[HN Gopher] Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-...
___________________________________________________________________
Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and
landing tests
Author : apsec112
Score : 161 points
Date : 2020-07-27 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun
| intended) before self-driving cars.
| kbenson wrote:
| It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been
| mostly automated for a while now.
|
| The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on
| almost entirely empty freeways and highways, and on designated,
| fairly uniform and well marked parking lots directly off those
| freeways. Self driving cars can already do all that fairly
| well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal
| with (pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage,
| lots of other cars, etc) that make self driving cars hard.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so
| not only is there more space, but it is relatively easy to
| check for potential conflicts before flights leave the
| ground.
| asdfadsfgfdda wrote:
| Flight plans are filed in advance, but a flight plan is
| just a plan. It's an impossible task to predict where an
| airplane will fly in advance, there are so many variables
| involved.
|
| Just some of the many reasons a flight will vary from
| flight plan:
|
| -Avoiding convective build up (thunderstorm)
|
| -Avoiding turbulence for passenger comfort (changing
| altitude)
|
| -Unexpectedly high headwinds (changing altitude)
|
| -A cold front causes winds to shift, so the runways in use
| change
|
| -Low clouds limits arrival/departure rate, so holding is
| needed
|
| -Snow removal from runways/taxiways
| carabiner wrote:
| We have these with Predator drones etc. These were mature at
| the time when the DARPA Grand Challenge had robot cars crashing
| in the desert.
| axlee wrote:
| Predator drones aren't exactly self-flying though, they are
| remotely piloted.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will
| still need to be there to take over during an emergency, so it
| won't save on pilot costs, right? And they can already lay back
| and relax during most of the flight so it won't really help with
| fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take off with
| less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over
| sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error
| during phases where such autopilot could've been running a source
| of accidents in practice?
| kandeel4411 wrote:
| Probably one benefit is having flights available and running
| 24/7, human pilots can only fly so many a day
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required
| number of pilots from 2 to 1 for some flights.
| kylec wrote:
| Or 0, eventually
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Sure, but you get a huge amount of the labor cost reduction
| just by going from 2 to 1 and probably have a much easier
| time justifying it. Labor costs are already a pretty small
| part of air freight costs, for instance, so proportionally,
| the improvement in total costs (in both absolute and
| relative-to-total terms) from going to 1 from 2 pilots is
| about the same as going to 0 from 1.
|
| EDIT: Just to illustrate... a 777 Freighter can fly a 5000
| mile route at like 500 miles per hour carrying about
| 100tons of freight, I think in one shift so you only need a
| pilot and copilot. That's 50,000 ton-miles per hour. Air
| freight revenue is about $1.40 per ton-mile, so in terms of
| revenue, you're talking $70,000 per hour. Pilot and co-
| pilot wages are much lower per flight hour than you'd
| imagine, around $20-50/hour, so combined, they both
| contribute about $70 in direct labor costs per hour, so
| already just on thousandth, or 0.1%, of the revenue from
| the freight they're carrying. Even eliminating the pilots
| doesn't reduce costs much!
|
| Much bigger difference for smaller and slower regional air
| freight routes.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| Cargo flights could fly without pilots, or use remote-control
| like a UAV
| aqme28 wrote:
| In addition to that-- is the pilot's salary a significant
| fraction of the cost of a flight?
| lnsru wrote:
| Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they
| got obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and
| bad weather flights.
| alacombe wrote:
| Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile
| objects on the road ?
| cachvico wrote:
| And when there's zero visibility?
|
| ILS presumably -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system
|
| So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an
| intelligent way?
| outworlder wrote:
| > So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in
| an intelligent way?
|
| There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing
| for decades and can be used by many aircraft today (from both
| Boeing and Airbus)
|
| All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III
| approach if it is available and let the old and boring
| autopilot do its thing.
|
| Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do
| what pilots already do: divert to an alternate airport.
|
| https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica...
| nabla9 wrote:
| In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing
| manoeuvres but the pilot is still in control. Complete zero
| visibility landing is not allowed. Pilot needs to see
| something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure
| that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind
| limits, almost no turbulence is not allowed and so on.
| qppo wrote:
| Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but
| only on the ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between
| flights that need corrections as problems occur.
|
| Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust
| communications infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet
| but it's fun to imagine. I trust machines more than people,
| unless they're made by Boeing.
| [deleted]
| pak9rabid wrote:
| I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the
| deadzone issue?
| koatuok wrote:
| Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at
| 500 mph? I had assumed that it only worked with a stationary
| transceiver.
| elcritch wrote:
| Perhaps not initially, but IIRC, they use "digital" antenna
| so it should be upgradable to track in real-time. Perhaps
| even by an OTA update.
