Jetstream Retrofit Illustrates How Close Modern Planes Are To UAVs 205
cylonlover writes with this Gizmag excerpt: "In April of this year, a BAE Systems Jetstream research aircraft flew from Preston in Lancashire, England, to Inverness, Scotland and back. This 500-mile (805 km) journey wouldn't be worth noting if it weren't for the small detail that its pilot was not on board, but sitting on the ground in Warton, Lancashire and that the plane did most of the flying itself. Even this alteration of a standard commercial prop plane into an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) seems a back page item until you realize that this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would the "majority of the public" have a choice?
Re:Software is eating the world (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete while hugely improving the standard of living overall.
Re:Computers (Score:4, Insightful)
Until the first robo-Airbus slams into a mountain due to a minor hardware failure, program bug, or solar storm.
That's why automated mass transit trains still have operators on board and GPS-navigated ships still have deck officers.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.
You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran [wikipedia.org]–U.S._RQ-170_incident#Capture_of_the_drone
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.
There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.
Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?
As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.
As OP alluded to, bee stings don't kill people, the anaphylactic shock reaction does.