Do you think passenger airliners will ever become totally remote control flyable in the future?For example, if both pilots were incapacitated due to an emergency could a pilot on the ground take remote control and land the plane similarly to how drones are? Perhaps cameras could be placed in the cockpit to give a view of it and be beamed down to the ground pilot so he could get it landed? Perhaps such a plane could be landed even if conditions in the cockpit were so bad that a human would be unable to regain control. Any views?Al

Do you think passenger airliners will ever become totally remote control flyable in the future?For example, if both pilots were incapacitated due to an emergency could a pilot on the ground take remote control and land the plane similarly to how drones are? Perhaps cameras could be placed in the cockpit to give a view of it and be beamed down to the ground pilot so he could get it landed? Perhaps such a plane could be landed even if conditions in the cockpit were so bad that a human would be unable to regain control. Any views?Al

The mere fact the USAF has UAVs flying about means that technically it is possible. However, whether you get a passenger to step onboard an aircraft without a pilot capable of taking manual control is another hurdle.Matthew

Do you think passenger airliners will ever become totally remote control flyable in the future?For example, if both pilots were incapacitated due to an emergency could a pilot on the ground take remote control and land the plane similarly to how drones are? Perhaps cameras could be placed in the cockpit to give a view of it and be beamed down to the ground pilot so he could get it landed? Perhaps such a plane could be landed even if conditions in the cockpit were so bad that a human would be unable to regain control. Any views?Al

Unnecessary, If we can get enough people well versed with the autopilots of most airliners that PMDG WILL MODEL one of the pax can just walk in LNAV/VNAV it to an autoland lol*Meant tongue in cheek, dont make it a troll thread*Luke Stevens

I'm sure you'll find lively past discussions on this all over the interwebs.1. You mention a remote control backup. Unions fear a remote control replacement.2. Passengers like to see grey hairs up front. US consumers don't trust a young whipper-snapper 8000 miles away reading off a script to troubleshoot their Dell, much less land their jumbo jet [i'm talking perception here, not real competence. That's marketing. That's business. No one remembers that the Dell they're holding or plane their boarding was designed overseas because USA doesn't produce the technical people it once did.]3. It opens the virtual cockpit door to cyber attack. The military has a pretty good system since no armed drone has turned around and fired on its own troops yet, but then again the Pentagon's computer systems are frequently hacked by the whizz kid in Anytown, USA and organized efforts by less-than-friendly countries.4. The military gains a huge benefit from eliminating life support systems on its drones. These systems cannot be eliminated on a passenger airliner.5. Who knows if airlines will even be around long enough to recover the initial investment on this? Peak oil is real. So is the Al Gore political lobby.I don't doubt that it is technically possible to do and that someday it will be done en masse, but my non-expert opinion is that it won't happen in the next 40 years. The govt moves at a glacial pace until/unless there's a catastrophe. ADS-B is taking 25 years to phase in and they couldn't even get those radio frequencies right. Unless cockpit doors are breached on a regular basis or hundreds of pilot-copilot pairs start kicking the bucket simultaneously, we won't move past the "what if" stage except for proof-of-concept research.Steve Perry[editted for name]

Do you think passenger airliners will ever become totally remote control flyable in the future?For example, if both pilots were incapacitated due to an emergency could a pilot on the ground take remote control and land the plane similarly to how drones are? Perhaps cameras could be placed in the cockpit to give a view of it and be beamed down to the ground pilot so he could get it landed? Perhaps such a plane could be landed even if conditions in the cockpit were so bad that a human would be unable to regain control. Any views?Al

Technology wise not a problem, but as stated the main problems are getting people to board one of those aircraft. I don't see it happening for a very very long time, apart from the cost there are currently way too many drawbacks. Lets take for example a engine compressor stall on the T/O Roll normally associated with a huge bang that scares the crap out of everyone on board. A pilot's training from Cessna to A380 is also about how the aircraft feels and in many emergencies seat of the pants flying is what saves lives and only actual line flying can begin to prepare you for that. That's something that cant be replicated in a office thousands of miles away from the actual machine. I do like the idea of a backup crew on Standby for an emergency, would never ever happen due to the huge costs but think of how many lives would have been saved if that system was in place, how many aircraft have crashed due to smoke in the cockpit, pilot incapacitation etc. The 737 that crashed in Athens was completely flyable circling Athens while everyone (except the steward) was unconscious , if there was a remote system to get it down lives would have been saved.One last thing is 'murphy's law' "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" Imagine the media reaction when the first Aircraft is lost due to remote uplink failure

But modern airliners are capable if autoland as we all know, so all is needed is some emergency trigger that will execute specific instructions in fmc, and of course clean way to airport. The technology required is already implemented.Of course I mean only emergency situations,not fully automated plane without crew!

