Did you really want to fly with a pilot that needs adrenaline?

 

Yes, yes I do. A good friend of mine hand flies whenever legal, and he's certainly one of the safest pilots I know; he holds some position at Alaska Airlines as a safety board chairman (or something along those lines). This guy, when he was younger, did all kinds of challenges such as flower bombing, landing on a mark, and so on. When I get a license, I'm certainly going to hand-fly as much as possible.

 

 

Yes, yes I do. A good friend of mine hand flies whenever legal, and he's certainly one of the safest pilots I know; he holds some position at Alaska Airlines as a safety board chairman (or something along those lines). This guy, when he was younger, did all kinds of challenges such as flower bombing, landing on a mark, and so on. When I get a license, I'm certainly going to hand-fly as much as possible.

 

As great a chap he sounds, he human, and we humans make mistakes, hence why insurance exists! I watch daily people in a safety driven environment, make bad judgement calls, errors, etc. when you go to get your license, you will learn much about human factors, CRM, and all the various error types that can occur to anyone, however experienced, and you'll understand why flying as become so automated and systemised in order to protect against us silly dangerous humans getting it wrong!

 

Your final statement about hand flying as much as possible, is the key thing, the as possible may be you allowed to taxi it from the gate to runway, but then they already devised those remote tugs that do that.

 

Anyhow must dash, need to do some work using electronic strips rather than paper ones with a pen that everyone said could never be replaced, and are now in use at the worlds busiest airport.

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The less people want to work and be with more benefits, the more will be demanded by robots. Us most annoying robots in the absence of defects inherent in our people. For example, greed. They love not available. But who knows love, as ******* knew her? The unions will not prevent robotics, their business extortion, who believe them? Sorry for my bad English

Some excellence posts around here. Especially raising my hat to James, but not only.

 

Perhaps to serve as food for thought or just as a HU on some topics, I may add some points. The Google 'driven' automated cars already cruise at least Nevada. Legally.

 

Automation (the systems and logics) and the computer intelligence connected to it are still man made. Lets not forget that. We will enter a new realm when that man made intelligence (which currently isn't real intelligence, depending on how you look at the word) is able to create it's own offspring. But, for now, we create what later serves us.

 

If the only hurdle for introducing unmanned commercial air transport would be the (reasonable) doubts, fears and acting of the current pilots and unions, we would already have unmanned airplanes. :mellow: That statements works in many directions.

 

I see technical but, most of all, legal issues being the main hurdle. As some guys have pointed out, we've already overcome those on e.g. trains, that system switching signals for human drivers, the full authority electronics on your car and those drones exporting freedom and democracy. :rolleyes: Examples.

 

 

As with every technological step, the current psychological perception ('I would never board an unmanned, means no pilots, plane') is well able to adapt to progress. It may take some years, perhaps even decades, but don't rely on your society to remain steady. It hasn't been so far and it may (hopefully) never be. Actually, it may even adapt too fast and too naive. So I could imagine that the 'downside' of an airline only running unmanned planes may well be able to become a big pro. Also, don't leave PR out of the game!

 

 

What already is taking place a lot is augmented reality. Systems interpreting stuff for humans due to various reasons (mainly speed, sometimes logics, mostly both I guess) and then presenting them a picture they have to gauge. You can, like nature shows, create specialists for a lot tasks. But nature's specialists come with an extra featureset and not the rather generic setup of a human being.

 

The short version of describing humans may well be 'they can do everything, but nothing really good'. By this, your sensory setup and a lot of management already is in the hands of full authority systems. Depending on the type of transport in use, more or less. On planes, we may agree that raw data already got replaced to quite some extent and may, on some setups, not even be available any more.

 

Humans are great at the decision making task. Well, as long as this involves other humans, an air-conditioned room and a comfortable chair. Anything adding stress to the picture alters 'us' a lot, more in the direction of instinct driven and less logic driven behaviour. There are examples for pilots doing a lot more and a lot more flexible as any system on the planet. However, you will also find accidents where even a simple takeoff config warning horn tried it's best to prevent the pilots from trying to take off. :(

 

By this, I wouldn't automatically say that unmanned vehicles are less trustworthy. They will, sooner or alter, arrive and I'm sure they will put them into the same testing setup as on the current unmanned cars. Their results will then show how they adapt to their surrounding. And from learning about the errors, the systems will get better. I can't always say the latter about humans. :mellow:

Alright, so I'll bite... Let's look at some of the arguments I hear about this subject.