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| Yes, it can, although I can't be sure it will work at 500
| mph. They tested it with a C-12, which has a top speed of
| 338 mph, and were able to transfer data at 610 Mbps.
|
| Source: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-
| offering-starlin...
| [deleted]
| qppo wrote:
| We already have satellite communications for media and voice,
| but iirc they have fairly limited bandwidth constraints. I
| think figuring out a way to get the flight recorder data to
| operators in realtime would be the first problem to solve,
| and I don't think it's been done yet for commercial flights.
|
| There was a startup around like 5-6 years ago (gone now,
| can't find any info on them, their name was "Flamingo"
| something or other) that had a proof of concept solution but
| they burned out quickly.
| phantom784 wrote:
| Latency is probably the bigger issue for aircraft, but
| Starlink could help there as well.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| What do you think is better about people made by Boeing?
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were
| automated long ago... ?
|
| [sorry, should have done more googling:
| https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica...
| seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no
| auto-takeoff]
| cachvico wrote:
| Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system
|
| It does require hardware on the runway though.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| This is for landing without visual contact with the runway
| (i.e. instrument flight conditions), typically the pilot is
| still controlling the aircraft, and looking at an instrument
| that tells him/her how to adjust the controls, although many
| aircraft can land automatically using these same systems.
| Avicebron wrote:
| It has been, but there is still a strong incentive to have a
| human in semi-control for contingencies
| outworlder wrote:
| Not only that, but it's free training. This helps keep pilots
| sharp and current.
|
| If autoland fails it could be that there's something else
| going wrong with the aircraft(ranging from a faulty sensor to
| something more serious). Now you have a pilot with degraded
| proficiency trying to land in an unusual condition. This
| impairs safety.
| nexuist wrote:
| There are other people talking about autoland, but it's
| actually meant to line the aircraft up with the runway and
| gently glide it down, and then the pilot deactivates it around
| 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to perform
| the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't
| flare by itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it
| will cause a ton of stress on the landing gear that adds up to
| more frequent downtime for repairs.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I believe the A320 has some auto land capability. Not a pilot,
| so don't know the details, but based on Youtube, it appears the
| pilot has to do some configuration on approach (line up the
| plane to some extent, set engines appropriately, etc).
| kirykl wrote:
| >"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own"
|
| It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is
| really critical
| irrational wrote:
| How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets,
| fighters, etc.) is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find
| people to "take over" from the AI pilot in case of an emergency?
| I suppose you wouldn't need that many since it's unlikely there
| will be multiple emergencies concurrently.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots,
| they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually
| flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other
| less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them
| in the plane?
|
| If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it
| being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are
| saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like
| flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a
| few second's timescale.
|
| That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane
| now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers.
|
| I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though?
| You'd still have a cabin-crew, too.
| joakleaf wrote:
| You probably don't need a crew for freight only flights.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Might be hard to imagine for you now, but could be completely
| different story in a few years. Basically there's no reason to
| believe people will be always more reliable than machines.
| [deleted]
| Avicebron wrote:
| I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system?
| Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be
| accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty
| dangerous outcomes.
| Joeri wrote:
| I wouldn't trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a
| crisis if they've barely done any real flying in the past few
| years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I'm
| worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.
| Simulacra wrote:
| "Russian jet crashed 'because captain couldn't land without
| autopilot"
|
| https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-c...
| lightgreen wrote:
| The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not
| have an feature to drop fuel and landed over max landing
| weight and there are other reasons.
|
| Metro is not the most reliable source of information.
| gibsonhouse wrote:
| simulators might be good enough to train for most situations,
| maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying
| the whole time.
| Jabbles wrote:
| The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can
| _only_ be trained for in a simulator.
|
| The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable
| in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| (sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking
| about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while
| flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it
| may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my
| larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.
| alacombe wrote:
| It's not as if a computer didn't crashe 2 737-MAX8 on take-off,
| despite pilots trying to correct the trajectory !
