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TheLuteceSibling t1_j1al62z wrote

Some of them land themselves, but only in nice conditions. The new and fancy ones land themselves in mediocre or poor conditions.

Wanna bet your life on Tesla Autopilot: Sky Edition?

Edit: oh, and the drones and things you listed still have pilots. They're just not in the vehicle. Auto-landing tech in aircraft is very rare.

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Any-Growth8158 t1_j1b2844 wrote

I can't imagine that people who actually work with software would trust these things. Without the ability to over-ride it, you'd never catch me in even an autonomous car even as a demonstration.

Everything is bug free and/or with sufficient redundancies until something no one expected to occur does and things go to hell.

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noonemustknowmysecre t1_j1b9tux wrote

> I can't imagine that people who actually work with software would trust these things.

There's a whole different genre of software when it comes to life-critical or mission-critical software. The sort where a bug could kill people or cost millions of dollars. Real engineering. Used to work on OBOGS which let fighter pilots breath. If you have a bug and the thing stops generating oxygen, the pilot has about 30 seconds to notice and pull an emergency lever to switch to the emergency tank. DO-178 would be the super-fun process to make this sort of software. And yes, you have to start worrying about stray cosmic rays flipping random bits in your memory. Lots of CRC checks and watchdogs and heartbeats. The time to reboot a system is important if the pilot can't breath in the meantime.

But if you ever.... drive a car on cruise control, ride an elevator, get an X-ray, then you've trusted your life to some lines of code.

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BrendanTFirefly t1_j1am8hq wrote

This makes me wonder if remotely piloted passenger aircraft is something that is currently in the works.

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rhomboidus t1_j1amszu wrote

Almost certainly not for liability reasons if nothing else.

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manofredgables t1_j1axmdt wrote

It's kind of funny though. Programming an autopilot for an airplane isn't even a very complicated thing to do. I'm pretty sure that I could make a pretty good one all by myself if I had a few months.

Making one that can be guaranteed to not cause any deaths though? Not touching that with a ten foot pole!

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Moskau50 t1_j1aoc70 wrote

Too risky, because you have the entire plane's functionality hinging on a single point of failure: the network connection.

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ZizouGOAT10 t1_j1aorgy wrote

Could they implement an autopilot that can take over in that scenario and keep the plane running until the pilots come back

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Moskau50 t1_j1aywvp wrote

The pilots are the backup for the autopilot, not the other way around. If the autopilot were to be good enough to replace the pilots during the outage, there would be no need for pilots.

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ZizouGOAT10 t1_j1az4tn wrote

Oh I’m assuming the remote pilots are the main source and the autopilot would be to keep the plane afloat until the pilots come back but not good enough to fully take over or anything

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Moskau50 t1_j1b3awp wrote

Which means that it’s not actually a backup, because if there’s some sort of electrical short that causes the connection to fail, that plane will crash.

Autopilot systems are routinely used today, so that pilots don’t have to have hands on the control for the entire flight. In any situation, or during takeoff/landing, the pilots take over for the autopilot. Outsourcing the pilots to a remote connection means that you’re outsourcing the backup, not the primary.

So you’re either swapping the autopilot to the role of backup (which is already a no-go in the current aircraft setup, so there’s no reason to assume they’d suddenly be okay with it) or you’re relying on the remote pilots to be as reliable as a pilot physically in the plane, which is foolish.

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WeDriftEternal t1_j1an1ko wrote

ITs not new. Remotely piloted aircraft aren't a new concept, its just way improved recently with technology and affordability. Taking the pilot out of any craft has long been discussed. Commercial Airlines would LOVE to have pilots not have to be physically in the airplane, it would make ops much much more effective and cheaper-- until something goes wrong, and it will.

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TehWildMan_ t1_j1an3rr wrote

In some countries, airlines and regulators are proposing the idea of single-pilot operation, at least in a normal cruise phase of flight. Even that is a regulatory hassle many aren't comfortable with

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noonemustknowmysecre t1_j1b7vpo wrote

> Some of them land themselves, but only in nice conditions. The new and fancy ones land themselves in mediocre or poor conditions.

Uh, you have that exactly backwards. The worse the conditions, the more that autoland is advised by the FAA

> Auto-landing tech in aircraft is very rare.

Wut? All airliners have it.

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WeDriftEternal t1_j1al59n wrote

"Need" is the wrong word.

