CoffeeIcePapers
Well-Hung Member
It won’t take much to reduce 3 and 4 man crews to 2 pilots.
Reduced crew
- Thread starter MikeD
- Start date
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
Since this whole idea rests on secure datalink for whomever is the remote pilot monitoring, can't wait to see how the provider of that link is planning on keeping it from being hacked and hijacked.
We have lots of long-range, secure, cheap datalink infrastructure and bandwidth for that, right?
We have lots of long-range, secure, cheap datalink infrastructure and bandwidth for that, right?
Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
nervous laughter
Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
I don't see any way past the crazy suicidal pilot problem. Either they can override the automation, in which case the automation is no protection. Or they can't, in which case they might as well not be there in an emergency the automation isn't suited to handle.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
I think you guys need to get serious about understanding the technology that you are competing with.
We flew that thing in a tactical formation with manned aircraft and landed it in the dust. It flies better than the standards more often than manned crews can. And it doesn’t take a trillion dollars of modification to achieve it. The first kits were about 40 grand in boxes and sensors. The new vision sensor they just showed us it’s 3-4 times better than the human eye, can recognize velocities and vectors at miles distance through atmospheric obscuring and can see in spectrums outside the visual.
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We flew that thing in a tactical formation with manned aircraft and landed it in the dust. It flies better than the standards more often than manned crews can. And it doesn’t take a trillion dollars of modification to achieve it. The first kits were about 40 grand in boxes and sensors. The new vision sensor they just showed us it’s 3-4 times better than the human eye, can recognize velocities and vectors at miles distance through atmospheric obscuring and can see in spectrums outside the visual.
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Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
I don't think anyone sane disputes that the computer can fly the plane as well or better than we can. Provided it's not jammed or confused or (fill in the blank). But those are real concerns with no obvious 100% reliable mitigation. And then there's the question of public perception. Younger Zs? Yeah, they might go for it, but I don't think most Millennials or basically ANY Xs are going to placidly get on a drone going 550mph in the stratosphere.
BEEF SUPREME
Well-Known Member
Hate to break it to you but this is the entire premise of Starlink
Lawman
Well-Known Member
Look at it from a standpoint the bean counters will approach it.
A robot plane crashes how much more often than the manned one? Also while we wait for that big spike on the spread sheet event, how much money are you losing operating under the current model if you could squeeze/find/get 10-15% more efficiency from gate to gate out of the airplane. How many of those pilot induced not spectacularly bad events could you be preventing at the same time. One robot crash vs all those other potential savings, oh and by the way the airplane no longer cares about crew rest.
Self driving cabs are now achieving normality. Self driving cruise cars in the interstate are happening. People are a couple years from sitting in the freeway system with unmanned trucking. They already let that big mop machine drive around the department store/airport with them. If you think they respect the people up front enough to demand they be there I’d say you’re grossly overstating their opinion of how the big metal tube gets them to a place. We have a high opinion of ourselves because we are pilots. Just like we all found out dating, that opinion may be somewhat self inflated.
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ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
Yup. It's literally an applied operations research problem where there's a need to communicate with a human.
I bet there's enough radar data and audio to train the models too.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
models are getting good enough and the prices are low enough where you could run a nearly world-class LLM on a high end gaming laptop (llama3:70b just came out a couple days ago). Hell, I routinely run the •tier ones on my 3 year old desktop without a GPU.
give it a few years and you don't need a secure datalink - it's just running on a few GPUs in the avionics bay.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
Press Release:
Ultra-Low Cost Carrier "Seatless" made $800b last quarter flying
Lawman
Well-Known Member
Mesh networking turning each aircraft at cruise into a flying network hub. Combine that with low data rate feeds to the traditional satellite constellations. Want to get real sexy, put the high altitude unmanned glider hubs in the air as the ARTCC mirror.
Same kind of distributed comms architecture we are pursuing in the military specifically to provide jamming and hack redundancy.
I don’t think we will completely ignore the aircraft, but the idea of taking the manned part to a central hub of people keeping tabs on the health of the system you get that.
The idea that Joe and Joanna from Ft Lauderdale won’t get in the self driving airplane though… that’s entirely a self protection weapon have asserted into the situation. It’s like saying “but what if the batteries!” two decades ago when asked why we still have paper pubs. Evolve or die.
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Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
Speak for yourself, I have a tinder waiting list. But yeah, it's definitely going to happen. My assertion is that for every "The stuff works really well and is improving exponentially" there's a bureaucrat with his nose in a 1975 FAA pub and a Congresscritter who needs dumbass Hoomans to stay employed. I've got 20 years left, and I like my odds of getting there or near it, at the very least. We're going to find out!
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
I hate to agree with you but you are right.
