Boeing studies pilotless airplane

[Air.Field]

http://www.bnn.ca/boeing-studies-pilotl ... r-1.773383

Nothing new. Just a matter of time now.

[North Shore]

I'm not convinced..the easiest thing to automate would be trains (known route, stops, and surface to travel on..), and apart from a few urban transit systems, they all still have people at the front end. I suppose that you could 'blame' unions for that, but I don't think, historically, that they've successfully stood in the way of technological advances.

[Rockie]

"But a self-flying plane would need to be able land safely as Captain Chesley Sullenberger did in the "Miracle on the Hudson," Sinnett said. "If it can't, then we can't go there."

Mike Sinnett, Boeing's vice president of product development.

[Bede]

Keep in mind that pilot costs are only ~4% of total operating cost. That's not a huge incentive for the development of a pilot less airplane considering you're likely to still have to pay the wages of some ground based monitor not to mention the huge development costs.

[Air.Field]

Maybe not totally pilotless yet. But certainly 1 pilot operation to monitor or save the day is within the realm of possibility in the near future

[stef]

Maybe they could teach the things to look out the window and not go blasting through a flock of geese.

[Rockie]

Maybe they could teach the things to look out the window and not go blasting through a flock of geese.

BFM'ing geese in a transport category airplane is a very bad idea.

[Gannet167]

Maybe they could teach the things to look out the window and not go blasting through a flock of geese.

This comment implies that the crew couldn've / should've or you would've been able to avoid geese by looking out the window and visually aquiring them, then manoeuvering the aircraft to avoid. Are you implying there was some mishandling in that accdient? I've taken several birds, you normally don't get to see them coming, sometimes you see a flash as they pass by, often you merely hear a thump. If you can see them in time, at any decent forward speed you need significant G to avoid. I pulled 4 the other day to get on top of some beach chickens that appeared out of no where in front of us. Not something you'd want to attempt at ~200 kts in an airliner (or any speed in an airliner).

[stef]

BFMing?

[Rockie]

Basic fighter maneuvering.

[timel]

If this industry wants to attract pilots, they should stopt saying they want to design aircraft without pilots.

[goldeneagle]

Once upon at time, not really that long ago, long range airplanes had 4 engines, 4 propellers, and 4 crew up front. The pilot and co-pilot sat in chairs that had controls for flying the airplane. The flight engineer sat behind them staring a wall full of dials and needles, with various controls for managing those engines. Across from the FE, and in some cases farther aft, sat the navigator with a shelf full of books, charts, a sextant and often some form of manually operated radio direction finder.

The automatic direction finder was a huge breakthru in navigation technology, and later the VOR. They automated all of the work done historically by the navigator, and made it easy to move the navigation display into a standard size instrument in the panel. And then there were 3, the navigator had been automated out of the system.

As time went on, engine technology improved dramatically. Initially most engine control systems were analog, but the digital age was beginning, and aircraft engines were a high value target for technology deployment, driven by cost and complexity. As well, larger more reliable engines with more power allowed for reducing the number of engines on long haul aircraft. Early on this was a bit of a battle, but the unions settled for 'crew of 2 on twin engine aircraft', the days of the FE were numbered. Enter the FADEC and then there were two.

Flight automation has improved DRAMATICALLY over the last decade, one only needs reference the proliferation of self flying small drones to understand how much it's advanced. The development cycle of airliners is slow, but, rest assured, that technology is finding it's way into modern new designs. The initial drive for pilot-less aircraft came from military directions, a desire to send armed vehicles into situations where loss of a pilot would create horrible political problems akin to the Gary Powers story. Certification hurdles still provide a significant cost barrier, but, somebody is going to cross that barrier, and it'll only be getting easier as we see the proliferation of cars that can drive themselves on congested hiways.

I dont think airliners are going to go pilotless any time real soon, but, I do believe we will write the next chapter in this story sooner rather than later. The next chapter will be titled:-

And then there was one

But it's not all a story of doom and gloom, the jobs wont vanish overnight. There is a huge investment in 2 pilot airplanes currently in service, so it'll take 20 years from the first introduction of the single pilot airliner until they are the majority of airframes in airline service. Heck, the last of the 3 seat stuff is still flying today.

