Boeing Studies Planes Without Pilots, Plans Experiments Next Year (seattletimes.com) 128
"Boeing has begun researching the possibility of commercial-passenger jets that will fly without pilots, using artificial intelligence guiding automated controls to make decisions in flight," reports Seattle Times. The company is planning experimental flights, without passengers, for next year. From the report: "The basic building blocks of the technology are clearly available," said Mike Sinnett, former chief systems engineer on the 787 Dreamliner and now vice president at Boeing responsible for innovative future technologies, at a briefing before the Paris Air Show. "There's going to be a transition from the requirement to have a skilled aviator operate the airplane to having a system that operates the vehicle autonomously, if we can do that with the same level of safety," Sinnett said. Sinnett said Boeing's research is driven by the pilot shortage worldwide that is only going to become more acute. In the next two decades, Boeing forecasts a demand for about 40,000 new commercial jets, roughly doubling the world fleet.
no pilots no passengers (Score:2)
Likely follow fly-by-wire adoption (Score:2)
Plus, even with removal of human pilots from the aircraft there may be the capability to remotely pilot the aircraft.
Heinlein hit this nail on the head (Score:4, Interesting)
I will never fly on a plane if the pilot isn't also on-board with me. He may not be able to as good a job as the computer and may cost more than a ground-based drone pilot, but in an emergency I know he'll do his damndest to try to save both our lives.
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That "whoosh" over your head was not an Airbus!
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The military has been using remote piloted and autonomous drones for a while now.
Also consider that most large, modern plans include
Autopilot
Autoland
Autobrake
I don't know of any auto-takeoff but as I understand it that's a simple process (full thrust, maintain heading, when speed > preset, rotate and ascend) with the typical emergency-abort criteria.
Mainly what pilots seem to do is make announcements, talk to towers, and request a flight path change if there's turbulence. None of this is especially comp
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The military has been using remote piloted and autonomous drones for a while now.
I was referring to top tier fighters and bombers. Current drones and RPV seem to mostly be of a lesser tier of aircraft.
I don't know of any auto-takeoff ...
F/A-18 carrier launches.
i'm still stupefied as to why the MTA (NYC Subway etc) and other cities trains still run things completely manually.
Government employee unions with a sympathetic city government.
meh (Score:2)
maybe automated-trains should be a proven tech first.
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Behold! The future! [wikipedia.org]
Is It Really The Future? (Score:2)
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maybe automated-trains should be a proven tech first.
Vancouver has been living in the future since 1986. The Skytrain system is the longest automated train system in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Airbus planes are basically flying without pilots. There's people in the cockpit but they can't override the computer in case of emergency (since French engineers know everything) and can only do minimal things within specific guidelines enforced by the computer; they're just slightly more in charge of the planes than flight attendants.
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Re: meh (Score:5, Informative)
I am Airbus A320 pilot and also a software programmer, albeit not a good one. In any case, you are wrong. Airbus does let you override the computer. In fact, the computer is quite dumb. It only has protections such as bank angle limits. It's still easy to mess up. Even the ECAM (electronic diagnostics and problem resolutions), is still dumb. For example, it can lead you to disconnect two IDGs if blindly followed. Would you want to be over the ocean without electricity?
I love the A320/321 but don't place too much faith on how smart these systems are. They only automate the most benign of tasks.
The Airbus A320 is safer than a 737 but it still requires quite a bit, if not more, knowledge.
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The Airbus A320 is safer than a 737
Isn't this only true if you include the older 737 models from last century, from before the A320 was available? I think they are both remarkably safe planes, probably without enough statistical data to differentiate their safety records.
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Clearly that system is poorly designed and implemented. Funny how everything in aviation needs to be tested to the 3rd degree yet some obviously broken things still pass muster.
I don't think (or hope!) that anyone here is suggesting taking a brain dead 'automation/decision tree computer' and letting it fly a plane without a pilot.
But a properly designed system? That's different. Heck, you could probably use some of the machine learning from IBM Watson and let it watch a few million hours of pilots flying
Cargo (Score:5, Funny)
I would think this would be a near no-brainer for cargo flights. Probably less so for passenger flights.