A principle frustration of my life the last year or so has been people spazzing out about this stuff followed by "it'll never be able to X" (just to watch it do X 6 months later). Then when I'm like, "hey, adapt or die, we've got to deal with the cards we're dealt not the cards we wish we were dealt" I'm somehow the •. I can't even say "I told you so" anymore - because, well, they just respond with, "NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING."
Humans as a species are ferocious. At one point we got down to something like 1000 women? And from that we came back to basically inhabit every corner of the globe that was reachable by foot or with a short sail before we had electricity. We're unbelievably adaptive and this situation is no different, we've gotta adapt or be steamrolled. Adapt our ways of thinking about the world, adapt our ways of solving problems, and address our preconceptions and biases - we've gotta look for "what's right" not "who's right" or what makes us the most comfortable. I can imagine that the same sorts of conversations were being had about cars back in the day. "I can't see why anyone would even want one of these horseless carriages? There's no feeling in a car; no heart in it. Also, cars break down for the most trivial reasons - my horse can eat grass, I have to find gasoline to keep the car running! This car thing will never catch on." Now how many horses are there compared to the peak?
I think there could be some really cool things that come out of this technology though. Pilots with skills other than just flying might be extraordinarily valuable. If you can turn a wrench and repair the drop-in humanoid robot replacement you just went up in value. If you have a deep understanding of these sorts of systems and how they work, or even a pilot who knows how networks work, you might be able to find a niche. This stuff isn't going to happen all at once - companies are notoriously cheap, so it'll take time. I could totally see there being jobs in the future of this that are like a blend of ITSM roles and pilot. Maybe the feeder job of the future still has a pilot flying a caravan out to the destination (and that caravan is partially autonomous), but when he gets there he's also basically dispatching the drones from his laptop that are going to carry all the packages to drop off at people's houses.
I don't know what the future is going to bring, but AI is going to be a part of it and we're going to have to reconcile that not just in aviation but in all careers. If 30% of the population is structurally unemployable (not unemployed, but unable to compete in any job unless they undertake significant and costly training), then I don't imagine there's going to be enough passengers able to drop a couple thousand bucks to fly from Tulsa to Rome. There could not be a single pilot replaced in the 121 carriers and AI could have substantial impacts on the industry. We likely literally need to reevaluate the social contract and we probably need to start doing that right now. This is going to disrupt most of everything in every industry.
How many of you guys have switched from flying to another career? I have, it wasn't fun, and while I like what I do now well enough, the reality is that it's not nearly the same, the people aren't as cool, and frankly, the job is just • boring in contrast. That's fine, boring is OK - but, turbulent times are ahead. Be prepared - that doesn't mean freak out and spend all your time doomering over it, but I don't know, like, learn how to use these tools? Or maybe don't buy boat - instead pay off some debt. You have a few years, enjoy yourself and don't stress over it, but... yeah, now would be a great time to set up your side-hustle.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
I know we've had this conversation before, but the advertisements that say "single women in your neighborhood" do not constitute a "tinder waiting list."
"We will see."
It's going to be interesting at least
Fair - you can buy a boat, maybe we should all buy boats, live on them, etc. My wife and I just came down to your neck of the woods and learned to sail a few months ago, by the way. Was a fantastic time.
Fantastic.
Inverted25
Well-Known Member
We are already flooded with resumes due to our reputation/pay/equipment. Makes no difference. Our HR partner just trashes any that come in. If we do need to hire due to retirement they have to post the job to meet certain HR requirements but those apps all go into the trash as well and we hire a known entity. I’m sure there are 135 and 91 operations that would use an influx of pilots on the street to force their pilots to take lower pay but not the good ones.
It’s really a different world. The cost to operate the flight department is pennies on the balance sheet but what we allow the company to do is significant. Cost isn’t a factor. We do everything we can to operate efficiently but the cost isn’t a driving factor. We often fly two planes to one location when it can be done with one but insurnace dictates that certain executives can’t be on same plane together for continuity in case of a loss. We have offered to operate the department at lower staffing levels when retirements have come up because we felt that we could maintain the same level of service with less pilots but the company insisted we kept the same number because they want pilots to have good QOL and stay. Last two pilots to leave lefts after 40+ and 30+ years respectively.
The threat of single pilot airplanes is already there on the corporate side. Netjets operates a large fleet that they could already fly with one pilot but don’t. There are different driving factors on the corporate side. The airlines I’m sure will do single pilot as soon as they can to cut cost. We could already do that on the corporate jet side but very few actually fly any of the single pilot jets with one pilot. Those are mostly owner flown when they are single pilot.
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Sounds like you are at a good place to be. I flew corporate for 6 years at 3 places. Best and worst jobs in aviation.