 

Planes already practically fly themselves, why not teach it to takeoff and taxi and then that's it, they don't need pilots:

Common mistake is that the purpose of pilots it to fly the plane. That is one of our duties, but what we're really there for is to ensure that the aircraft get;s into the air and back down safely. Computers can't think critically. Computers don't have the where withal to think, "Hey, the weather is going to get a bit worse in a few minutes, better divert early to avoid getting into delays at our alternate" or "Let's take 800kg more today, because the rugby game is on and there and there might be some extra holding" or "Barcelona in June, better load an extra 1000kg into the tanks". I've every confidence in aircraft being able to fly from A to B, but that's not what we're there for, we are there to manage the flight, to be prepared to go against the plan, and cope with unexpected situations.

 

Computers are good at somethings, humans at others. Computers are great at following instructions, and humans at being creative. That's why humans sit at the front end, but let the computers do the flying for 95% of the flight.

 

Pilots have such high wages, it'd make travel so much cheaper to not have to pay the pilots wages:

Pilots account for about 2.8% of the price of your ticket. Not that much, and certainly not the savings that would justify the expense of having to roll out a system like this worldwide.

 

But most plane crashes are caused by pilot error, if we remove them flying would be much safer.

You know, that's probably one of the things that irks me the most. Indeed, the majority of accidents are caused by pilot error, but does anyone ever stop to think about the number of accidents that are prevented by pilots? Easily 3-4 times a year, you'll look down at the autopilot with a startled look and declare "What's it doing now??? I have manual control." Autopilots for some reason like to do stupid things, they just do, and we're there to stop them when they do. The number of times before landing a jeep may have driven onto the runway, a ramp worker walks in front of a plane, the plane starts flying where it feels like going and not where it's told. Had the pilots in these cases stop back and simply said, that's the AP, let it do it's stuff. Then the number off accidents would probably be something along the lines of 99.9999999999% computer error, 0.0000000000001% Human error, and whatever tiny potion is left for mechanical error. Accident levels would sky rocket if there weren't pilots on the flight deck to take control and avert disaster.

 

Lot's of jobs are being automated, why not pilots?

Probably because it's one of the most safety critical jobs out there, you don't get much more safety critical than jobs like a pilot, with perhaps the exception of Doctors. Your life is literally in their hands. Why not automate supermarkets. There's already the technology for automatic floor cleaners, automatic shelf stackers are used in warehouses all around the world, till machines are already being replaced, yet there's no fully automated super markets out there. Could you get rid of doctors perhaps, I mean if this self flying plane can interpret weather maps, and patterns, then surely a doctor-computer could analyse symptoms and scans? All we'd need would be nurses. If cars can drive themselves get rid of street-sweepers, get rid of bin men, get rid of taxi-drivers. If shops are going to be going all automatic on the till, we could probably get rid of accountants too, just use a computer program for that. All these things could be much easier automated and with much lower safety risks, yet they aren't.

 

What as a race do we do when we automate everything, and we now spend our time doing as we want?

Can you imagine it? No one has a job, we all just do whatever we want... I'm getting bored just thinking of it, one week off work and I'm itching to get back. Life would be dull, imagine the following conversation:

 

Me: "Hi Seamus, what's up, what did you do yesterday?"

Sé: "Hi Ronan, oh nothing much I was talking to Barry."

Me: "And what's Barry up to?"

Sé: "Oh nothing much, he was talking to Róisín."

Me: "And what's the news with Roisin then?"

Sé: "Oh, nothing either, she was talking to Séan."

Me: "And hows Sean then?"

Sé: "Oh Sean was talking to me the other day?"

Me: "And how are you... " :mellow:

 

It'd go on and on, we'd grow weary of life with no purpose to it. Funny thing is, we need work to give us something to do, we may say, that the meaning to life is not to work, but ask any unemployed person ,even those whose other half may be working and be plenty comfortable on the money front, what'd they'd like to be doing, and you can bet the answer is work, not staying at home, painting, or learning the piano. We need something to work towards. We need something to get us out of bed in the morning. As much as we may like to have life as one big party, that'd just get very boring, very quickly. On a side note here for that old what is the meaning of life question, one that stuck with me for a while has been that the meaning of life is to give life meaning. Pretty accurate I think.

 

 

Unions.

Not in a million years would unions allow a fully automated aircraft into the fleet. Never. Ever. Not a chance.

 

Hope this clears up a few points,

 

Regards,

Ró.

Alright, so I'll bite... Let's look at some of the arguments I hear about this subject.

