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German Wings A320 crashed
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ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
This took almost no time to pop up on the interwebs...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/its-time-for-robot-pilots-germanwings-crash
It's Time For Robot Pilots
Written by
JASON KOEBLER
STAFF WRITER
March 26, 2015 // 12:20 PM EST
It's increasingly looking like the plane that crashed Monday in France, killing 150 people, went down because one of the pilots turned off the autopilot and intentionally crashed it into the ground. Why are we still letting humans fly passenger planes?
The short answer is, we're not really. It's no secret that planes are already highly automated, and, with technology that's available today (but that isn't installed on the Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings that crashed), it would have been possible for someone in a ground station somewhere to have wrested control of the plane from those on board and reestablished autopilot (or to have piloted the plane from the ground).
As it stands, pilots actually touch the controls for an exceedingly short period of time on any given flight. According to a recent study by Duke researcher Missy Cummings, in which she interviewed 11 commercial who fly both Boeing and Airbus planes, they barely touch the controls at all. The study is embedded below.
"Pilots flying the [Boeing] 777 agreed that they spent about 7 minutes for a typical flight actually 'flying' the aircraft, meaning touching the controls," Missy Cummings, a former military pilot and an unmanned systems researcher at Duke's Humans and Autonomy Lab and at MIT's Humans and Automation Lab, wrote in the paper. "The Airbus pilots stated that they 'flew' their aircraft about half that time."
"The initial negative reaction was soon followed by a series of negotiation questions, such as 'Can I watch movies?' or 'Can I read a book?’"
Cummings has long spoken of a future where pilots, in the traditional sense, wouldn't do anything at all—she's seen fighter pilots lose their jobs to drones in the military, and expects the same will eventually happen in commercial planes. As far as she's concerned, most commercial planes are already drones, more or less.
"Those three minutes Airbus pilots fly isn't because they have to fly it, it's just procedures. It's just during takeoff," she said.
The idea that pilots don’t do that much, of course, is not a popular opinion within the aviation industry.
It's true that autopilot cannot account for every possible thing a plane will encounter, and flying purists point to Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who managed to safely land a US Airways flight in the Hudson River after it was struck by a flock of geese. Sullenberger's heroics, and other times a pilot or copilot have actually had to take the controls to avert disaster, are used as evidence that pilots are still needed and still useful.
But then again, there are cases, such as the 9/11 attacks, the 1999 EgyptAir Flight 990, and this week's disaster, in which the pilot, or a hijacker, or someone flying the plane, becomes the most dangerous thing to a specific plane's safety.
"Commands could come from a ground control station"
But it doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. A purely auto piloted plane would probably crash from time to time, but leaving complete control of the plane to those on board, 100 percent of the time, hasn't worked either.
So Cummings and others have looked into a system in which one pilot is in the cockpit, and the other is a robot—or at the very least, a group of humans—on the ground. For one, it would eventually save a massive amount of money for airlines in terms of pilots' salaries, which is why it's attractive to airlines (whether we want to automate pilots out of existence is another question). But, secondly, it could prevent disasters like this week from occurring.
"That Airbus could, with some very simple changes, be remote controlled," Cummings said. "They're operated with a system known as digital fly-by-wire, where the pilots are, through ones and zeroes, telling the plane what to do. Those commands don't have to be right there, they could come from a ground control station."
Flying a plane from the ground (or taking it over from the ground, in case of emergency) raises a host of other issues, namely hacking concerns. But the military does it with drones all day, every day, and well-encrypted communications would go a long way to preventing that from happening. Onboard computers could, if connection was lost, automatically land the plane, which is already done with the military's Global Hawk drone.
It's something that Boeing has already patented, in fact. The company has designed and patented an "uninterruptible autopilot system" that could take over the plane from the ground.
The company would not tell me if it has already installed the system into any of its planes, but Cummings suspects it hasn't because such a system would have to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration first.
"Boeing is committed to designing airplanes that are both safe and secure—meeting or exceeding all applicable regulatory requirements for both physical and cyber security," a Boeing spokesperson told me. "For security reasons, we do not discuss specific airplane design features."
Such features are coming, eventually. A British research firm called ASTREA has tested completely pilotless passenger planes, and automated features on existing planes aren't going away.
Cummings doesn't think we'll ever see fully pilotless passenger planes—not because it can't be done, but because she says someone has to be on the plane to deal with unruly passengers, orderly seating, and that sort of thing (others have suggested this role would be something like a flight attendant, who also knows how to fly the plane). That is, until a humanoid robot can do it, a prospect that Cummings says is much further off than pilotless planes.
"I think we'll see no pilot, completely unmanned cargo planes for companies like UPS and DHL," she said. "I think the person on a passenger plane will be increasingly supervisory and the rest will be done by ground operations."