I would consider flying a robo-flight if they installed an authentic HAL 9000 eye on the cockpit door, if for no other reason just to see it.
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So they claim to have invented a secure wireless computer network system that could never ever be mass hacked, remember, greedy, cheap, lowest tender and hack one, hack them all. So automated planes the perfect false flag system for endless wars, they choose who they get to blame the attack on based on current corporate profit goals ie resources that need stealing, munitions that need expending and replacing, any hint of nationalising of essential services (the perfect corporate blackmail tool).
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Cockpit will be gone. Seats with front views will be very expensive though. Even though the 'windshield' will be tiny windows.
What windscreens or windows? (Score:2)
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People get too claustrophobic. Not all of them. If what you say was psychologically possible, they would have done it years ago.
HAL 9000 murdered all its passengers (Score:2, Funny)
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Spoiler alert!
Computer checks pilot (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a pilot at all, they need to actually fly the plane, or they will deskill. No half-smart AutoThrotle that can cause crashes like the Air Asia one.
And then we need a smart AI system to monitor the pilot and warn them if they are doing something stupid. Like trying to land the plane miles short of the runway.
If the pilot does not respond the autopilot can disconnect the controls.
It used to be said that you need a pilot and a dog. The pilot to feed the dog, and the dog to bite the pilot if they touch the controls. But the Autopilot can the job of the dog as well. Maybe electric wires in the seat.
[AutoThrotle -- when flying a small plane, one constantly monitors air speed on descent. But large planes have autothrotles that are like cruise control and do this for the pilot. But if they autothrotle is set to the wrong mode, then nothing is monitoring the air speeed. which has led to several crashes.]
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which has led to several crashes
citation needed
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citation found! [aviation-safety.net]
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citation found!
You call that a citation? This [wikipedia.org] is a citation.
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In this and the other citation provided, the crash happened because the pilots fought the autopilot (and made plenty of other mistakes). Had they NOT tried to compensate for a situation they didn't fully understand, they might have had a rough time until the auto-systems got them on a level flightpath but they'd be alive.
The difficulty here isn't skill loss due to automated systems, it's pilots and autopilots not being able to interpret what the other is doing. If the pilots in this example had simply le
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If they just let go they probably would've been fine.
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"deskill"? Is that like roadkill, but with your desk?
(Yes, I know, It's de-skill. As in lose skills. But I read it "desk-kill" and thought it was funny. Like the pilot will suddenly go postal sitting behind a desk or something.)
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Nothing like the AI disconnecting the controls from a pilot who is still trying to fly a plane. But the AI decided it knows better.
Ever tried to indent in Word when it has decided you don't want to do that?
No need for AI for something like this to happen, it already happened. See The untold story of QF72 [smh.com.au].
I think the very idea of an autonomous, civilian plane is ridiculous at this time. I only need to imagine one of those freighter 747s flying over here each and every day, manipulated into crashing into town. The damage could go much further than even 9/11. The only context in which the autonomous plane might make sense is in a military context - and I do believe drones are already close enough to this.
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Yes, it's a good thing that planes with human pilots cannot be manipulated to fly into buildings or mountains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Doomed from the get go (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Now imagine there were no humans who could pilot the thing on board. When that eventually happens, and it will happen, people will become far too afraid to fly in AI only flights.
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I can counter that with a suicidal pilot [wikipedia.org] - something that machines don't yet aspire to. I'm betting that if we sat here all night posting examples of human vs. machine errors in aviation, you'd run out of material first unless we go waaaay back.
Re:Doomed from the get go (Score:5, Funny)
Give them enough time around airline passengers and they will.... :-D
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disgruntled technicians/engineers/hackers
The problem with your argument is that those people could sabotage a plane right now, so simply adding more automation does nothing to help or hurt that scenario.
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When that eventually happens, and it will happen, people will become far too afraid to fly in AI only flights.
Pilot error [wikipedia.org] is one of the most common reasons for crashes. AI auto-pilots don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than humans.
So start them out in cargo planes, continue to improve the tech, and once they pass humans in reliability, no more human pilots.