[Meatservo]

I disagree somewhat about the one-pilot thing. I could be convinced that someday there will be NO-pilot airliners, but I find it difficult to envisage a safety case for eliminating one rather than both pilots. It's not as though it's physically impossible to fly a two-crew airliner by yourself- sure there are a few switches you can't reach from one side or the other, but generally I think you could fly just about anything with one guy. Certainly the typical airliner has much better automation than many smaller planes that are allowed to operate SPIFR. So the co-pilot must be there for some other reason, really, than being necessary to operate the plane. Unless you can build a cockpit that can interact intelligently with a single pilot, keep him awake, and engaged, provide responses to verbal commands and inquiries, then by eliminating the co-pilot you eliminate the safety advantages of having two people and don't replace it with anything. What technology can replace a co-pilot that isn't in there already? With a couple of industrial servos, a satellite modem and an "Arduino" or "Raspberry Pi" programmable circuit board I could probably outfit a mid-nineties 737 that could fly with no pilots right now. Maybe not reliably or safely enough for people but whatever. There must be some reason we have settled on two guys up there that has nothing to do with automation levels.

Besides, who would want such a crappy job, locked away in a cockpit all by yourself for hours and hours, bored stiff, doing nothing and talking to no-one? It would be a step in the wrong direction. It would be worse than having no pilot at all.

[Rockie]

Autopilots do not fly commercial airplanes. Pilots fly them, and the auto-flight system is just one of the tools they use to a greater, lesser, or no degree to do that. At best automation does nothing more than point the airplane. Computers make no decisions and offer no judgement or opinion to aid the pilots in making theirs.

You're right Meatservo, a single pilot could safely land a transport category aircraft but that's not why the second pilot is there. He (she) is there as a second brain trained on the aircraft and knowledgable not just on procedures and policies, but the particularities of each specific flight. Aircraft procedures are specifically designed to take advantage of that resource in normal and abnormal situations.

People who tout automation as taking over from the pilot probably don't fly an automated airplane. If they did they would know how quickly automation can switch from being an aid to a hindrance.

[leftoftrack]

There enthusiastic response is due to things like rockets and spaceshuttles before that being unable to land without computer's

[leftoftrack]

80% of aviation accidents have human factors as a major contributing factor. Yes automation will have a double engine failure scenario plugged into the software. And if you recall the accident report about the Hudson. The human factors of figuring out what was happening was the only reason the river landing was actually required. Like composite technology and elevators. This too will become a reality for most of the world's aviation.

[confusedalot]

simple question. is boeing getting atc and the weatherman involved? Everything is possible, however my life experience does not give me great confidence in a near future monorail type of operation. hell, drones have operators.......

[Rockie]

80% of aviation accidents have human factors as a major contributing factor.

When you have statistics on how many crashes are prevented by humans to compare that to this statistic might be meaningful to this discussion. Until then it's only a single part of a complex equation.

I could just as accurately say 100% of autonomous aircraft crashes are caused by automation.

[co-joe]

Keep in mind that pilot costs are only ~4% of total operating cost. That's not a huge incentive for the development of a pilot less airplane considering you're likely to still have to pay the wages of some ground based monitor not to mention the huge development costs.

You're telling me, that you think joe public would choose to fly yyc-yyz for $800 with airline A over paying $768 with zero pilot airline B?

IMHO it's only a matter of time.

[timel]

Looking forward to take look at that MEL. Who is going to be reliable for a crash? Engineers?

Everyone likes to talk about the softwares, but nobody ever speaks about the hardware, there is no way you can predict when a transistor will fail. There are way soo many variable I can think of, so good luck to them!

I think aviation has become very safe, because we have developed protocols where two people in a cockpit are looking after each other. In year 2000, we were supposed to have flying cars and everyone is getting very excited about AI lately, whatever that means anymore, last time I checked they can only operate robots by doing heavy pre-programming. The day they figure out to copy a human brain into a robot and they figure out how to predict the lifetime into hardware components, including all the external factors that can happen, I'll be worried. That day, I'll start a very big garden and wait for my government welfare, until then, happy flying everyone.