Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and landing tests

https://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-completes-autonomous-taxi-take-off-and-landing-tests-2020-7

by apsec112 • 6 years ago

332 317 6 years ago

ngngngng2• 6 years ago

The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply watched.

Talk about training your replacement.

My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it.

bdamm• 6 years ago

You should because it's a terrible career, although really I think most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career into good industries so in the end, no big deal. Let 'er rip and enjoy the view when you get it

Ancalagon• 6 years ago

Why is it considered a terrible career?

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

And what is your evidence that "most pilots end up bailing out of the pilot career"? And, what do you consider "good industries"?

bargl• 6 years ago

I have some friends who love it, some who hate it and some who didn't finish and got a ton of debt.

If you decide to be a pilot reach out to real world pilots and ask for advice.

I have friends who did years being paid very little at local airports so they could "make it" to the airlines to get paid much better.

The biggest thing I observed from my 10+ friends is, being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications. At first you pay for them, then you get paid for them but not much because those people are paying for them, then you get paid a living wage for them because you're flying customers/cargo/etc.

My friends who are happiest as pilots either had the government/some other entity pay for their training, or were able to skip ahead in pay by getting directly to airlines.

outworlder4• 6 years ago

being a pilot is completely measured by hours in the cockpit and certifications

Yeap. So if you can fund the initial thousand hours (give or take) you should be ok. If you can't and you don't like small GA aircraft you'll have a miserable time trying to get paid to fly and have enough hours to be considered by airlines.

outworlder4• 6 years ago

My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out of it.

So he wants to be an airline pilot? Ultimately ferrying passengers? He should be ok. The industry is very safety conscious and moves extremely slowly. His children, if he decides to have some, may not be if they choose the same career.

I would be more concerned about smaller planes or freighters.

This is provided that this is something that he actually loves to do. Because otherwise not sleeping at home and weird hours will get old really quick. If he loves aviation you probably can't talk him out of it :)

ngngngng2• 6 years ago

He's doing the standard "change your mind every couple semesters" thing that most 20 year olds seem to do. Just a few months ago I was teaching him programming, now he's decided becoming a pilot is the thing to do.

doodles526• 6 years ago

It highly depends on what he wants to do in aviation and his motivations for working as a pilot. I can give my perspective as someone who had a full-time tech career and started the transition to working as a helicopter pilot several years ago. Some of this has already been stated in other comments - but thought I would add my opinions overall.

Signs you should not be a professional pilot:

* You're doing it for prestige. We're decades removed from the golden age of aviation. It may be cool to you to be a pilot - but most other folks don't view you as having a dreamy job. Don't be a pilot for how others view you, do it for you.

* You're doing it for the money. High paying(>$200k) jobs in airplanes are rare, and reserved almost only for captains at legacy carriers, and some corporate jet pilots. You need A LOT of experience and a lot of luck to get these jobs. And who knows how long these higher salaries will last. Some of the best paying($350k+) jobs in aviation are in cargo - UPS and Fedex - which are likely to be some of the first to automate away the pilot. Helicopter salaries are much much much worse. The highest pay I've ever seen was a heli-pilot with 35 years of experience and 30,000+ hours making $150k piloting a $22M aircraft. Given, he only works 6 months a year for that pay. But still a pretty terrible best-scenario pay rate.

* You're an adrenaline junkie who is looking for their next fix. If you want to get your license and go do crazy stunts out in the desert with no people around - be my guest. But you'll be eaten alive in most sectors of commercial aviation without a safety-first mindset. In some areas of aviation, sure, there's some risks. But they should always be calculated risks where the ends fully justify any added risk factor.

* You want to spend time at home. Most flying jobs are nomadic. It is hard on families, and isn't for those who are uncomfortable moving frequently and living the hotel life. Most pilots I know have been divorced several times if they've ever found someone who agree to be in a long term relationship with someone who moves so often and is around so little.

Signs you could consider being a professional pilot:

* You love flying, and nothing will keep you out of the cockpit. This is pretty much the only reason I think anyone should become a professional pilot right now. For many people there's something incredibly special about being in the air. As a hobby, aviation is incredibly expensive(doubly or triply so for helicopters than fixed-wing). So unless you have a career that can support your expensive aviation fix, you may actually be financially better-off flying for a living(as compared with a low/moderate salary job and flying away all your money). Finally, depending on what you want to do in aviation, there isn't always an equivalent option for hobbyist, and you have to go commercial to fly those missions.