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Pilot error is one of the most common reasons for crashes.
Pilot error is one of the most common results from NTSB investigations, but that doesn't mean pilot error was actually the cause. PE is what the NTSB hangs things on unless they can find good evidence of something else -- because the manufacturers of any hardware or software blamed for a crash have lawyers who make good money defending them, while the dead pilot cannot pay anyone to defend him.
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"Pilot error" is what they call it when the situation is so bad that the autopilot doesn't know what to do, hands control back to the pilot, and the pilot crashes.
Hudson River (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me know when these AIs can land a plane on the Hudson River after a massive bird strike.
Re:Hudson River (Score:5, Insightful)
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And I might add that the root cause was that the pilots did not see the large flock even though the weather was good. A very simple computer based vision system would have picked them up in plenty of time to avoid. As would a good set of pilot eyes that were actually looking out the window.
(No, the planes do not fly so fast that vision is useless. They are flying at about 100m/s, and it is easy to see a LARGE flock of geese at 1000m, just look up in the sky sometime.
Re:Hudson River (Score:5, Interesting)
Or a busy airport pushes planes out with a low ceiling on climb. Some nameless fool is using a RaspberryPi3 and doing pirate radio that nulls out the vision system. Engines fail, maybe both. The plane is overloaded with fuel to begin with, for a long flight. Suddenly the options are thin.
Siri? What do we do now? Several tugs and ferries are on the water landing zone, and that unpleasant silence of no thrust is pounding in whose ears? No ears.
It will take a very, very long time before AI can replace human pilots, fallible as they are. What happens when the ILS goes down in the middle of a windy thunderstorm? I've had wind push the tail so hard that we were landing sideways, but lived to tell about it. Feel free to search on windy landings, especially one made of a day at DUS to decide just how much you trust a Boeing program on the rudder pedals.
So many industries are pushing to get rid of transportation drivers because of their supposed costs that it's almost a mantra among the MBAs in transportation companies, who have nickled and dimed us to death. Those pesky pilot unions, always wanting more..... yet many pilots get paid less than bus drivers. It's all about playing to the greed of airlines, who loathe the next political disaster that craters their stock.... and their pension funding (looking at you, United).
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I've had wind push the tail so hard that we were landing sideways, but lived to tell about it. Feel free to search on windy landings, especially one made of a day at DUS to decide just how much you trust a Boeing program on the rudder pedals.
But that's just the thing, isn't it? Any modern car is better at threshold braking than a human, and moreover can do something that no human with less than three legs (real ones, mind you) can manage: brake each wheel independently while also managing the throttle. (you can build a brake pedal with two master cylinders behind it such that the heel and toe each affect a different end of the car, a trick used in rally racing.) A plane is going to be much the same thing, only moreso; it can manage each control
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And they have to do all of this in near or actual real-time, summoning the actions of possibilities of thousands and thousands of actions, and do it right, just like a pilot with several years experience, and make the sensation essentially a normal day for passengers.
I never said pilots were infallible. I'd rather die in a crash caused by a pilot, than AI.
You can pitch ABS as an example of modern design wisdom; and as a subsystem, it's true-- usually. It adds lots of complexity and most drivers don't know h
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You can pitch ABS as an example of modern design wisdom; and as a subsystem, it's true-- usually. It adds lots of complexity and most drivers don't know how to use it.... and technicians can't repair them well.
This is patent nonsense. First of all, most of the time you don't bother to repair an ABS module. You replace it. If it's new, you replace it under warranty. If it's old, you can get a used part. If you go to a shop, of course, they're not dicking around with used parts. They're just going to buy a reman and slap it in. They follow the instructions and everything works fine.
The only time this is not the case is when you need a magical scan tool that your local indie shop doesn't have in order to bleed the b
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I snicker. I restore cars. There are tools I have and can't afford/don't need. Dealers don't understand ABS well, and their techs don't know how to repair it well. I have lots of admittedly anecdotal evidence to point to. Some of the 1990s ABS designs are worse than none at all. Today, it's a bit better. And some vendors train their techs better or put better instructions into Mitchell.
