reached its natural limit, navigational efficiency is still advancing. Computers in Air Traffic Control centres and in airliners themselves allow more productive use of airspace as the density of traffic in the sky steadily grows. One likely development is greater direct control of flights from the ground, rather than by spoken radio communication between pilots and controllers as at present, with its attendant potential for misunderstandings, especially when communications are in English between participants for whom this language is not the mother tongue.

It is unlikely that complete control from the ground will ever be achieved, however, because there will always be occasions when problems can only be resolved with the judgement of a human mind in the flight deck, such as the necessity to deviate from the planned flight path in order to avoid hazardous weather or for technical reasons or to reconfigure aircraft technical systems after faults occur. Perhaps a system will evolve where a ground controller sends instructions directly to an aircraft's autopilot but the instruction will not be executed until the human pilots permit it.

Would one pilot alone on the flight deck be enough if Air Traffic Control were 'flying' the aircraft? It is likely that one person could handle the workload during normal operations. But suppose the human pilot considers it necessary to intervene. Who will be there to assist him or her, and more importantly, to confirm or query his or her judgement and to monitor his or her actions? Perhaps as long as there are airliners in the sky there will always be a case for at least two humans in the flight deck.

Again, will our future pilots be able to fly their aircraft without the assistance of autopilots and computers when necessary if they never get the chance to practise these skills during normal operation? A related factor is that a pilot whose job is merely to watch the aircraft fly itself is unlikely to be as well motivated as one who can get his or her hands on the controls now and then. Designers of future aircraft and airline managers must address the issue of how much and under what conditions pilots should be allowed, or indeed encouraged, to fly manually and without guidance systems. It is likely that compared to a mere aircraft monitor, a skilled, motivated pilot will always make a greater overall contribution to flight safety.>>

A truly pilotless commercial jet aircraft is pure fantasy. As has been stated before the complexity required to ensure a safe flight from A to B is immense. It's not a limitation of computers (they can do anything you tell them and very fast). Rather, it's man's inability to be able to program a computer which takes into consideration all known and unknown variables. We can't predict the weather accurately and we can't accurately program unforseen events despite the pseudo science field of "artificial intelligence". Thus no safety expert worth his salt would ever sign of such a design.

It's a human trait as we advance with technology to achieve more and more with less effort. All industries employ automation and some go to greater lengths then what we see in aviation. However, even with this being the case, every automated system that is responsible for the lives of people or which could cause large scale damage if it fails (dam control, nuclear power plants, train signalling etc etc) usually has a minimum of 2 people monitoring it. Again, the computer is not the limitation, it's man and his capacity to program the computer to get it right in all cases! All the time!

This idiot journo is simply singing to the tune of what are a bunch of globalist bandits who want to destroy the middle class. Anybody any where earning a respectable salary needs to be destroyed because it doesn't fit their world vision of a two class system. Whatever nonsense they can espouse which has people accepting that high earning professionals are unnecessary expenses for industry, they will.

This is often quoted as a rationale for pilotless aircraft, while in fact -as far as I'm aware- flight deck crew costs only account for something like 3% of an airline's expenditure?

Having spent much of the last 26 years "handling the big jets" on worldwide operations, I feel the quote I've highlighted points to the sort of problems automated flights will struggle with.

On more than a few occasions I've had to dig deep into my skills and experience over, say, central Africa in order to safely pass through the ITCZ. The passengers would have been unaware of the efforts we were making - apart from the seatbelt sign - and a safe landing was always the outcome.

It will be many years before I feel able to trust such a "pilotless" machine with my safety.

I suppose the acid test for this level of automation will be when it is possible for a commercial airliner to be autolanded VISUALLY. :) We are required because we are the ultimate safeguard when circuitory wisdom fails. A billion years of evolution will always be better than the machine it is capable of producing. By definition.

pilotless airliners are safer...40 years of flying here...they are safer only for pilots and the passengers who elect not to fly on them and stay on the ground.

San Francisco created a world class subway system called BART (bay area rapid transit). IT was to be automated with NO drivers. But it didn't work and they had to put human drivers in the trains.