This kind of thing has theoretically been possible since WW2. Operation Aphrodite and Project Anvil were two such trials of this kind of thing. War-weary B-17s and PB4Ys were stripped of lots of equipment, rigged up with remote controls, taken off by volunteer crews, who then bailed out at 2,000 feet, with the aircraft then being flown towards enemy targets whilst being remotely controlled from a nearby aircraft. The intention being to dive them onto well-defended targets whilst the controlling aircraft stayed out of flak range. If you read up on both projects however, you'll see that they were a total fiasco, actually killing more allied people than it did enemies, by a considerable margin. They never managed to damage any enemy targets successfully.Of course, 1940s technology was not as capable as what we have now, and we know such things can be successfully done with what we have today. Check out for example the very well known NASA Dryden Test Center footage of a B-707 being remotely crashed onto special spikes designed to rip open its fuel tanks to test a new fuel additive that was supposed to make the fuel 'gel' on shock impact (like custard does if you've ever tried that well known party trick). The fuel test might not have been successful, but the 707 being piloted remotely onto the spikes quite clearly is when you see the footage, as you can observe the starboard wing going right over one of them:

More impressively, the (sadly now no more) Russian reusable shuttle orbiter 'Buran' was of course flown up into space and then brought back down to land completely without pilots on board, and that was over 20 years ago: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2957056/spac...uran_1988_ussr/The problem today is however, that you would have a hard time convincing Joe Blow that it was safe to get onto an aircraft without pilots, or that such a back up emergency system was even necessary. Space flights, Dryden crash tests and military drone missions are all done with everyone concerned accepting an element of risk that just cannot be condoned for civilian flights, at least not from a perception point of view when dealing with people who don't know much about how automated flight actually already is. Most people are totally unaware of how little actual 'driving' the guys up front on their holiday jet do, and airline marketing departments have enough sense not to tell people too much about that. 'Fly with us, our pilots barely touch the controls!' would not be a good sales campaign.As a back up system in the event of all the crew dying, then yes, it might be useful in theory, but there really have been very few situations where that might have helped. The only one I can think of, is Helios Airways Flight 522 in 2005, where the crew forgot to pressurise the aircraft and climbed it up to cruise, causing everyone on board to fall unconscious until it ran out of fuel and then crashed. The solution to that was much simpler than making remote control airliners; Boeing simply added some items to the 737 pre-flight checklist to ensure it wouldn't happen again.Flight 522 was intercepted by Greek Air Force F-16s, and we can suppose that theoretically, if a two seater F-16 with a guy in the back could have remotely taken command of it whist the pilot kept him formated on it, then it probably could have been landed by remote control. But really, the chances of such a thing happening are so slim that it would never be worth the expense of making all airliners have such remotely controllable systems, let alone having a bunch of people on standby ready to jump in to action and take command at every airport in the world on the very slim off chance they might be needed.The real back up against a pilot dying at the controls of an airliner (which has indeed happened a few times), is the fact that there are two pilots. And if both pilots die on your airliner, it's really not your day, but to be honest, that day would indeed be a rare one.Al

Not necessary IIRC. I believe there isn't one incidence of both pilots being incapacitated on an airliner.

Not necessary IIRC. I believe there isn't one incidence of both pilots being incapacitated on an airliner.

Ummm two posts on this thread have given a example....

Ummm two posts on this thread have given a example....

Crap I forgot about the Helios flight.What I was thinking about was, specifically, there have been no incidents where passengers have needed to take control, which is obviously not quite the same. My bad :(

Crap I forgot about the Helios flight.What I was thinking about was, specifically, there have been no incidents where passengers have needed to take control, which is obviously not quite the same. My bad :(

There never will be an incident where psx need to take control (except something like a recovered 7500 situation) , as Flight Attendents are trained to take over and fly with autopilot to land the plane. Few FAs I have talked to are also in flight school so that is even more of a plus.

Security would be a major issue with doing this - imagine someone "hacking" a plane's controls via a system like this.

Thanks for all the replies. It surely would be expensive to fit such remote control devices into an airliner. But if it could be done one day it might be nice to know that the plane could be landed if the pilots were unable to. Perhaps they would not need lots of remote pilots at each airport. Maybe just a few that could link in via satellite for emergencies and take over from anywhere in the world would save some money. I heard that pilot tiredness is or was a problem in the industry, well if a remote pilot could be called upon to take over for a while one of the pilots could get some rest on board especially on the long haul flights? Hacking might not be a problem if the pilots could override any malicious hacking with a physical switch. But I don't know.I would never fly in a completely remote plane with no pilots. Reminds me of the James Bond movie where the villain takes over the helicopter with radio control unit and tells Bond, "Welcome to remote control airways!"Al

All Ultra longhaul flights have a minimum of 4 pilots on board that work in shifts so that helps with tiredness, it normally consists of 1 Captain and 3 F/Os Cathay also have S/O or Cruise pilots that don't do any take off's or landings. My old man's got 4 years left on the 777 doing Ultra longhaul he mentioned that the crew rests are towards the back of the aircraft which personally doesn't sound too good if you need to get up front quick in an emergency.I also couldn't imagine getting a proper rest in a small bunk when you know your the Captain .Regards

The fish is oly served to the FO!