Recently, Greg Farris posted:

says...


The thread is about airline operations without pilots. Not about
philosophical considerations of autonomous operation.

And, my point is that you won't have pilotless airline operations
without autonomous capabilities. It isn't a philosophical matter
because the evidence of today's capabilities is pretty clear. If you
wish to suggest otherwise, show some proof that it works in any kind
of vehicle, anywhere. The difference between autopilots and
autonomous airline operations is pretty significant.


I notice that this thread is cross posted to different newsgroups.
Perhaps you are contributing from alt.rec.metaphysics or something :-)

Perhaps you're contributing from alt.rec.dream-on? ;-)

You are hung up on the idea of autonomous operation, when that wasn't
the point at all. Flying airliners without pilots does not imply that
they have to fly themselves without human intervention. To most of
us, it means they are controlled from the ground, with a level of
human supervision and intervention scaled to the complexity of the
task. This means, as you say, the pilot is not physically in the
airplane. It also means that one 'pilot' (human or otherwise) can
manage several airliners, and moreover manage conflict between them
better than any one pilot in any one airplane could do.

Well, this is a shift to a slightly different approach, and adds both
complexity and unnecessary risk.

To you, if I understand you correctly, this doesn't pass muster,
because it is not true autonomous operation. the planes are not
making any decisions by themselves, or very few. This, however, was
not the point of the initial thread, which was only concerned with
removing costly, error-prone pilots from airliners.

Your system of having remote pilots *increases* the potential for errors.
How many screens will the pilot have to watch to replace the simple task
of scanning (this isn't as simple as it sounds, either)? And, you want to
have one guy managing more than one flight? At the very least, this is not
likely to improve the loss rate, which would more than offset the cost of
the pilot's salary. Add to that the expense of maintaining the requisite
systems, and it's easy to see that the cost of operation would be higher,
not lower than today. How much will an A&P with a computer science degree
cost?

Perhaps you are not involved in aviation, or not aware of how the
system is organized.

The FAA is satisfied that I am involved in aviation by virtue of a
certificate and current medical. And, I pass my checkrides without
problems, so I suppose I understand, at least to some degree, how "the
system is organized". ;-)

By the time a plane takes off, under an IFR
flight plan, its route has been scheduled, and the airspace is
progressively cleared of all conflicts.

Except for such things as developing weather (see the thread about XM
weather / Garmin 396), which is why we still have PIREPS, for example.

In short, *I* won't be flying on any airliner where the pilot is not on
board.

Neil