Someone will develop a crewless airliner. But will find out the hardway that it won't work just right.

Oh well. Remember that on the first lunar landing, the automatics were taking the L(E) M to a landing on a crater, Neil took over and landed on a safe spot.

I see from his biography that he was the Chairman of Northern Rock when it had to be bailed out. Perhaps his knowledge of banking is equal to that of aviation. :E

However, he missed two important points. Firstly, autolands are not applicable in lots of situations for all sorts of reasons eg crosswinds, RNAV/visual approaches, defects occurring in flight or allowable items. Which brings me to the second point that if you require someone that needs the skill to land the aircraft manually then you have to train them and keep them current so they may as well be in the aeroplane. Never mind the whole host of day to day stuff that we deal with eg traversing the ITCZ being a good example as mentioned above.

The lesson surely of AF447 is that when the aircraft is degraded in some respect then it is quite likely that old fashioned piloting skills are required to ensure a safe outcome.

Out of curiosity (as opposed to making an offensive point) how is it that the USAF Global Hawk fleet operates without making "headlines"?

I'd say that 3% sounds rather low, but supposing it's correct, most airlines would bite your hand off at the prospect of saving 3% of DOCs.

Though it's not that simple, of course.

Global Hawk
 

"the USAF Global Hawk fleet operates without making "headlines"?"

A very interesting question! I would much like to see exactly what the accident/incident rates are for UAVs on a like-for-like basis, but I doubt the miltary are going to provide them......

Aircraft manufacturers will build if airlines pay for them. Airlines will order if it brings them benefit & they can sell tickets on them. But will Joe Public get on board?

I reckon skipper-less boats before planes.

Does the global hawk not have a pilot on the ground? It is not 'pilotless'.

And wasn't one hacked by the Iranians, making a soft landing in 'enemy' territory?

Would a pilotless aircraft have the "situational awareness" to decree the best call for an evacuation.

There will be cameras everywhere surrounding the aircraft back to home base, but during an incident the uplink might be corrupt or lost, so who would make the evacuation call ie. front, back, left or right emergency chutes ??

Superpilot

Like your last paragraph. Completely in accordance with my own thoughts.

Good article.

Speaking as SLF....no way, not in a million years would I get on a pilotless airliner.

Game over cos no customers, no deal.:=

..............ahhhh the nashing of teeth by the aeronautical luddites......

Its going to happen.........get over it. Maybe there might still be someone sat at the front but they are only going to get paid £ 3 10 shillings and sixpence a fortnight........

You know it...I know it !

I trust that Mr Ridley will be an early volunteer to land at, say, Cuzco, in a pilotless plane in the late afternoon.

"A billion years of evolution will always be better than the machine it is capable of producing. By definition"

nonsense - any 2 bit calculator can run rings round your mathematical capabilities, any car can travel faster than you can run, any light bulb is better than you rubbing sticks together

Given the choice, I would rather have two chaps or chapesses up front who fly real stick and rudder aircraft at the weekend.

Not nonsense. "Capability" does not only equal speed and performance. A computer is dumb yet impressively fast and efficient. It can do what we can do only much faster. Thus, it can solve the same problems we are trying to solve, only much faster. By definition, it cannot be superior to the human mind, because the entire concept of computing is enveloped within the limitations of the human mind (who built them?). I speak as someone who has had a career in developing automated solutions for industry. Anyone with even a semi-pro background with programming will appreciate my comments.

Even Starship Enterprise with all its bells & whistles had Capt Kirk, Mr. Zulu and Spocky to manage the office. They did not just strap in, push the TOMTOM button then go to sleep for a few days an wake up in required destination. Pilotless a/c would kill the Greek island holiday market. These are the rantings of a bystander who has a limited view over his subject. If he thinks that everyone flies only between major autoland airports, in calm air with no weather, no diversions, no snags etc, then he is in cuckoo land. Technically it might be possible from LHR to Sydney with ground control monitoring the flight and being able to takeover and manipulate the a/c from the ground; even carry out QRH items. But we all know Murphy is alive and well and lurking in the dark corners. QRH's are used because something has malfunctioned. Who's to say the down-link telling the ground pilot there is a problem will function, or that the the up-link with the solution will function. Electrons have a tendency to migrate without warning. Atmospheric effects can affect the signals. Oops! Try Samos or Corfu at night sitting in an armchair in NATS.
Can he really believe what he spouts? Perhaps he should have listened to Eisenhower instead of MOL.

