By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

Recently, Greg Farris posted:

says...

[...] And, you
want to have one guy managing more than one flight?


Well, yeah!
Even thought of a name for it. I'll call it ATC. A savvy mix of
human and computer technology, watching over departure, en-route and
arrival of several planes at once. Science fiction, I know, but it
could work, if you give it a chance!

I'm sorry, but ATC does *not* "control airplanes", they are *never* the
PIC. Perhaps you're not involved in aviation, or understand how the system
is organized... ;-)

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?

I don't think the impetus of the thread was really to reduce costs -
or at least not exclusively. The airlines have found many ways to
reduce pilot costs!! I think the thread (which I did not initiate,
and which I did not even agree with) was as much about reducing human
error as anything else.

Well, you "jumped into" this thread at my response to Peter Duniho, who
cited overall loss rate and cost of operations as two motivating
considerations for airlines. Your scheme accomplishes neither of those
objectives.

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

Neither will I! I've said from the get-go that I didnt think it was a
good idea. I just don't share your view about the technical
complexity of it. I think about 85% of it is in place already, and
the remainder is not much
more complicated. Some challenges - sure. Nothing space-age though.

I think you underestimate the diificulty of those challenges. It's far
beyond "space-age" in the present-day sense. Consider the Mars rovers,
which are piloted remotely. They basically follow relatively short
instruction sets for relatively short distances, and even then they get
into trouble because they are in a dynamic environment, albeit 2D.
Airliners require much larger instruction sets over a much longer period
and travelling over much greater distances in a 3D dynamic environment. It
just won't happen without decent AI, and it certainly won't be cheap to
maintain.

Neil

Recently, Chris Colohan posted:
[...]

So, you are left with two choices: 1. Try to design a communication
system which is so robust that communication failure is virtually
impossible; or 2. Include some sort of autonomous system as a backup
for when communication fails.

Do I think this is impossible? No. Do I think it is quite hard to
get right? Yes. It certainly will take quite some time to get this
right enough to win the trust of the average passenger.

I completely agree, but as I wrote earlier, by the time this idea is even
a remote possibility, we'll have all kinds of autonomous machines running
around us, and we'll take it in stride.

Neil

Neil Gould wrote:
Recently, Chris Colohan posted:
[...]

So, you are left with two choices: 1. Try to design a communication
system which is so robust that communication failure is virtually
impossible; or 2. Include some sort of autonomous system as a backup
for when communication fails.

Do I think this is impossible? No. Do I think it is quite hard to
get right? Yes. It certainly will take quite some time to get this
right enough to win the trust of the average passenger.

I completely agree, but as I wrote earlier, by the time this idea is even
a remote possibility, we'll have all kinds of autonomous machines running
around us, and we'll take it in stride.

I see that they ran the 'robot/remote controlled ground vehicle trials
again and some actually completed the course.
If they're that unreliable on the ground where you can stop and rectify
faults I don't think the possibility of pilots being removed from the
cockpit is going to arise...

Bob Fry wrote:
Not my statement. See
http://www.longbets.org/4

What sayeth the group wisdom? I think eventually there will be
pilotless aircraft, the question is when.

Does anyone know when it was that Dr. Charles Stark Draper, the inventor
of inertial navigation, flew coast to coast on a "computer-controlled"
airplane? I believe it was in the '50s.