Boeing to study pilotless planes

Seggy said:
Actually if you look at some of the court cases around driver less cars and other ethical implications needed to be worked out, we are still a VERY far way away from driver less cars.

Also, you really think China/Russia is going to want a pilot less aircraft over their airspace with technology from another country? Do we want a pilot less aircraft from Russia or China over our airspace? We need to keep an eye on pilot less commercial aircraft, but it is (hopefully) not in the next generation of aircraft.
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I doubt it's that far for cars. 5 years? Maybe 10. When it finally does happen and become mainstream, it will be one of the biggest gains safety-wise in recent memory. 35,000 people a year die on the roads. Think about that for a second. If computers start driving, that number will drop to sub 1,000 once the majority of cars are automated. Eventually it will be super rare to die in a car crash.

As far as aircraft go, it will happen eventually, but most likely after all of us are dead and gone.
 
Cptnchia said:
Unless or until there is a huge crash, with large loss of lives, and the end result is, "well, yes Senator, a human pilot wouldn't have done that, they probably could've landed without loss of life."
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I think that this will happen right around the time the public begins to warm up to the drone carrier idea and delay its full implementation another decade or so.

Unmanned aircraft still have a very high accident rate which is understandable at their current stage of development.
 
Roger Roger said:
We've been through this before in a gazillion threads. People have made that same forecast since the beginning of technology and each new wave of technology brings more access to things like food, shelter, and transportation to more people more cheaply than the generation before. Put down the dystopian sci-fi and go out in the real working world for a bit.
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You are correct that each wave of technological progress has brought a higher standard of living to more people, more cheaply. However past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Historically, as old jobs were rendered obsolete by new technology, new jobs have emerged. In the future I don't expect that to happen as much, precisely because the technological advances will leave fewer and fewer tasks than can be done more cheaply by labor than by capital. While new industries will certainly emerge, most of the work will be done by hardware and software and relatively few jobs will be created compared to past technological advances. Another issue is that technology progresses exponentially, so technology is advancing faster than in any of the past waves of new technology and the rate of progress will only increase. So we are in new territory compared to the past, or at least we will be soon..

Consider that one or two centuries ago, it was common for anyone who could afford it to own horses. Horses and oxen or other beasts of burden were pretty much essential to agriculture and transportation. Today there is little room for horses in our economy, and the horse population declined significantly in the first half of the 20th century. I suspect that, in the not too distant future, the same thing that happened to horses will happen to ordinary people- technology will advance to a point where our skills are no longer useful in the economy, and structural unemployment will skyrocket.

Cptnchia said:
Gotta tell ya, I find it a bit unsettling reading posts by pilots arguing for/defending the elimination of their jobs. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight. 14 years and counting. You crazy kids and your tech! Just stay off my property.
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I'm not necessarily arguing for my replacement with technology, but it would be pointless to bury my head in the sand and ignore the fact that I will soon be obsolete as a pilot. I have 39 years left until the current mandatory retirement age, and it seems painfully obvious to me that the need for human pilots will have declined drastically by then. Long before I turn 65 I suspect people with my level of intelligence and social and psychomotor skills will not have much place in the economy. While I hate to see this happen and I hope my predictions are wrong, there is no use in denying what the future likely holds.
 
The need for Un manned flying is obvious in combat situtions. The need for manned flight in commercial ops is obvious.
 
The automation thing is a lot of fan-wank by the bean counters and engineers who don't know how to siphon gas out of a car.

Automation really only works with the safety margins needed when the envrionent is controllable or extremely predictable. A climate controlled factory with safety enclosures, a sealed train tunnel rated for low speed, and space are all good examples.

Assuming we can get it good enough to put-put along on its own in garden variety weather, we have the most unpredictable element of the environment....manned vehicles and/or people. Because of this, manned and unmanned ops are fundamentally incompatable in anything other than an extremely low density traffic situation. That driverless Uber might sound awesome until you realize that driving your own car will be illegal at that point. That's the only way it works.
 