Well, I don't know the specifics for pilots, but the entire staff costs for my largish southeast Asian airline accounted for 17% of total operating costs last year. Considering only about one out of every eight of our staff are pilots, but that their retribution/training cost is typically higher than average, I would be surprised if our pilots accounted for more than 4-5% of our costs. Just a back-of-the-fag-packet calculation of course.

Compare that with 40% of total operating costs going towards fuel, 14% for overflight/landing charges, 8% for maintenance, and pilots begin to look relatively cheap. I suspect most pax wouldn't really notice a 4% reduction in ticket prices. They would sure notice the first headline announcing that a remotely piloted/autonomous passenger airplane had crashed killing everyone on board...

His statement was "at some point in the not so distant future" -- that is the problem, combined with system-wide (not just aircraft) redundancy and reliability requirements for safety-of-life mass transport.

In narrow cases unpiloted human transport is possible now. The once-planned space shuttle replacement VentureStar would have been unpiloted yet passenger carrying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar Likewise the air-breathing Skylon space plane (if ever built) is planned for unpiloted but passenger-carrying operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

However those are highly specialized cases, built in very small numbers, where any needed degree of engineering and redundancy can be added. They were planned from the very beginning for unpiloted operation. Airliners were not.

Besides the aircraft themselves it would almost certainly require complete and reliable NextGen deployment. That itself would have to be re-engineered for safety-of-life unpiloted transport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_G...rtation_System

It would require total rethink of flight control and navigation redundancy and reliability. Existing planes could not be software upgraded. Today if you lose redundancy during an autoland, the pilot can take over. If there's no pilot, the entire system must be more robust and have deeper, better-tested redundancy. The space shuttle flight control system was quintuple redundant, and it only carried volunteers.

It would likely *first* require a gradual transition to single-pilot operation over many years, first in non-passenger cargo operations, while carefully analyzing the results. Then would come very limited test cases of "no pilot" operation for cargo, where a minimally trained backup pilot would be available. As experience was gained that feedback would refine the aircraft and air transport systems needed to safely support broader unpiloted commercial operations.

Only after the data from early steps in non-piloted cargo transport was available and understood would similar steps be stared for passenger service. It would be very slow and gradual.

I can't see it happening for 50 years or more. It's not in the "not too distant future".

Just another SLF here saying hell no as far as my ever flying on a crew-less airliner, but then at my age (70) I'm sure I'll never be faced with that choice:ooh:

I'll put my money on better automatics and their integration with the human pilots.

I was very pleased to learn while watching an inflight demo of the B787 autopilot capabilities being demonstrated by Boeing test pilots. One point that .
I found interesting, was that the 787 autopilot can lose all airspeed input in the case of blocked pitot tubes and not drop out, but rather revert to pitch and power rather than hand the crew a box of rocks. To my mind, this sounds like a good move on Boeing's part.

Hey, I only fly toy airplanes, so what do I know:)
Pete

OK, Nobody show that article to MOL!

"Pilot-less aircraft because they are safer and we dont trust human beings"

Who programmes the computers to do this monumental job?

HUMAN BEINGS:ugh:

I think you will find that will turn out to be incorrect within a few decades.

It seems inevitable that driverless cars will shortly be with us and indeed I predict that eventually we will not permit cars to have drivers due to the (very likely vastly) superior safety record of the driverless ones.

Thus accustomed to automated vehicles, air travelers will I feel accept pilotless aircraft when their safety record demonstrates that they are significantly safer than the piloted version. I guess we will start out with cargo. It seems certain to me that this will happen in a time scale of decades.