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| There's some interesting articles about the role of automation
| in the Air France 447 disaster:
|
| Short article:
|
| https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-sho...
|
| Much longer article, but 100% worth the read if you have time:
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...
| Animats wrote:
| Right.
|
| This is a big issue for self-flying aircraft. Keeping the
| aircraft stable requires reliable altitude, airspeed, and
| orientation data. If you have that, you can stay in the air.
| AF 447 lost airspeed data, the flight control system dropped
| to a lower level, and gave up stall protection. It couldn't
| tell if the aircraft was stalling. That was enough to confuse
| the pilots so badly that they crashed a working airplane with
| plenty of speed, power, and altitude into the ocean.
|
| A self-flying aircraft has the same problem, only worse.
| Without that info, it cannot stay in the air. There are
| fighters that need so much active stabilization that if you
| lose air data, you have to eject. Self-flying aircraft thus
| need really, really reliable air data sensors, and lots of
| them.
|
| Getting airspeed from GPS has been suggested. There's one
| bizjet which does this. It can't be flown in areas where GPS
| jamming is in progress. Over-dependence on GPS is a problem.
|
| All that is just to be able to fly straight and level. That's
| flight control. Navigation and landing are separate problems.
| yummypaint wrote:
| The only practical way to mitigate this that i can think of is
| more emphasis on regular simulator training. It may ultimately
| undercut the financial benefits of full time autopilot if
| pilots have to spend a larger fraction of their time on the
| clock in simulators, plus more sims would have to be built and
| operated.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The cockpit could just double as a simulator in non-emergency
| situations.
| PinguTS wrote:
| A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago,
| that Airbus can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It
| was about 15 years ago.
|
| But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems
| during take-off and landing, because the pilots don't get
| practise. But pilots need those practise if they should take over
| in emergency situations.
|
| The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see
| automated railways and automated airplanes before we see
| automated cars.
|
| PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways
| system to allow mixed traffic of automated and manual railways.
| Yeah, I know some of the guys doing the saftey certifcations for
| this.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is a highly underrated insight to autonomous system
| design. The use of autonomous systems in dense public spaces
| will usually be driven by programmatic constraints before
| technical ones.
| davidhyde wrote:
| It is very difficult to convert trains to run fully automated
| not because of the technology but because of unions that
| typically run the show. Don't underestimate the power of the
| unions. They have decades of experience in getting their way.
| Dahoon wrote:
| Very US specific.
| cbanek wrote:
| I've always been amazed at the trams in Vegas between the
| casinos that are I think remotely semi-automated (at least one
| of them, I've seen an operator in a booth at one terminus, in
| the Excalibur). Some of them are even elevated! I think the Las
| Vegas monorail is also automated.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I rode the Las Vegas Monorail, which is automated. It is also
| elevated. When it gets to the end of the line, they tell
| everyone to exit the train. Well, I didn't (hey, there's no
| attendant to make me...)
|
| They then switched from one track to the other. This involved
| moving down past the station to this stub of track that just
| ends in midair, with absolutely nothing except the control
| system to keep you from going too far and crashing down 15 or
| 20 feet to the ground below. That was... a bit nerve-
| wracking. It all worked, and they don't regularly fall off
| and crash, but... I don't think I'd do that again.
|
| But yes, they're automated, and it works, and works reliably.
| 7952 wrote:
| There are still safety critical things that the Airbus is
| unable to do itself. For example talk to ATC, make decisions
| about changing weather conditions, fly a visual approach, or
| know that the causes of an electrical problem is coffee spilled
| on the thrust levers.
| one2know wrote:
| Exactly, there is a limit to the intelligence that people are
| willing to pay for. For example, no aircraft manufacturer
| will go as far as to develop a differential thrust system
| that replicates how UA 232 pilots guided their plane after
| flight controls are lost. Its just not cost effective.
| contrarianmop wrote:
| We already have automated railways - metro trains in copenhagen
| have been self driving for over a decade now. While I am not
| personally sure about airplanes, automated trains should become
| more popular.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| > we will see automated railways
|
| The future is now: there are automated rail lines in a numbers
| of cities around the world. Some are relatively old, too.
|
| The JFK AirTrain is one such example.
| Simulacra wrote:
| What are the drawbacks to automated rail? I had to look this
| up and was very surprised rail is not automated more in
| America. Is it safety?
| stingrae wrote:
| In BART, in the bay area, I believe it is largely because
| of Unions.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, BART had one crash because the automated control
| system mis-read a command and accelerated when it should
| have been braking. Debuggable? Perhaps. But after that,
| it's a tough sell to say that there shouldn't be a human
| in the cab to say "Wait a minute, that's not right."
| Avicebron wrote:
| Unfortunately there has been a prolonged campaign(ennui?)
| against rail in the US. I imagine lack of funding for
| innovation in legacy rail systems is to blame here.