We WANT humans in the loop. In fact many commercial and military aircraft are flown almost entirely by computers, they can even take off and land without humans -- however we want a pilot in the loop in case anything goes wrong and for the events we can't predict or aren't yet able to create a good and safe enough computer for.

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_OBAFGKM_ t1_j1al5n9 wrote

If your driverless train fails, it slowly comes to a stop on the tracks and everyone gets out. If your pilotless plane fails, you've got 200+ people dead.

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Em_Adespoton t1_j1alx0x wrote

Trains can be automated because they mostly operate in one dimensional space with minimal interruptions.

Automobiles operate in two dimensional space with lots of interruptions, but the fail state is to stop at the end of a two dimensional trajectory. We still haven’t fully sorted this one, so cars are limited to automation in conditions that are reasonably well defined.

Airplanes operate in three dimensional space with no marked paths and all sorts of unforeseen choices, from shifting winds and weather to fixed obstructions to wildlife and other airborne objects.

And yet despite that, much of what a modern passenger jet does is automated — autopilot navigates while at cruising altitude, and ATC manages landings.

But then there’s takeoffs and the many many things that can happen in an unexpected way in three dimensional space.

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OrangAMA t1_j1all3r wrote

A lot can go wrong with a plane, pilots are kind of like in flight tech support these days. Even though autopilot is a thing, planes still require a lot of manual input to make the autopilot function as well.

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Yellosophy t1_j1anp5k wrote

Talking from an engineering perspective, planes rely on sensory input to determine their state, say their flight path, and what actions to take to ensure they are on course. In the case where sensors pick up false readings, we have an intuitive source of information (i.e. the pilot) to correct the plane making mistakes based on bad input.

Say what you will about drones and driverless vehicles, but the catastrophic impact a out-of-control plane would have is too high no matter how small the risk is. All tech is fallible - we just test as much as we can until we think it can handle all of what we know it is supposed to do.

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zzupdown t1_j1aq8vo wrote

I think passengers feel better about risking their life traveling on a plane if there's a pilot with the will to live risking their life, too.

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druppolo t1_j1ayoxy wrote

Basically, cars and trains have a simple autopilot rule: if things go south, brake, stop, wait for instructions.

Planes simply can’t be told to pull the handbrake and wait rescue. The airplane crew is a very well dressed rescue team.

(Drones don’t count as they won’t carry people, so you can apply the rule if things go south “soft crash in the place you took off from”, which is nice but it means strike a power cable on the way to the soft crash or land on a person head, and in fact, you’d hood let the drone take off place completely free for emergencies. Real life personal example: Dude sent his drone from a parking lot, and the drone came back for an emergency, I was parking in that spot, if I came a little earlier that drone would have landed on top of my car. Now imagine two airbus 380 emergency landing on the same runway at the same time. If you make it simple they gonna crash one in the other, if you make it more complex you increase the point of failure of the machine and autopilot… ultimately, the more you try to code different scenarios the more new scenarios you open in an infinite spiral. Then you are back to the old set brakes and wait, which a plane can’t do). Or you use a human pilot so multiple pilots on multiple planes can adapt and sort it out.

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Cactusjack_96 t1_j1b72b1 wrote

We have an anti-drone system in the military called the DRAKE. It allows us to kill drones/send them back to the sender. Now imagine if someone could kill/return to sender an automated 737 with 300 souls on-board.

Would be a nightmare, especially with the amount of air traffic all over the world.

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clocks212 t1_j1c2vl7 wrote

Quite frankly the pilot is not the most expensive thing on that aircraft. A 737 burns $2100/hour of fuel at cruise, more during takeoff. Total operating cost of a 737 might average $4000-8000/hour factoring in all costs. And you want to save $400 by not having a crew?

Also the average payout for an aviation death is like $5-10million. So you’re talking about something like $1 billion in wrongful death liability alone per aircraft. Your insurance carrier isn’t going to be happy about that decision to save $400/h in crew costs. So whatever those premiums go up by has to be less than the $400 you’re saving.

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RandomName39483 t1_j1efi2v wrote

Twenty years ago the joke was that the flight crew of the future was going to be a pilot and a dog. The dog was there to keep the pilot from touching anything, and the pilot was there to feed the dog.

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gabrieltaets t1_j1e3njl wrote

there's been fatal accidents caused by bad software in planes, and for relatively "simple" controls. As a programmer myself, I'm never getting on a plane without a human pilot.

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