I think you are significantly underplaying the stress and work involved in the field of medicine and journey to becoming a happy, successful physician.

 

While I have no personal experience, I know that medical school is expensive, long, and rigorous. You need a very good academic record in order to be accepted, and have to go through many years of difficult training, compared to the training required for most other fields. After that, you have to serve a residency, during which you may be woken up constantly and irregularly and work long hours. After that, you may quite possibly not find a well-paying job or even a job at all, especially during such economically unstable times. After that, you risk feeling forever guilty or getting sued if you make potentially life-threatening mistakes.

 

Sure, one could argue that pilots must preserve the lives of their passengers every day for every flight. However, not only are commercial aircraft so highly automated, but the field of commercial aviation is less dangerous overall. Accidents are not supposed to happen during regular operations (most commercial pilots will never experience anything life threatening during their careers), whereas the patients of doctors earning as much as you specified are often coming with problems in anticipation of death if the doctor does not do well.

 

I'm not in the medical field but I do fly for a living. For the expense of getting all the ratings its well over 40k and that's just to get to the point of flying some worn out POS for peanuts in the middle of the night, on holidays and in snow and ice in the winter and, thunderstorms in the summer which I've done in my previous job flying checks in a Baron. As for never facing death I lost an engine on take off in a Navajo on a hot day with my boss his wife and their 3 kids in the back but if I screwed up 6 people would have died if a doctor screws up one dies. You don't just get your PL and go fly a brand new 737 you gotta work your way up like a doctor in residence

Right now I am flying a MD-11 on KOAK-RJBB route. The last time I touched anything was the altimeter gong thru 18000. The next time I do anything will be to change the altitude on the FCP from 38000 to 23000 to start the descent. If the FMS is set up correctly the MD-11 will do automatic steps climbs from FL320 to FL340, FL360, and FL380. The overhead panel switches fuel, air, hyd, elect. automactically and this technology is mid 1980s'.I think I will go to sleep and get up in 8-9 hours and land the plane. It's closer than you think.

 

Michael Cubine

Perhaps, but the pilots in the front aren't there anymore to do the mundane tasks of getting it off the ground and back down again.

Thats not the core of what they are trained for, they earn their big bucks when things start to go wrong, like the BA 777 that didn't get power on final because of a blocked fuel oil heat exchanger, at which time improvization becomes the name of the game and doing what you can with what you got.

 

A computer fares pretty poorly in the unknown. it can't do or attempt to do anything it hasn't done before (Programmed) and our "learning computers" are about as intelligent as a single bee / fly today, so it is quite a while to go.

getting an ATP is just as hard as medical school

 

Not sure I agree. I mean, the JAA ATPLs are tough. But they're not really even A-Level type most of the time, it's just the volume of information to learn for the tests and the profession. My brother is doing the basic Nursing qualifications now and I know I would die trying ha. Sure I've found parts of my license tricky, but when you're extremely enthusiastic about it, then it becomes a lot more easier and enjoyable, unlike School!

 

The subject of Unmanned Aircraft does scare me, it's definitely a possibility. I mean, look at us lot flying the NGX. It's practically the real thing, just being simulated in a Microsoft program. I just don't feel we'll see it globally in my life time.

Right now I am flying a MD-11 on KOAK-RJBB route. The last time I touched anything was the altimeter gong thru 18000. The next time I do anything will be to change the altitude on the FCP from 38000 to 23000 to start the descent. If the FMS is set up correctly the MD-11 will do automatic steps climbs from FL320 to FL340, FL360, and FL380. The overhead panel switches fuel, air, hyd, elect. automactically and this technology is mid 1980s'.I think I will go to sleep and get up in 8-9 hours and land the plane. It's closer than you think.

 

Michael Cubine

 

that's why you are only trusted to fly a virtual MD11 I take it you didn't do hourly fuel checks to confirm correct fuel burn and no leaks, didn't have to deal with full enroute and sometimes dodgy ATC communications, weather avoidance and checking updates from base through ACARS, dealing with minor faults or MEL issues on your 20yr old freighter, reducing to max turbulence penetration speed while getting bounced around in straps with no option to climb due to a 744 ahead of you etc etc etc.

 

sim flying is nothing like real flying, which is why you still see many on Vatsim paused at TOD because they are still asleep.

 

Regarding fully automated flying, the closest any of us may see in our lifetime is automated freighters flying special routes with a backup pilot onboard. once this is proven and the risk proven to be minimal only then will they even begin to consider putting pax on board, by this point our children & grandchildren who grew up on iPads/iPhones, will be running airlines/purchasing tickets with fully automated cars in there driveways.

 

Those of us that are left will be talking about the good old day's when we could push LNAV/VNAV

What I don't understand about company's wanting automate everything is at some point no one will have a job and be able to buy thier products.

 

Exactly! Everybody will lose their jobs because everything will be automated. The world will be boring as hell and everybody will be extremely spoiled. What will even be the meaning of life then?

Exactly! Everybody will lose their jobs because everything will be automated. The world will be boring as hell and everybody will be extremely spoiled. What will even be the meaning of life then?

 

The same way the steam engine and the computer caused everyone to lose their jobs? History has shown that technology might cause certain professions to disappear (like, say the computer, yes it used to be a job, not a machine), but it does not reduce the total number of jobs in the economy in the longer term.

 

We're still quite far off from technology that can fly an airliner gate-to-gate in actual operating circumstances, and as mentioned computers are not good at improvising if something goes wrong. Whether we'll ever actually see a pilot-less airliner depends on whether we can get over our need to have someone to blame for an accident, and whether people are willing to ignore the lack of pilots if it means they can save $10,- on their ticket (and considering all the other stuff people are willing to put up with to have the cheapest ticket...).