| causalmodels wrote:
| Rail cannot get adequate funding for even basic
| maintenance and upkeep and upgrades, let alone
| modernization, because of widespread corruption among
| government officials and public sector workers. I'm sure
| public perception plays some role but it is not the root
| cause for our current situation.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| A mix of politics, bureaucracy, and cost. For example,
| there was a fatal derailment back in 2017 in the US, and an
| automated safety system that may have prevented it was
| delayed.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42421417
|
| From the wikipedia article on Positive Train Control (PTC):
|
| >In December 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability
| Office (GAO) reported that Amtrak and the major Class I
| railroads have taken steps to install PTC systems under the
| law, but commuter rail operators were not on track for the
| 2015 deadline.[14] As of June 2015, only seven commuter
| systems (29 percent of those represented by APTA) were
| expecting to make the deadline. Several factors have
| delayed implementation, including the need to obtain
| funding (which was not provided by Congress); the time it
| has taken to design, test, make interoperable, and
| manufacture the technology; and the need to obtain radio
| spectrum along the entire rail network, which involves FCC
| permission and in some cases negotiating with an existing
| owner for purchase or lease.[15]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
|
| So needless to say... the technology likely exists today,
| but implementing anything significant to existing
| infrastructure in the US is a monumental feat.
|
| The above example is just a safety system, but once you
| start removing employees you also start running up against
| labor unions... which is yet another layer holding things
| back.
| plumeria wrote:
| The metros in Lausanne, Switzerland and in Copenhagen,
| Denmark are automated.
| gspr wrote:
| Nitpicl: Only one of Lausanne's two metro lines is
| automated; the m1 is way too exposed to human interaction
| with the track area for that to be risked as it's currently
| laid out.
|
| Also, Line 14 on the Paris metro (heavy use) has been
| automated since the 90s.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| But we haven't seen automated freight trains. A light rail
| train hauling commuters along a dedicated bespoke elevated
| rail line (Vancouver's skytrain, Disney World etc) is one
| thing, a hundred cars full of iron ore descending a hill
| behind a preschool is another.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I believe that Australia has an automated freight line.
|
| The original intent of the Black Mesa & Lake Powell
| (hauling coal to a power plant) was for it to be fully
| automated, but I don't know if it ever ran without a human
| in the cab.
| joosters wrote:
| The preschool is hiding behind the hill on the railway
| line? I wish they'd stop building these schools on the
| train tracks, it's so irresponsible.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Most of the automated railways operate on closed tracks. Many
| of those even on closed platforms. Here in Germany, my
| hometown Nuremberg, it runs one of the first underground
| railways with open platforms and combined with man operated
| railways. It needs a lot of safety electronics and I know
| some guys who were responsible for certification after
| install. (Yeah, I am somehow from the business.)
|
| Don't try to compare closed tracks to open tracks. A closed
| track is more like an elevator.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| We have the London DLR
| cogman10 wrote:
| What are the main difficulties around an open system vs a
| closed one? To my novice eye they look like they should be
| fairly comparable.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Runs on my laptop vs runs in production
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A semi truck breaks down in a position fouling the
| tracks. A drunk passes out on the tracks. A freight car
| isn't securely tied down on a siding and rolls out onto
| the tracks. Et cetera.
|
| For an open system, you have to be able to respond to
| arbitrary visual input. For a closed system, there
| shouldn't be random stuff on the right of way.
| cgh wrote:
| Vancouver has SkyTrain:
|
| "SkyTrain is the oldest and longest, fully-automated,
| driverless, rapid-transit system in the world."
|
| https://www.translink.ca/Schedules-and-Maps/SkyTrain.aspx
| boudin wrote:
| There's a few one that existed before then. Quite crazy to
| think that some existed in the 70's, almost half a century
| ago:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_guideway_transit
| PinguTS wrote:
| Which is a completely closed track, much like an elevator.
| 4ec0755f5522 wrote:
| Not sure this meets your definition but the Expo line
| splits:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_Line_(SkyTrain)#Route
| ekianjo wrote:
| There are already automated trains in Paris (one metro line),
| and I can think of several places in Japan with automated train
| lines as well (not the main ones). It's already proven
| technology.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I would be very happy to see automated trains, I often see an
| immediate jump to tackling the hardest cases in engineering
| before thinking about simple and efficient solutions. Almost
| everything about the Japanese rail system is something I want
| to see in the US
| mattlondon wrote:
| In London several of the tube lines are automated. There is a
| driver but all they do is press a button to close the doors
| at stations and make announcements to passengers "for safety
| purposes" (i.e. unions)
| Skye wrote:
| For some lines that go above ground (Northern, Jubilee,
| Central), the driver sometimes had to put it into manual
| mode to compensate for the worse breaking when it's raining
| outside.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| This is a bit of a misrepresentation. Drivers still have
| actual safety and operational roles - they can drive the
| train manually in cases of equipment failure, deal with
| passenger emergencies, that kind of thing. Even the DLR,
| which has used automation since opening, has a staff member
| on each train who can take over driving if required.
