no thanks - remote controlled passenger planes?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/travel...led-passenger-
airplane/index.html

No thanks. Not that I need to fly so it's a moot point, but I
wouldn't fly as it is purely on philosphical grounds vs TSA.
But that pales in comparison to the ramifications of remotely
controlled airliners.

Can you imagine the chaos when someone hacks the signal? And
it WILL get hacked. It's already happening with military drones.

I'm no ludite, but I think technology is being put in places
it has absolutely no business being put. Drone military craft
are one thing - it removes people from harm. Drone airliners
PUTS people into harm.

Brian
--
http://www.earthwaves.org/forum/index.php - Earth Sciences discussion
http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

On Fri, 26 Jun 2015 21:16:41 +0000 (UTC), Skywise
wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/travel/remote-controlled-passenger-airplane/index.html

No thanks. Not that I need to fly so it's a moot point, but I
wouldn't fly as it is purely on philosphical grounds vs TSA.
But that pales in comparison to the ramifications of remotely
controlled airliners.

Can you imagine the chaos when someone hacks the signal? And
it WILL get hacked. It's already happening with military drones.

I'm no ludite, but I think technology is being put in places
it has absolutely no business being put. Drone military craft
are one thing - it removes people from harm. Drone airliners
PUTS people into harm.

Brian


Interesting.

Like unmanned drones, who is legally responsible in the event there's a mishap
when there's no pilot in the cockpit?

Does the lack of the prospect of the "pilot's" imminent death, as a result of
her being safely on the ground, reduce her caution and/or lead to increased
disregard for FARs?

If the pilots are not eliminated, there's little cost incentive to go down this
road. If they are eliminated, how is your estate going to be compensated for
damages in the event of a MAC?

Of course, AirBus aircraft are already fly-by-wire, so they could be put into
unmanned service rapidly.

One presumes there are butt-loads of computer code involved in implementing
such automated aircraft operations; what could go wrong? :-(

Hacking is always an issue (apparently in manned airliners too), but what about
jamming the weak satellite radio control signals with a more powerful
terrestrial radio transmitter? Can autonomous programming overcome loss of
remote control input?

This sort of reminds me of The Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS):
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/SATS.html.

So, are you ready for the Internet Of Things (IOT):
https://player.vimeo.com/video/126458720?api=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.raspber rypi.org%2Fwindows-10-for-iot%2F.

Larry Dighera wrote in
news
One presumes there are butt-loads of computer code involved in
implementing such automated aircraft operations; what could go wrong?
:-(

I have programmed as a hobby for at least a couple decades.

A quick story. On a small recent project I wrote some code
on a microcontroller to drive some full color LED's for an
art project. Worked wonderfully. Development continued for
some time.

Then I made a small change. Instant crash and burn. No lights.

It took me days to track down the bug. I ended up having to
'manually' run the code on paper and track what every variable,
every memory location, every CPU register was doing at every
step.

Turned out it was not the recent change I had just made, but
a bug that I inadvertently made very early in writing the code.
It just coincidentally happened to still work correctly until
the later change made it not.

Oh, and this code was only 33 lines long!!!

The error? I forgot to put in a "#" symbol. The result was the
command was accessing the wrong memory address to get some data,
but by pure coincidence that wrong address contained the right
data, thus it still worked. When I made the later change, it
changed the value in that 'wrong' memory address thus exposing
the error.

It amazes me to no end that people can write software for such
critical systems as nuclear power plants, aircraft autopilots,
ICBM's, and Mars rovers and NOT have the thing just end up a
heaping pile of goo. Well, even as 'just a hobbyist' I do
understand how, but it's still amazing.

But, sometimes it does still blow up in the end...

http://www.around.com/ariane.html

Brian
--
http://www.earthwaves.org/forum/index.php - Earth Sciences discussion
http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?