 

Planes already practically fly themselves, why not teach it to takeoff and taxi and then that's it, they don't need pilots:

Common mistake is that the purpose of pilots it to fly the plane. That is one of our duties, but what we're really there for is to ensure that the aircraft get;s into the air and back down safely. Computers can't think critically. Computers don't have the where withal to think, "Hey, the weather is going to get a bit worse in a few minutes, better divert early to avoid getting into delays at our alternate" or "Let's take 800kg more today, because the rugby game is on and there and there might be some extra holding" or "Barcelona in June, better load an extra 1000kg into the tanks". I've every confidence in aircraft being able to fly from A to B, but that's not what we're there for, we are there to manage the flight, to be prepared to go against the plan, and cope with unexpected situations.

 

Computers are good at somethings, humans at others. Computers are great at following instructions, and humans at being creative. That's why humans sit at the front end, but let the computers do the flying for 95% of the flight.

 

 

You make a lot of good points, but I don't agree on this first paragraph. You're right that computers are incapable of creative thought, but the examples you give are not examples of creative thought, they're examples of experience based rule following:

If the weather is going to deteriorate by amount X in Y time, divert now.

If a major sport event takes place during the scheduled arrival time take Z kg extra fuel.

A competent data miner could probably derive quite a lot of these rules from a database of the delays encountered by an airline. Certainly a rule like 'June in Barcelona, take 1000 kg extra' would pop right out. Systems capable of doing this are already in use at all the large investment banks, they have computer programs that detect hidden 'rules' in the stock-market and use these to make money (e.g. if both Vodaphone and Deutsche Telekom are going up, it's probably a good idea to buy stock in other telecom companies as well, this is a very crude rule, the real ones are much more sophisticated).

If you can state something as a rule, you can teach it to a computer.

A better example of creative thought would be the handling of QF32 (the Qantas A380 with an uncontained engine failure), we're (in my best guess) decades at least away from a computer capable of doing that.

Whatever about the extra fuel at a certain time of year, that's pretty easy I agree. But then we hit an issue with the first criteria, "If weather deteriorates by X amount in Y time, divert". All of a sudden, you've got 50 aircraft in the air over a major airport, that have all now decided to automatically divert. No one diverted early, no one thought they'd hang on and try some more, that's the kind of flexibility that humans provide.

 

Or what about something like let's taxi over taxiway Bravo slower today, it's wet and bravo can get slippy. There are numerous things like this that humans know, but would take infinitely long to try and program computer with that sort of information. There are so many variables on every single flight that it'd be impossible to teach a computer all of them, yet a human can just look at something with their eye's and instinctively know what to do.

 

But smart thinking on the QF32 example though, hadn't thought of that.

 

Regards,

Ró.

Isn't QF32 the exception.. from the rule? :mellow:

 

Fictional scenario. In a world where the other 'pilots' are computers, the ATC is and your plane is the last one being driven by a human. Which system has to be creative and which ones are just working together with a predictable, measurable and reliable outcome?

 

Don't worry, Rónán, I get quite some of your points and I also like to see competent and educated folks like you in the cockpit for some time to come. However, you are not the only one and your obvious qualities also don't get repeated by all personnel being allowed to ride a plane with passengers. Even more so when the air gets thin.

 

Crash reports are harsh and may, on a certain level, even do wrong to an otherwise fine crew. But they also show that it's not necessarily routine and experience which can safe a plane. Not to mention that a system can, through connection with others, become very 'experienced' in a short time while every pilot has to learn from ground up. It's the ability to adapt to a new situation and to judge it in the first place. While pilots are browsing their QRH, a system may already have found out that there is no checklist for losing a large part of the wing and.. continues to fly the plane.

 

And since we've brought systems and reliability levels to new heights, it's a matter of fact that the exceptions remain a hard task for every crew while the rule in the line ops may not offer many of those hero moments media loves so much. The mathematical model of air transport doesn't show that we need an ace to handle a yoke. Not to forget that a computer may well 'ace out' a pilot, same as the electronic stability program on cars already does. Full authority by the way.

 

 

You have a point when reminding folks about stuff a good crew actually prevented from happening. But the Achilles' heel of that argument surely is the question 'why did they have to do it in the first place?'. If the answer is 'because another crew/mechanic (or ATC) screwed up', the second paragraph of my post comes into play. :ph34r:

 

I have to bite my tongue to respond to the concerns about losing jobs or the 'automated society' because.. look at us! In 2013. :mellow:

 

Wait, my coffee maker just told me that I'm allowed to grab the java now.

So many excellent points! I have a few comments based entirely on prediction and speculation. I am neither anti-human nor anti-technology, and these are merely thoughts that I have constructed using logic and trends.

 

Not that much, and certainly not the savings that would justify the expense of having to roll out a system like this worldwide.

