Boeing looking into passenger planes without pilots

Idiosyncratic said:
Except most pilots don't opt for full autoland (it's not usually SOP except in crap weather anyway), and I'm not sure about the newest equipment, but it is normal in most airliners that the autopilot cannot be engaged for take-off.
What I do know about the newest equipment is that the average "hands-on" time in an A350 is around 20 minutes. That's still a fair bit of time, and the fact is that pilots are most definitely actively involved in every step of a flight - it's not like we sit on our hands and do nothing (the opposite is true - flying is rather stressful, autopilot or the not). Decisions which the computers aren't going to make for you are constantly made throughout every flight.
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What amazed me was meeting the long haul captain of my a350 flight . She was 27 years old. Normally it takes years to reach the left seat and it's quite rare to have female crew but to be commanding the newest jet just out of nappies wow.
 
At least with a human pilot in the plane you know hes going to do everything in his power not to crash the plane , unless hes some phsycotic German dude with suicidal aspirations , but theres no way i will ever get in a plane thats being controlled remotely by some dude that thinks its a video game with nothing to lose , theres just too many factors that could go wrong.
 
Unlike cars, there are no other vehicles to contend with because of predefined flight paths,
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You know what they say about assumptions being the mother of all f__kups.


The only ordinary hazards are adverse weather conditions that can be flown around or compensated for
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And what if you can't?

And given enough sensors and enough training, a pilot program will be able to figure out what it should do when something goes wrong.
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That is a horrific combination of sensor fusion, robust control systems and machine learning. I don't suppose you know how much this type of research costs?
 
Idiosyncratic said:
That's like asking a brain surgeon to enlighten you on the intricacies of brain surgery...
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Which would you rather have performing surgery on your brain: a surgeon with 100 hours of experience... or a surgeon that has literally every medical textbook ever written, committed to memory?

Which would you rather have flying you: a pilot with 100 hours of experience... or a pilot with literally every training manual, technical errata and NTSB accident report ever written, committed to memory?

Data is everything.

konfab said:
That is a horrific combination of sensor fusion, robust control systems and machine learning. I don't suppose you know how much this type of research costs?
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Nobody said it was cheap. But if it wasn't the future, one of the two largest aerospace companies on the planet wouldn't be investing in it, now would they?

zippy said:
The cause of most aircraft accidents are due to human error. Apparently.http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/the-one-chart-that-shows-what-causes-fatal-plane-crashes-10494952.html
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As that article illustrates, fully a third of all aircraft accidents since 1950 have been due to pure pilot error, and if you factor weather into that, the number increases to almost half. Now, we don't have stats for how many crashes were averted due to pilot effort (e.g. miracle on the Hudson) but I'm willing to bet good money that in terms of human lives, that number is far lower than the number of lives lost.

Automate it all - pilots, air traffic controllers, the works.
 
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