That is of course a political question. In the UK and USA for example lower earners are getting a good kicking and have been since about 1980. In the UK I think the median wage is about £24,000 a year, that is half of all earners earn that or less. My guess is the squeeze on wages and terms and conditions of employment will march up the income scale and affect more and more people leaving a very small proportion isolated in their wealth on the top of the pile.

A few other countries have balanced the increasing earnings of a relatively few with the tax system, Sweden is an oft mentioned example. This is being strenuously resisted in the UK and USA. No one of course knows what the future will bring but it could get quite bleak for many people unless there is a change in direction.

Errr, no.

What if a machine was designed that was equal to human intelligence. Then you make a faster one. Would that be more intelligent?

Ray Kurtzweil writes popular books on topics like this. He is no fantasist having invented the electric piano and turned it into a huge business[1]. He has many other interests. An Electric piano is a device that sounds very, very like a real grand piano and it was not at all easy to make.

Ray Kurzweil was recently presented with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Eta Kappa Nu honor, the societies top honor.

He is convinced that machines will be able to be more intelligent than humans in a few decades.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The Singularity Is Near - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He uses the term "Singularity" to mean the point in time where computers are as intelligent as humans.

10 minute history of Kurzweil Music Systems. Fascinating, I had never seen this before, thanks Superpilot for prompting me to find it. Didn't know Stevie Wonder was the instigator. Mr Wonder was a user of Kutzweil's reading machine for the blind.

7 minutes - Ray Kurzweil: The Coming Singularity (2009)

21 Min. How To Create A Mind: Ray Kurzweil at TEDxSiliconAlley
Quite poor sound but managable.

Day 1 - Part 1/2 - The Jeopardy Watson Challenge (2011) - 3 x 20 min shows
This is a complex, cryptic TV word game that I can't play at all.
IBM built a machine that beat the best human players. The humans are stunning. The questions were sent as files.

Three years after 'Jeopardy,' IBM gets serious about Watson
Where IBM are taking Watson now.

IBM Watson: The inside story of how the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer was born, and what it wants to do next - Feature - TechRepublic

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence is his Artificial intelligence web site.

[1] Kurzweil Music Systems is a company that produces electronic musical instruments for professionals and home users

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.

Like nuclear fusion, driverless cars have been shortly about to be with us for as long as I remember. GM were making movies about the delights of driverless cars in the 50s, and I'm sure I remember a demonstration of one on the BBC in the 70s.

If we can't make an autopilot that won't throw up its hands and give up in a situation like AF447, we're a heck of a long way from a driverless car that can operate in any but the most contrived and controlled of conditions.

With lots of TRW around.

SLF speaking - Since when does my ticket NEED to get 3% cheaper (assuming figure above is correct)? What I pay for a ticket rarely has much to do with the actual operating costs of the flight (remember that thing about how much it costs to paint the hall). I would be a lot happier with fair pricing on all flights than 3% saved with no flight crew.

Plus, the technology and pilot on the ground to intervene if needed will still cost 1.5%, so the savings is not even 3%.

As for the comment on the BART system, I do not know about it, but driverless trains are now proven tech. They have been in Vancouver since 1986. I have no problem with diverless when the variables are minimal and problems just result in safely stopping where you are. Trains OK, cars maybe, ships perhaps, planes no.

AI is something else that's been 'a few years away' for as long as I remember. I'm guessing that, when it eventually happens, it won't come from humans developing software, but from scanning humans brains and simulating them in software.

"It's relatively easy to remove humans in ground transport."

It's easy to remove them all right, what is not easy is to deal with the consequences. Just have a look at what happened at Lac Megantic when the human was removed!

There are more than a few posters on here that wouldn't pass the Turing test!

CPDLC , the first step is here already . The equipment allows ground control of the FMGC , the accept option a software requirement only .

Within the next 5-10 years , the technology will allow a CTC McPilot to watch & smile at the passengers for min wage.

I guess I don't have to remind everyone the most obvious title that rhymes with Banker :}

I don't write articles pontificating about his "profession" (even though I, like most people shafted by them, undoubtedly hold a fairly strong opinion)

Perhaps he should think twice before sharing with us his "wisdom" concerning stuff he is clearly inept at forming a rational view of.