|
| That's not to say that entirely driverless services can't
| be done. There are a bunch of metro services globally that
| are grade-4 fully-autonomous and totally unattended, and
| some of them have been in operation for over 30 years. But
| like all large-scale systems, there are lots of
| complicating factors, system-specific conditions, and
| various tradeoffs to be made - a lazy Daily Mail "damn
| unions" argument isn't really fair.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yep this is why they want "train captains" (kinda like
| the DLR has) rather than requiring a fully-trained driver
| in a cab at the front.
|
| IIRC there is something like a 6 year waiting list to
| become a tube driver because they do a 36 hour week for
| PS55k a year (up to PS100+k for some) with over 40 days
| paid holiday, and can retire on a full pension at 50
| years old (1)
|
| It seems like a ludicrously cushy job and I 100% put it
| down to those "damn unions" essentially blackmailing TFL
| by always threatening to strike at the busiest times. I
| don't blame them,but I don't think that the "damn unions"
| argument is unjustified when it comes to Tube drivers and
| there near-constant threats to go on strike for the most
| rediculous things that any reasonable person would agree
| were legitimate reasons (such as when a driver was sacked
| for repeatedly failing drink-driving tests (2), or
| another for a driver who repeatedly drove through red
| signals (3)). These are potential disaster near-misses,
| yet the tube driver's unions use them as more leverage to
| threaten a strike and squeak out a bit more pay and a bit
| more holiday.
|
| 1 - https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tube-driver-
| salary-holida...
|
| 2 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-
| rail-transp...
|
| 3 - https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/13/tube-workers-striking-
| protest...
| darren0 wrote:
| I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely
| unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.
| Simulacra wrote:
| The shipping industry is one where it could be extremely
| helpful, particularly in thwarting pirates. I've always
| wondered why cargo ships are not drones, full autonomous until
| it gets within a certain range of its destination.
| alacombe wrote:
| I'm not sure you'd like the fully automatic sentry miniguns
| associated with drone ships !
| alacombe wrote:
| Classic NIMBY'ism :-)
| irrational wrote:
| I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots
| (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled
| pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain
| was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that
| I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.
| bsder wrote:
| The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into
| LAX probably somewhere around 2000.
|
| We were flying through a really big storm front _forever_.
| Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours.
|
| Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the
| place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as
| smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I
| had ever experienced.
|
| Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you
| can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down
| in that weather on autoland."
|
| Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have
| turned that on 2 hours earlier?"
|
| Pilots are done.
| boogies wrote:
| The article mentions that.
|
| "For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't
| replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by
| helping reduce workload. ... "For autonomous technologies to
| improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance,
| pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in
| a press release."
| newsclues wrote:
| Is that logical?
|
| What are the environmental and economic costs of an automated
| cargo ship going down vs airliner (cargo for comparison)?
|
| It's hundreds of millions dollars and fuel.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Actually this leads to an interesting point..as far as I know
| cargo ships are not automated sooner. It seems that it's just
| as open as the sky...potentially the sea is much less
| forgiving?
| [deleted]
| asynchronous13 wrote:
| If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown
| by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you
| comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup,
| but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to
| a ground station.
| fossuser wrote:
| The Boeing 737 max 8 software couldn't keep a plane in the
| sky with an army of pilots fighting to save their own lives.
|
| I wouldn't get in one of these until there are better
| controls on this kind of software, it's not the same as
| autopilot.
| bioipbiop wrote:
| The 737 max was brought down by a classic autopilot style
| feature.
|
| I imagine full automation will come to air cargo first and
| gradually find its way in passenger liners as the public
| becomes less hysterical.
| asynchronous13 wrote:
| There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused
| accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less
| scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and
| won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep
| happening as long as experience is valuable.
| Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63
| dead Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal)
| pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead Air France
| Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
| Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead
|
| and this is just a random selection, there are long long
| lists of human-caused aviation accidents.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Don't forget Colgan Air Flight 3407 where the pilot was
| either too sleepy, or simply didn't know what he was
| doing.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not a luddite, if the software is ready and safer
| than people then I'd be okay with it.
|
| There's a history of software _not_ being ready while
| people pretend it is and then it kills people
| (Therac-25).
|
| I'm just skeptical that we'll know when it's actually
| safe.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Therac-25 wasn't a "it's not ready yet!"-type issue. It
| wasn't an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only
| became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died
| and the industry has learned and improved as a
| consequence.