Personally, I fall into the "I love flying" category. Even though my tech salary would have allowed me to fly small piston helicopters several times a week as a hobby, I wanted to challenge myself by flying more complex missions and aircraft than I could as a hobbyist - wildland firefighting and search+rescue specifically. This year is my first on a fire contract, and I can say without a doubt that for me the time/money/strain on relationships has absolutely been worth it. I love my job, and every day I'm off-site I wish I were working. However, there are some caveats. I'm single and enjoy being so. I seriously doubt I would stay in aviation if I found a long-term partner and/or started a family - the two do not seem compatible to me at all. Also, I still do contracting in tech for additional income. I know I have that as a fallback career if the aviation industry automates away the jobs I enjoy. So I'm not 100% sure if I would have done this without that fallback career plan.

With regards to automation in flying, I don't have a crystal ball. The FAA moves slowly. Very slowly. The only "fast" thing I've seen them do is add more regulations to UAV operators when they started becoming a potential danger to manned air-traffic. But I have never seen nor heard them being quick to loosen regulations or certify automation systems(in fact, FAA safety documentation discusses how automation can cause more harm than good when paired with a human operator - to highlight their thoughts on the matter).

But I would likely say that your brother will be able to find flying jobs for decades to come. Airlines will be slow to integrate fully automated cockpits due to regulation - and the first crash, I imagine, will likely roll back approvals for many years after(whenever it comes - we can't build perfect systems. And the NTSB would likely blame the system, even if pilots couldn't possibly have resolved the issues themselves). Also, if your brother is interested in any kind of back-country flying, I bet those will be even longer away from automation if they ever see it. Think flying people to rural airstrips in Alaska, flying float planes charters in the San Juans, or bringing supplies to villages in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia. The highly dynamic environments with unimproved strips and water landings would be a non-impossible but more difficult task than typical airports to automate. And the cheap labor available to these missions would likely not justify the additional expense of automation. Speaking of cheap labor - these back-country jobs pay absolutely garbage wages - but I personally know a couple former airline pilots who transitioned to rural flying missions because they were tired of flying a bus with autopilot and wanted to get back to what they considered "real flying".

Hope that mini-rant adds some valuable context for you!

Merrill• 6 years ago

Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first?

Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?

kamel3d• 6 years ago

or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to test this technology since they love cutting cost

msla• 6 years ago

How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse to deal and a human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two engines gone? Multiple engines gone and a really stiff crosswind? How good is it at landing in a blizzard on an icy runway? I know it never happens. Planes never land on the Hudson River, either. There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe as possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that, but what are the current limits of automation?

thehappypm• 6 years ago

Probably the limit is that in the miracle on the Hudson, Sully wouldn’t have had a co-pilot.

bdonlan• 6 years ago

I suspect that the with the current electrical system on airbuses, the emergency electrical configuration wouldn't have enough power to run all those image processing computers at the very least (dual engine failure would cause this). However that could be resolved with additional battery capacity.

A more likely cause of automation failure would be failure or disagreement in the various sensors on the plane. These are typically triple redundant, but there have been cases where, for example, all the pitot tubes ice over and airspeed indications are lost. There are ways to deal with this but they're not currently programmed into the autopilot.

Other possible causes include failure of major flight controls requiring workarounds - eg, dealing with a stuck rudder with deliberate asymmetric thrust.

That being said flight control issues can probably be dealt with, if necessary. The real problem is with dealing with ambiguous situations where you have to weigh risks.

Consider: your radios are out. Per standard procedure you should proceed on your flight plan to the final fix and hold until your scheduled arrival time. However, fuel consumption is high - you're not sure, but you might have a slow fuel leak, and your destination has dicey weather. Do you divert without clearance or risk that you might be marginal on fuel at your scheduled arrival time?

phire• 6 years ago

Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible.

The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully understand the complete autopilot algorithm and understand exactly how it should act in any situation.

Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are designed to disconnect when they detect something weird. They don't even understand aerodynamics.

I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually designed a fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI techniques (so no machine learning or neural networks; Just decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models and predictions) then it could handle a wide range of emergencies.

It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out emergencies just fine, and should even be able to land in the Hudson River or anywhere else it has detailed maps.

These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer of a fully autonomous plane would know about and test their software against in simulations.

The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have issues are avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency landings in areas with substandard mapping and unexpected aerodynamic failures (beyond what their adaptive aerodynamic model can handle)

alacombe5• 6 years ago

I wonder how a computer would have reacted to Search US Airways Flight 1549...

fataliss• 6 years ago

Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive corporations like Boeing and Airbus : /

young_unixer• 6 years ago

You could have stopped at "done".

boramalper• 6 years ago

Boeing and Airbus

I wouldn’t even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing; they are using formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has outsourced its software to $9-an-hour engineers[1].