Let me branch to driverless cars, another problem looking for a spot marked X. In 48yrs of driving, I've seen too many acci
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I've seen too many accidents, and many of them would have been compounded by driverless vehicles smashing into the results of them,
The driverless vehicles are going to notice the incident sooner, and they're going to be less willing to take risks than the average human driver. They're also going to be communicating with on another via V2V. V2V will probably become mandatory for all cars, providing even more information about traffic accidents. I'm not thrilled about that either, but I do expect it.
or perhaps not stopping to aid injured people.
They certainly will not stop to aid injured people. They will be in constant communication with a control center which will be staffed with
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Re: Hudson River (Score:1)
100m/s eh? I dont think so
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100m/s eh? I dont think so
Why not? 100 meters per second is about 225 miles per hour. Take off speeds [aerospaceweb.org] are slower and cruising speeds [wikipedia.org] are faster, so shortly after takeoff, 100 meters per second doesn't sound unreasonable.
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The reason they added 30 seconds was because they went through their checks to attempt to get the engines back online before diverting. The simulations were diverting almost immediately after the bird strikes because they knew the bird strike resulted in failure, when most bird strikes do not and most bird strikes allow engine restarts.
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And that was a very stupid thing to do.
Near the ground, their first thought should have been where they can glide to and land. By 2,000' they have passed the dead zone and should easily make it back. Now, if there had been the river in front of them, and the airport behind, and only 1,500', then they could have been well excused for going for the river. But the river actually led back to the air port, so there was no conflict.
Engines do not stop without good reason, so it is very unwise to bet on being a
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Also, the "smart" part about landing was to do it near where the ferries are stationed so you have a chance at rescue. There isn't really a lot of empirical data on forces as you land on water...
As graceful as the landing looks in the videos, I am sure a computer would have been able to manage air speed and angle of attack better, it is the unforeseen se
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I think that ending up near the ferries was mainly luck. There is no evidence that he manoeuvred to be near them. Just went straight in. Fortunately, the river is long and in the direction he was then flying, so the plane just went down in a straight line and eventually met the water.
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Where he landed was dictated by the planes energy and avoiding bridges.
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The Hudson river crash was due to pilot error.
They hit the birds quite high, 2,000' by memory. They took a full 30 seconds to decide to turn the bird around, by which time it was too late. Fortunately, the river happened to be nearby. (Wikipedia is your friend.)
i've only seen the clint eastwood film, there the delay is explained as followed:
- there is a checklist they have to go through when something happens that covers all options
- it takes time for humans to decide what to do
that is not human/pilot error, that is just human behaviour. it takes time to react. in fact the pilot skimmed huge part of the checklist because it would take too much time.
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Let me know when these AIs can land a plane on the Hudson River after a massive bird strike.
Most human pilots couldn't have done it. An AI pilot, if it was trained with water landings as a criteria, could.
Whenever people try to point out the weakness of AI, they always pick weird corner cases. But the thing is, these are often where an AI excels. An AI can be trained on thousands, or even millions of simulated water landing scenarios, and replay them over and over until it handles them properly. A human pilot will likely have zero experience.
Once the AI pilot is trained, then the "water landin
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The three most likely reasons are:
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Not necessarily. A sign could get hit by a car and bent in such a way that it appears to affect the wrong road. But yes, in general, you're correct.
May be closer than you think (Score:3)
While I'm not ready to go all in on AI controlled planes yet (or let's call them something else like Expert Systems, they aren't real AIs) I think starting to test is very valid. We are able to design systems with very good decision making capabilities these days. It is conceivable that we will soon be able to make them on par with humans, even for extreme cases like 1549.
It is certainly an area worth putting R&D in to.
That's fine (Score:2)
Surely we don't need pilots.
And don't call me Shirley.
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I want Ted Striker and Elaine Dickinson as my pilots
Edge cases are hard (Score:2)
It's always easy to automate most of a problem, but edge cases tend to be really hard to solve. Yes, the autopilot can fly the plane 99.9% of the time, but the pilots are there for the 0.1% when it can't.
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It's always easy to automate most of a problem, but edge cases tend to be really hard to solve. Yes, the autopilot can fly the plane 99.9% of the time, but the pilots are there for the 0.1% when it can't.