| fossuser wrote:
| They ignored repeated failures and evidence of
| malfunction by saying it was "impossible" that it could
| be failing in that way.
|
| Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737
| max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the
| industry has not fully learned the lesson.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the
| "malfunctioning" was the system working as-directed by
| the user, but the UX was horrible for informing the user
| what they were doing.
| [deleted]
| ekianjo wrote:
| Most accidents are due to human error, so you are taking
| way more chances by relying on the ability of pilots,
| statistics wise.
| fossuser wrote:
| Doesn't this just mean that today the mechanical parts of
| a plane are pretty reliable?
|
| It's not much of a comparison to flying software that
| isn't yet in use since there isn't any data to make that
| comparison.
|
| Am I wrong? Are planes flown today without human
| intervention?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Apart from landing and take-off, most flights are in
| autopilot for most of the flight duration nowadays.
| claydavisss wrote:
| Afaik from talking to pilots, your statement isn't even true,
| takeoffs and landings are done by a person.
| edmundhuber wrote:
| Link to Airbus's press release:
| https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/ai...
| More info here: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-
| aerial-mobi...
|
| Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking
| into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight.
|
| Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I
| can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as
| BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's
| proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane
| completely would be insanity.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me,
| who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would
| be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a
| self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the
| plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.
| usrusr wrote:
| Drivers take almost all information they need for driving
| from looking through the windows, whereas pilots take almost
| all information from looking at the dials. That difference
| alone makes flying inherently more automatable. Automated
| driving adds a lot of sensing requirements over manual
| driving, but in flying the manual way already requires most
| of the sensing you'd need for automation.
| asdfadsfgfdda wrote:
| The act of controlling a plane can be done entirely by
| looking at gauges, but that's not the only thing a pilot
| does. Pilots are also interfacing with ATC, flight
| attendants, dispatch, maintenance, and passengers. Even if
| you replace these interfaces with a computer usable format,
| you still need someone with judgment and responsibility for
| the flight. Pilots exercise their judgment over the
| information they receive from these other sources, and to
| coordinate these resources for efficient, safe flight. It's
| a huge challenge to replace all of this with a system.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The "bail" maneuver is considerably easier in a car.
|
| It's also far more likely to be necessary, but pulling over
| to the side of the road is easier than landing off runway.
| edmundhuber wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I
| pointed out that BI probably has different ideas than Airbus.
|
| To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff,
| navigating/obstacle avoidance, landing". To the extent that
| driving a car isn't "what you see is what you get", flight is
| much worse.
|
| In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither
| takeoff nor landing), and depending on what kind of airspace
| you're in you may need to: * listen to ATC for commands, and
| advise them of what you're doing, * avoid weather, * look out
| for traffic, * watch your gauges, * stay on a heading,
| altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is
| routinely done with autopilot.)
|
| In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it
| look so casual.
|
| A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate,
| Communicate". This is the basic priorities for your
| attention. If you're pointed at terrain your priority is to
| fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you
| (to some extent) of that first responsibility, especially
| during routine parts of flight, so that you can do the other
| things. Airbus is looking for more things to automate to let
| pilots do more strategic thinking in general.
|
| Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with
| what BI is thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower,
| there's no need to communicate, the rules for driving are
| pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be, without
| hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and
| speed limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that
| it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and
| everyone can climb out of the vehicle.
| ngngngng wrote:
| > The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its
| Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its
| flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on
| its own as pilots simply watched.
|
| Talk about training your replacement.
|
| My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should
| talk him out of it.
| bargl wrote:
| I have some friends who love it, some who hate it and some who
| didn't finish and got a ton of debt.
|
| If you decide to be a pilot reach out to real world pilots and
| ask for advice.
|
| I have friends who did years being paid very little at local
| airports so they could "make it" to the airlines to get paid
| much better.
|
| The biggest thing I observed from my 10+ friends is, being a
| pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and
| certifications. At first you pay for them, then you get paid
| for them but not much because those people are paying for them,
| then you get paid a living wage for them because you're flying
| customers/cargo/etc.
|
| My friends who are happiest as pilots either had the
| government/some other entity pay for their training, or were
| able to skip ahead in pay by getting directly to airlines.
| outworlder wrote:
| > being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the
| cockpit and certifications
|
| Yeap. So if you can fund the initial thousand hours (give or
| take) you should be ok. If you can't and you don't like small
| GA aircraft you'll have a miserable time trying to get paid
| to fly and have enough hours to be considered by airlines.