Cptnchia said:
Gotta tell ya, I find it a bit unsettling reading posts by pilots arguing for/defending the elimination of their jobs. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight. 14 years and counting. You crazy kids and your tech! Just stay off my property.
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I think it's a horrible idea personally. But I don't think we can stop it.
 
I hope ALPA launches a widespread public smear campaign on pilotless Aircraft if this ever gets close to a reality.

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Soku39 said:
ALPA couldn't even stop NAI, what makes you think they'll be able to stop the societal sea change towards automation in every industry. Boeing and the airlines would crush ALPA.
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Unfortunately you are right. I'm sure ALPA will launch a smear campaign once pilotless or even single-pilot airliners become available, but it is unlikely to be successful. ALPA only has so much power and finances anyway, and unions have been declining for decades now and will only continue to do so. Certainly the political climate has been becoming more and more anti-union for years and shows no signs of stopping.

ALPA will be like a single raindrop against the wave of automation, and I doubt the public will care since pilotless airliners could bring lower fares. Certainly right now taxi driver unions are campaigning/ lobbying against Uber and Lyft but I doubt many people take them seriously when ride-share services offer lower taxi fares. Like it or not ALPA will more or less be in the same position when pilotless airliners become viable.
 
jtrain609 said:
Anyone who thinks this is feasible anytime soon has never had to get a computer to do anything useful beyond opening a web browser. It took me and a team of fellow nerds a year to figure out how to make an already existing print server count the number of pages students were printing at a university, and then figure out how to bill them accordingly. For this problem you'd have to invent technology that doesn't exist yet in order to solve some basic problems, and that doesn't even get to redundancy issues.

Computers don't think, they execute a programming language. What happens when the computer runs into something it isn't programmed to deal with? It crashes, ignores the problem, or ends up doing something completely unexpected.

And you don't even need to get as exotic as a Sully type situation. What happens when you run into a situation where a loss of both radar altimeters puts the aircraft in a situation where the autoland system doesn't know where to flare? Crash? Give up and crash? Crash on the runway? Ask if there are any pilots on board?

Now, single pilot cockpits? That's easy. We could do that today no problem.
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How long did it take to fix it so it didn't print out one of those obnoxious cover sheets for every single print job?
 
The joker in the deck is AI. Without substantial progress on genuine machine learning, pilotless aircraft are at least a generation away, IMHO. But a lot of really, really smart people are spending an absurd amount of money on it, suggesting to me that maybe they know something I don't. With real AI, all bets are off regarding the timeline. But hey, look at the bright side, unemployment doesn't seem like such a big deal when you're being hunted down by Terminators.
 
Dispatchers and ATCers will be replaced far before pilotless airplanes become a real concern. Those are the folks who should be a bit more concerned in the next 10-15 years.


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BlueMoon said:
How long did it take to fix it so it didn't print out one of those obnoxious cover sheets for every single print job?
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That was easy, and a feature that turned on with one radio button. We started using those because people would print a 100 page document, be unable to find it, and then print it four more times before it finally came out on top.

Once we started using the cover sheets, waste went down dramatically.
 
Boris Badenov said:
The joker in the deck is AI. Without substantial progress on genuine machine learning, pilotless aircraft are at least a generation away, IMHO. But a lot of really, really smart people are spending an absurd amount of money on it, suggesting to me that maybe they know something I don't. With real AI, all bets are off regarding the timeline. But hey, look at the bright side, unemployment doesn't seem like such a big deal when you're being hunted down by Terminators.
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This is very much the camp I'm in. By the time planes are gate to gate the average worker is going to super not care. You'll literally be fighting for your life at that point.
 
Kingairer said:
So who is this guy on the ground? And what's the point of putting him there versus in the airplane.
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Well. 90% of a given flight is fairly boring. If you put flights together in the right way, one guy can operate several flights simultaneously.

Bot to mention savings on hotels, cabs, per diem, etc. The financial case is there.
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
Well. 90% of a given flight is fairly boring. If you put flights together in the right way, one guy can operate several flights simultaneously.

Bot to mention savings on hotels, cabs, per diem, etc. The financial case is there.
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Assuming you could have a robust enough connection to the aircraft from the ground that is immune to any type of denial of service attack.
 
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