 

The thing is, if we have pilot-less planes there will inevitably be accidents that would have been prevented if there had been pilots on-board. However there are currently also accidents that would not have happened had a computer been flying the plane. I think the public would rather have 2 crashes a year caused by human error than 1 crash a year caused by computer malfunction.

I'm not in the medical field but I do fly for a living. For the expense of getting all the ratings its well over 40k and that's just to get to the point of flying some worn out POS for peanuts in the middle of the night, on holidays and in snow and ice in the winter and, thunderstorms in the summer which I've done in my previous job flying checks in a Baron. As for never facing death I lost an engine on take off in a Navajo on a hot day with my boss his wife and their 3 kids in the back but if I screwed up 6 people would have died if a doctor screws up one dies. You don't just get your PL and go fly a brand new 737 you gotta work your way up like a doctor in residence

One year of medical school probably costs that much! And student doctors do not have any luxuries even after exiting residency, as I discussed in my previous post. They must earn their reputations by working even harder and more cautiously in the real world.

 

It's unfortunate that you experienced an engine failure, but it wasn't supposed to happen. It's not as if you walked into the cockpit knowing or thinking that there was going to be an engine failure, whereas patients walking into the offices of high-paying doctors are almost always coming with life-threatening problems. Maybe 1/1000 of a pilot's flights will run into serious issues similar to the one you described, but maybe 1/2 of a doctor's patients will be coming with life-threatening issues.

 

There is also the issue of guilt. Not to seem rude, but if you crash with fatalities, it usually claims the lives of everyone, including the pilot, but if a doctor operates improperly, he or she still lives after the death of his or her patient. And I am sure every high-paying doctor has experienced patient death under his or her care before. Okay, you might experience some incidents during your career as a commercial pilot, but the chance that you will be responsible for someone's death is much less than that in the field of high-paying medicine.

Unmanned flight?

 

I see us going the way of BattleStar Galactica....

They gave the Cylons way way too much intelligence...and look what happened.....

I completely agree. What if the computers fail? Engine failures? The requirement for a water ditching as was the case in US 1549? It's WAY safer to have a trained professional with decades of experience at the controls. If the computers fail today, the airplane lands because of the pilots. With failed computers and no pilots, the aircraft is basically left to crash on its own in a very disastrous way.

What I don't think everyone realizes here is that no airline would ever place an order for one as immediately once they've placed their order, every pilot at that airline would strike. The airline would be grounded and either have to collapse or be cancel their order. So unless they can instantly replace their entire fleet over night, no airline will ever do it. As for start up carriers, then they'll just be squeezed straight out of the market.

 

Besides, the cost of flight crew is a very small percentage when it domes to the cost of operating a flight for most decent sized airliners.

 

Unmanned aircraft serve their purpose for dangerous missions such as those in the military, but for civilian flight the gains are not that much. Once again the phrase "If you think experience costs a lot, wait till you have an accident" comes to mind here.

 

Regards,

Ró.

Passenger acceptance is likely to be very low in our lifetimes at least.

 

For the military, the political costs of a downed pilot are high in modern astnchronous warfare - also a factor.

 

You may translate that into whatever operating system you wish, but that is all.

 

Argument over.

 

Just imagine the public outcry after one goes down because of a BSOD.

 

"Redundancy," you say? Great. The second computer will take over when the other blue screens, but what happens when stuff hits the fan? Programming is only as effective as how you write it. The reason UAL232 was so much of a mess is nobody thought to run the redundant HYD lines through different spots. Why would I? Until that point in time, nothing had really torn through all three lines to affect the redundancy.

 

Same goes for programming. You can't program for the unforseen. What happens when a program hits an unhandled exception?

 

 

BOOM.

 

One year of medical school probably costs that much! And student doctors do not have any luxuries even after exiting residency, as I discussed in my previous post. They must earn their reputations by working even harder and more cautiously in the real world.

 

It's unfortunate that you experienced an engine failure, but it wasn't supposed to happen. It's not as if you walked into the cockpit knowing or thinking that there was going to be an engine failure, whereas patients walking into the offices of high-paying doctors are almost always coming with life-threatening problems. Maybe 1/1000 of a pilot's flights will run into serious issues similar to the one you described, but maybe 1/2 of a doctor's patients will be coming with life-threatening issues.

 

There is also the issue of guilt. Not to seem rude, but if you crash with fatalities, it usually claims the lives of everyone, including the pilot, but if a doctor operates improperly, he or she still lives after the death of his or her patient. And I am sure every high-paying doctor has experienced patient death under his or her care before. Okay, you might experience some incidents during your career as a commercial pilot, but the chance that you will be responsible for someone's death is much less than that in the field of high-paying medicine.

 

 

 

 

I'm not saying doctor's don't earn thier money because they do! But my point is pilots should be payed more. I love my job but so do many doctors

A joke that's been around for a long time now:

 

The flight crew of "the future" will consist of a man and a dog. The man's purpose is to feed the dog. The dog's purpose is to bite the man if he dares to touch ANYTHING in the cockpit.

 

People have been sweating this stuff since the start of the Industrial Revolution - see the Luddites. It's interesting to listen to the arguments about system failures and then consider what the ATC system we'll be flying in by, say, 2020 will look like and the technology it will depend on. Or the technology that most modern aircraft already depend on. Like it or not, commercial flying will continue to become more and more of a computer dependent, automated process with fewer and fewer people doing the hands-on stuff.

 

Which is not to say that I necessarily like it either. A lot of the fun and romance continues to be rooted out of the world as what was once extraordinary becomes mundane. I love tech, and have spent my career working in it, but I often shake my head at it as well.

 

Scott