| outworlder wrote:
| > My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I
| should talk him out of it.
|
| So he wants to be an airline pilot? Ultimately ferrying
| passengers? He should be ok. The industry is very safety
| conscious and moves extremely slowly. His children, if he
| decides to have some, may not be if they choose the same
| career.
|
| I would be more concerned about smaller planes or freighters.
|
| This is provided that this is something that he actually loves
| to do. Because otherwise not sleeping at home and weird hours
| will get old really quick. If he loves aviation you probably
| can't talk him out of it :)
| ngngngng wrote:
| He's doing the standard "change your mind every couple
| semesters" thing that most 20 year olds seem to do. Just a
| few months ago I was teaching him programming, now he's
| decided becoming a pilot is the thing to do.
| bdamm wrote:
| You should because it's a terrible career, although really I
| think most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career into
| good industries so in the end, no big deal. Let 'er rip and
| enjoy the view when you get it
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Why is it considered a terrible career?
| dr-detroit wrote:
| $20,000-$40,000 annual salary starting out
|
| Most of the coastal elites on hackernews spend more than
| that annually on apps for their iWatch
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance,
| doing the same thing a million times, dead-man's shoes,
| having to work against a schedule, living out of corporate
| hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules,
| shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to
| like about it?
|
| Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union
| game talk about achieving the same pay an undergraduate
| intern gets in a tech company.
| jfk13 wrote:
| While there's doubtless something to what you say, I
| don't believe there are _that_ many undergrad interns
| getting the pay of a senior pilot. You 're thinking of an
| extremely select subset of tech companies.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet
| against the average working pilot earning less than the
| average tech intern either.
| gipp wrote:
| Spend ~4/7 of your life in mediocre hotels far from home,
| work itself consists of sitting in a cramped box with even
| less to do than than the passengers on the flight, money
| _can_ be good but not career-goals good... I can see it.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| One reason it's not great is there are a lot of pilot
| wannabees that are stuck flying small commercial feeder
| flights, and they don't have much experience and training,
| and they get paid barely enough to live on. They hope to
| get on to one of the bigger companies (american, united,
| etc). The flights a few years ago that iced up in NY state
| (I think that was where) were sleeping on someone's couch
| for a few hours only before a flight, and they didn't have
| much training.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And what is your evidence that "most pilots end up bailing
| out of the pilot career"? And, what do you consider "good
| industries"?
| jedisct1 wrote:
| But can it serve Tomato juice?
| plumsempy wrote:
| no
| Merrill wrote:
| Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first?
|
| Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?
| kamel3d wrote:
| or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to
| test this technology since they love cutting cost
| msla wrote:
| How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse
| to deal and a human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two
| engines gone? Multiple engines gone and a really stiff crosswind?
| How good is it at landing in a blizzard on an icy runway? I know
| it never happens. Planes never land on the Hudson River, either.
| There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe as
| possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that,
| but what are the current limits of automation?
| phire wrote:
| Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible.
|
| The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully
| understand the complete autopilot algorithm and understand
| exactly how it should act in any situation.
|
| Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are
| designed to disconnect when they detect something weird. They
| don't even understand aerodynamics.
|
| I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually
| designed a fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI
| techniques (so no machine learning or neural networks; Just
| decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models and predictions)
| then it could handle a wide range of emergencies.
|
| It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out
| emergencies just fine, and should even be able to land in the
| Hudson River or anywhere else it has detailed maps.
|
| These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer
| of a fully autonomous plane would know about and test their
| software against in simulations.
|
| The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have
| issues are avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency
| landings in areas with substandard mapping and unexpected
| aerodynamic failures (beyond what their adaptive aerodynamic
| model can handle)
| thehappypm wrote:
| Probably the limit is that in the miracle on the Hudson, Sully
| wouldn't have had a co-pilot.
| alacombe wrote:
| I wonder how a computer would have reacted to Search US Airways
| Flight 1549...
| bdonlan wrote:
| I suspect that the with the current electrical system on
| airbuses, the emergency electrical configuration wouldn't have
| enough power to run all those image processing computers at the
| very least (dual engine failure would cause this). However that
| could be resolved with additional battery capacity.
|
| A more likely cause of automation failure would be failure or
| disagreement in the various sensors on the plane. These are
| typically triple redundant, but there have been cases where,
| for example, all the pitot tubes ice over and airspeed
| indications are lost. There are ways to deal with this but
| they're not currently programmed into the autopilot.
|
| Other possible causes include failure of major flight controls
| requiring workarounds - eg, dealing with a stuck rudder with
| deliberate asymmetric thrust.