Such hypothetical aircraft would be integrated into fleets through typical fleet renewal cycles as replacements for older aircraft, thus justifying the costs. That is, it is unlikely that entire fleets would be converted to ultra-automated ones in a single step. Instead, airlines would probably divide the transition process between cargo and passenger aircraft, and further smoothen it by properly timing the phasing in and out of aircraft. The results would probably be similar to how the more-advanced B777s and B787s are phasing out many B747s and B767s, respectively, without much complaint regarding costs from passengers.

 

There are so many variables on every single flight that it'd be impossible to teach a computer all of them, yet a human can just look at something with their eye's and instinctively know what to do.

Ultra-automated aircraft would probably not achieve self-sufficiency in a single step, either, and would probably be managed and monitored by humans with the instincts you are referring to from the ground, in a fashion similar to the operation of drones. I would imagine that any changes involving self-sufficiency would only occur after the likelihood of failures becomes so small that all resolvable issues can be addressed from the ground, most likely by a group of non-specialized human monitors (e.g., with general ATC, dispatch, and maintenance duties). Thus, these ground monitors could eliminate the middle men—the pilots—and directly troubleshoot issues while preserving the benefits of human instinct during emergencies that might require significant "thinking outside of the box". Due to gravity and the fragility of flight, I am guessing that such ground monitors will always remain, regardless of how advanced commercial aviation automation becomes (unless we find practical ways to manipulate gravity).

 

It'd go on and on, we'd grow weary of life with no purpose to it.

Remember that this thread largely concerns commercial aviation. There will always be a passionate aviation enthusiast group, so it is likely that the casual flying / GA market will remain strong, especially if the wealthy continue showing interest. Even if commercial airliners are replaced by unmanned aircraft, aviation enthusiasts and former commercial pilots will probably still be able to satisfy themselves with VLJs (for a continued jetliner experience), small propeller aircraft, and/or flight simulation (in the worst case).

Edited January 28, 201313 yr by zowen11

Such hypothetical aircraft would be integrated into fleets through typical fleet renewal cycles as replacements for older aircraft, thus justifying the costs. That is, it is unlikely that entire fleets would be converted to ultra-automated ones in a single step. Instead, airlines would probably divide the transition process between cargo and passenger aircraft, and further smoothen it by properly timing the phasing in and out of aircraft.

Thing is though once you bring in one of those aircraft to the fleet, you'll have no pilots to operate the remaining section of the fleet that are all 'old fashioned' aircraft, instead they'll be on strike, and you'll go bankrupt. If they were to be brought in it'd have to be in one quick swoop...

 

 

I suppose one good thing to sum up aviation is that it's predictably unpredictable. Humans provide the flexibility to do this and deal with the fluidity of air travel. No two flights are ever the same. Cumputers are great at doing set, repeatable tasks, humans are good at dealing with change and coming up with creative solutions.

 

Regards,

Ró.

Thing is though once you bring in one of those aircraft to the fleet, you'll have no pilots to operate the remaining section of the fleet that are all 'old fashioned' aircraft, instead they'll be on strike, and you'll go bankrupt.

Same as they are on strike when you force them to fly with not enough fuel, Rónán? :Batting Eyelashes:

 

I admire your passion, but I think that any change has to face at least two hurdles. Theory and, then, reality. The latter being under the influence of various factors. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure there were strikes with every man power reduction in the cockpit. Radio operators, navigators, flight engineers. They are all gone. And I'm sure some of the arguments before involved a lot about unflyable planes, reduced safety or 'we will strike'.

 

Cumputers are great at doing set, repeatable tasks, humans are good at dealing with change and coming up with creative solutions.

I get your point. But I've found the electronic stability program in cars to be very creative over the shock and do nothing 'creativity' of the driver. I also think that the creativity to stall an airplane in the believe to do the right thing already got ruled out on certain planes for a reason and the main question remains. Who has to be creative, when all 'opponents' in a future fictional airspace follow logics instead of their biorhythm?

 

Is a crew taking off on the wrong runway or forgetting to monitor the airspeed on the approach creative? Isn't fatigue a big problem and doesn't the human factor awareness already advise you to be cautious when making tough decisions at times you are normally sleeping? Food for though.

 

We gave various examples of technology already ruling your day, regardless of the transportation method in use. Ask for the reason why this technology came in, works and may stay as long as it gets replaced.. by even better tech. :mellow:

 

But, even running the risk of repeating things, other folks have pointed out that we may be quite far away from actually being able to replace the pilot folks in commercial passenger transport. So please don't read this as if it would happen tomorrow or the day after that. :smile: The cars are progressing nicely though.

 

Prepare for your deepest fears!