Remember, Cummings recently spoke to 11 commercial pilots about the idea of losing their copilots and having it done on the ground, by a robot, instead. Their immediate concerns were not about safety—instead, they wondered what they'd do in the cockpit without anyone to talk to.
"Initial reactions strongly indicated that being the only person would be lonely, and their preference was to have another person in the cockpit," Cummings wrote.
"In almost all cases, this initial negative reaction was soon followed by a series of negotiation questions, such as 'Can I watch movies?' or 'Can I read a book?’” she added. “Upon reconsideration and with the caveat that as long as they were allowed activities to keep themselves occupied, the pilots generally felt that the loss of the other person was not such a negative concern after all."
Wishful thinking. Plenty of drones met their ultimate demise from joysticks thousands of miles away.
To the Author: Go work on your novel at Starbucks, hipster.
poser765
Well-Known Member
Acceptable risk, I guess? I just don't really see how that is a threat than can be completely eliminated.
Like with cars, guns, knives, motorcycles, frozen concentrated orange juice, Guido the Killer Pimps, all sorts of ways to destroy yourself and others and no true way of preventing it.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
Wishful thinking. Plenty of drones met their ultimate demise from joysticks thousands of miles away.
To the Author: Go work on your novel at Starbucks, hipster.
Oh I totally agree - but I wasn't even looking for this and it popped up on vice almost immediately. This is the type of clickbait that the omni-panicked populace will eat up as they're sold the rational for our obsolescence.
Pilot Fighter
Well-Known Member
Get an ASW or EW guy drunk and he'll talk shop too. You just won't understand a word we're saying....we slur a lot.Get a former SAC pilot drunk and he'll tell you all about "Lob and Release", "Dial-A-Nuke/Variable Yield Devices", "Standpipe Fuel", the true mission of the KC-135 after it's last drag of a bomber group, oh yes.
poser765
Well-Known Member
Exactly. there is no promise of safety in life. the BEST we can do is mitigate the risks, but we can never eliminate it. People have to decide for themselves if the knowledge that a crew member could totally hijack and crash a plane is a valid reason to forsake using air transportation.
Like Doug pointed out, look at cars. I get out on the road daily knowing that people can and have crashed their cars through densely populated areas on purpose. I have evaluated that risk and deemed it acceptable.
BEEF SUPREME
Well-Known Member
Pilot Fighter
Well-Known Member
Didn't somebody try it at SFO by slamming into the seawall, while their crew watched?
Agreeing with @MikeD , there are plenty of opportunities for a pilot to crash a plane, even with a full cockpit.
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BEEF SUPREME
Well-Known Member
Sorry but when dealing with humans there is no perfect system. Even if it worked perfectly for you @MikeD
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1612912,00.html
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
Not a whole lot to hear on there.
What sticks out to me more is that you don't hear the two things specifically mentioned by the official who originally spoke about what was on the CVR: the Captain yelling to go along with the door kicking, and the supposedly calm breathing sounds of the FO.
So, sounds like fake to me.
Screaming_Emu
Well-Known Member
Well it's easy! This dude was white, so he obviously just had issues. The other guys...obviously terrorist freedom haters!
huge huge huge amounts of
You know with the number of hours flown versus the number of events, statistically, the crash was a non-event.
Like there were literally more people having heart attacks worried about Ebola than people that actually had even a 1% chance of being exposed to it.
Like there were literally more people having heart attacks worried about Ebola than people that actually had even a 1% chance of being exposed to it.
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Tiptank
Well-Known Member
My Mom called today to get my take on the whole tragedy. I asked her how many murders and suicides took place here in the USA today (by depressed people or otherwise). She didn't know. No one in the general public knows... it's probably staggering. It would be to hard to report the statistics in a glitzy "in-depth" 5 minute segment on the national news. Or investigate the underlying problems in general...
This event (like many others) just feeds the sensationalist needs of the masses looking for that kind of Hollywood Film type drama that the primitive brain seems to crave. Bleh.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
I don't care who ya are, that's funny.
It's not one another who need convincing. It's the flying lay public who will listen to the media sensationalism. That's where the battle will be: public perception. Tough to change
ChasenSFO
hen teaser
Let's be real, people are stupid. The lemmings that believe everything they read...read, who am I kidding, HEAR from network news will move on at the next huge tragedy or event and forget all about this. I'd bet a lot of money 1-2 years from no, if now a few months from now, you won't see much of anything popping up about this. Like I said earlier as have others in this thread, sorry folks, this ain't nothing new. Just the first one to happen in a Western country since the viral media days began. Funny, I was old enough when Egypt Air 990 happened(767 F/O nosed dived into the Atlantic when the CA left the cockpit) and I know it wasn't even on the front page of all the newspapers I saw. A German guy does it with a plane full of Europeans and OMG #whitelivesmatter. I hate people sometimes.