In article ,
says...


Recently, Greg Farris posted:



One point of the DARPA challenge (cited earlier in this thread) is to
create autonomous vehicles capable of simply getting from point A to B in
a dynamic environment. The results speak for themselves.


They do - and what they tell us is that navigating over uncharted terrain,
full of obstacles, is a challenge for land vehicles. Quite a different
challenge from taxiing across a few hundred feet of perfectly charted,
smooth pavement, custom designed to fit the particularities of your
vehicle!

If we really wanted pilotless airliners (and my argument is that we do not,
and will not, probably ever) it will be a simple matter to eliminate the
human-controlled taxiing phase. Simply towing the aircraft would be one way
to do it. Besides, ground operations are one of the most error-prone phases
of aircraft operations, usually because pilots misunderstand
instructions. So this would be a good candidate for automation, even
without getting rid of the pilots.

G Faris