Well, from what I understand they hand over full control to the pilots given sufficient failure because they're there and supposed to be experts, but in many cases it could have continued and in many cases pulled through. Or the damage is so extensive the pilots can't control the plane or don't understand the situation themselves. Or the pilots don't know what to do in these error conditions and don't know how to fly either. For example Air France 447 [wikipedia.org].
According to the final report, the accident resulted fro
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That depends on how the computer is programmed. One could presumably change the failure mode so that it continues without changing anything until it gets valid data, which would have probably prevented the disaster. Or one could make the failure mode be an emergency descent, which would at least have avoided the stall, in all likelihood, and maybe avoided the crash, too. And a computer could ostensibly use other data like GPS to determine its ground speed and altitude, and use that data as a crude estim
Business Oportunity (Score:1)
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Windshields are heavy and can break. They will install litle windows oblique to the front and still charge a huge premium.
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More likely there will be no windows. Just not worth the expense.
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If people, as a group, could be packed together like sardines without any windows the airlines would have done it 50 years ago.
Perhaps if they sedate the claustrophobic passengers.
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We sat on the tarmac for 8 hours waiting for the windshield to be replaced and cure, it kind of sucked, but not as bad as have a windshield shatter at 550 MPH and 35,000 feet.
Electriccal Fires et. al. (Score:2)
The pilot of an aircraft has many legal, emergency, and crew leadership duties which go beyond the actual piloting of the aircraft.
Being a pilot has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.
The pilot shortage is a red herring, like any other occupation, if you pay people commensurate to their educational investment, skills, knowledge, experience, and continue their training. The airlines
Other than flying...? (Score:2)
I wonder how AIs react to hijacker demands?
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Yes, that was my point. This could make hijacking a thing of the past.
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I wonder how AIs react to hijacker demands?
That AI software has already been written. In a previous life it was called "Clippy". "It looks like you are trying to hijack this plane. Would you like to..."
My prediction (Score:2)
*chuckles*
Checklists and prepared-for emergencies. (Score:1)
The thing is... a computer can "work a checklist" way faster than two cooperating pilots can. Good.
So we get rid of the "we need time to work the checklists". The plane just radios to the airport: "I have an engine problem, MAYDAY I want to land back on runway 05, in 13 minutes, 23 seconds."
But in un-prepared emergencies, some pilots have taken the right decisions for a safe landing. For example that plane in hawaii that blew its top. It landed way overspeed because of control problems when slowing down.
So
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So in the "normal" cases you get a bit better, but in the exceptional cases, things get a bit worse.
That remark reminded me vividly of Frank Herbert's comment (in "The Dragon in the Sea"/"Under Pressure") that "there is no such thing as a small accident on a submarine". I suspect that "a bit worse" is a huge understatement (except in the sense that each of us can only die once).
Front seat (Score:2)
Progress! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh good. In the past there have been incidents when the computers apparently took over an aircraft and locked out the pilots.
http://www.smh.com.au/good-wee... [smh.com.au]
Now there won't be any pilots to be locked out, so the aircraft can just destroy itself in its own preferred way.
There is no Pilot Shortage (Score:1)
World wide airlines have no problem employing pilots. However, in the US companies pay them like busdrivers with worse working hours. As companies mainly compete over price, there are only a few options to stay afloat. The easiest is to reduce salaries. This work especially well when there is no market wide union negotiating salaries where every airline is bound to pay.
no way (Score:2)
An oldie but a goodie (Score:2)
Not over my house! (Score:2)
I'm glad there's no passengers on the plane, but that still risks everyone on the ground under the flight path.
AI Pilot? (Score:1)
"overhead" fee special offer (Score:1)
So no one is going to bring up... (Score:1)
9/11 on this subject?
When it is finally relevant?
Now, I am not an alarmist or back the "war on terror" ie "license to do what ever". But this is actually a solution that does not kill people.
Regarding implementation.
First of, this system would first replace the two pilots rule.
After millions of hours of training and testing it would move to cargo flights.
THEN to passenger flights.
It must be self contained.