|
| That being said flight control issues can probably be dealt
| with, if necessary. The real problem is with dealing with
| ambiguous situations where you have to weigh risks.
|
| Consider: your radios are out. Per standard procedure you
| should proceed on your flight plan to the final fix and hold
| until your scheduled arrival time. However, fuel consumption is
| high - you're not sure, but you might have a slow fuel leak,
| and your destination has dicey weather. Do you divert without
| clearance or risk that you might be marginal on fuel at your
| scheduled arrival time?
| vemv wrote:
| This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen.
|
| We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to
| truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very)
| sophisticated one-trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing
| than an intelligent system.
|
| Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.
| chewbaxxa wrote:
| So was the person who dubbed statistics ML
| anchpop wrote:
| from edmundhuber:
|
| > Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I
| can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as
| BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's
| proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane
| completely would be insanity.
| manfredo wrote:
| It's not incorrect to say that automated technologies aren't
| always better than human operators. But that's not the measure
| we need to use. The question is does the _net failure rate_
| increase or decrease? Say the automated technology fails 2x as
| much in unexpected failure cases, but halves typical failure
| rates?
|
| Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected
| failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures
| (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an
| analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes
| from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to
| expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of
| 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the
| severity of crashes, this is good outcome.
|
| Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not
| rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare
| people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual
| impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a
| plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated
| flight crashing.
|
| Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not
| mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of
| this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe
| parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even
| then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer controlled
| flight controls has existed since the 1970s.
| Avicebron wrote:
| >Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not
| rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns
| scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their
| actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser
| reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than
| an automated flight crashing.
|
| In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is
| sound, people will take issue until the technology is
| universally so far above a human driver that the accident
| rate is neglible.
| manfredo wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. Even if the accident rate is half,
| that's still an immense gain - over 10,000 lives saved each
| year in the US. Even if it's equal (or slightly greater
| than equal), the productivity boost would be substantial.
| Do we really think that people with hour+ long commutes
| would reject a self driving car with half the accident rate
| of a human driver?
| tjoff wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Most accidents occur when people are distracted, doing
| stupid things and at the same being sleep deprived and
| looking on the phone.
|
| Imagine only producing accident rates twice as good as
| that, what a nightmare.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I don't know, probably not, but to your point about
| people's fear being irrational, I can see people strongly
| rejecting the idea of dying to a software glitch they
| don't understand.
| kevincox wrote:
| Human pilots are also a recipe for disaster. We put two of them
| in the cockpit for redundancy but they definitely aren't
| perfect. I'm not saying that we should adopt this right away
| but one day this will surely be the safer option. And a
| transition plan of having pilots on board for backup seems very
| reasonable.
| baron816 wrote:
| I think I might trust an "AI" pilot more than a human one.
| Human pilots often fail to respond to unexpected conditions as
| well (see Air France Flight 447). Pilots have also gone nuts
| and crashed the plane intentionally (see Germanwings Flight
| 9525).
|
| Something like this should at least allow airlines to use just
| one human pilot, who I doubt would do much 99% of the time. If
| there's something that the computer can't handle, the human
| could take over.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| It's relatively easy to get the stats of fatal accidents that
| did happen, but how difficult is it to get the stats of
| accidents prevented by human pilots? Both are relevant to
| evaluating the impact of a 100% AI pilot.
|
| I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records
| of incidents but I also suspect there could be many
| unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots
| into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident
| was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their
| career.
|
| Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA
| reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify?
| How is this verified?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Would you get on a plane with no pilot?
| rglover wrote:
| _Hell no_.
|
| At least have qualified pilots who want discounted travel on
| board (being available for emergency take over pays for their
| flight--a new pilot takes over at their destination).
| lightgreen wrote:
| There won't be enough qualified pilots if most flights are
| autonomous.
| lightgreen wrote:
| Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a
| plane without a pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money.
|
| Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get
| certification to fly in drone mode between remote airfields at
| first.
|
| A350 freighter seems to be under consideration.
| https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter...
| fataliss wrote:
| Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive
| corporations like Boeing and Airbus : /
| LifeLiverTransp wrote:
| To be honest, autonomous cars have me more worried.Planes are
| rare a few dices thrown once a year. Cars are a whole casino,
| playing each day.
| young_unixer wrote:
| You could have stopped at "done".
| boramalper wrote:
| > Boeing and Airbus
|
| I wouldn't even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing;
| they are using formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has
| outsourced its software to $9-an-hour engineers[1].
|
| [0]: https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf
|
| [1]:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
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