[0] https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

PopeDotNinja• 6 years ago

I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun intended) before self-driving cars.

kbenson• 6 years ago

It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been mostly automated for a while now.

The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on almost entirely empty freeways and highways, and on designated, fairly uniform and well marked parking lots directly off those freeways. Self driving cars can already do all that fairly well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal with (pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage, lots of other cars, etc) that make self driving cars hard.

mmcconnell16182• 6 years ago

Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so not only is there more space, but it is relatively easy to check for potential conflicts before flights leave the ground.

carabiner2• 6 years ago

We have these with Predator drones etc. These were mature at the time when the DARPA Grand Challenge had robot cars crashing in the desert.

axlee• 6 years ago

Predator drones aren't exactly self-flying though, they are remotely piloted.

mehrdadn• 6 years ago

Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will still need to be there to take over during an emergency, so it won't save on pilot costs, right? And they can already lay back and relax during most of the flight so it won't really help with fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take off with less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error during phases where such autopilot could've been running a source of accidents in practice?

Robotbeat3• 6 years ago

I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required number of pilots from 2 to 1 for some flights.

kylec• 6 years ago

Or 0, eventually

numpad06• 6 years ago

Germanwings Flight 9525

justaguy88• 6 years ago

Cargo flights could fly without pilots, or use remote-control like a UAV

aqme28• 6 years ago

In addition to that-- is the pilot's salary a significant fraction of the cost of a flight?

kandeel4411• 6 years ago

Probably one benefit is having flights available and running 24/7, human pilots can only fly so many a day

lnsru• 6 years ago

Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they got obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and bad weather flights.

alacombe5• 6 years ago

Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile objects on the road ?

Upvoter33• 6 years ago

I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long ago... ?

[sorry, should have done more googling: https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica... seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no auto-takeoff]

Avicebron7• 6 years ago

It has been, but there is still a strong incentive to have a human in semi-control for contingencies

outworlder4• 6 years ago

Not only that, but it's free training. This helps keep pilots sharp and current.

If autoland fails it could be that there's something else going wrong with the aircraft(ranging from a faulty sensor to something more serious). Now you have a pilot with degraded proficiency trying to land in an unusual condition. This impairs safety.

alistairSH• 6 years ago

I believe the A320 has some auto land capability. Not a pilot, so don't know the details, but based on Youtube, it appears the pilot has to do some configuration on approach (line up the plane to some extent, set engines appropriately, etc).

cachvico2• 6 years ago

Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system

It does require hardware on the runway though.

jeffreyrogers• 6 years ago

This is for landing without visual contact with the runway (i.e. instrument flight conditions), typically the pilot is still controlling the aircraft, and looking at an instrument that tells him/her how to adjust the controls, although many aircraft can land automatically using these same systems.

nexuist• 6 years ago

There are other people talking about autoland, but it's actually meant to line the aircraft up with the runway and gently glide it down, and then the pilot deactivates it around 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to perform the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't flare by itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it will cause a ton of stress on the landing gear that adds up to more frequent downtime for repairs.

vultour• 6 years ago

Now that's just completely wrong. Airliners had full automatic landing capability for a long time, it's very often used when there's zero visibility at the destination airport.

Joeri• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if they’ve barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I’m worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.

Rebelgecko• 6 years ago

There's some interesting articles about the role of automation in the Air France 447 disaster:

Short article:

https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-tragic-crash-of-flight-af447-sho...

Much longer article, but 100% worth the read if you have time:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

Animats• 6 years ago

Right.

This is a big issue for self-flying aircraft. Keeping the aircraft stable requires reliable altitude, airspeed, and orientation data. If you have that, you can stay in the air. AF 447 lost airspeed data, the flight control system dropped to a lower level, and gave up stall protection. It couldn't tell if the aircraft was stalling. That was enough to confuse the pilots so badly that they crashed a working airplane with plenty of speed, power, and altitude into the ocean.

A self-flying aircraft has the same problem, only worse. Without that info, it cannot stay in the air. There are fighters that need so much active stabilization that if you lose air data, you have to eject. Self-flying aircraft thus need really, really reliable air data sensors, and lots of them.

Getting airspeed from GPS has been suggested. There's one bizjet which does this. It can't be flown in areas where GPS jamming is in progress. Over-dependence on GPS is a problem.

All that is just to be able to fly straight and level. That's flight control. Navigation and landing are separate problems.

yummypaint• 6 years ago

The only practical way to mitigate this that i can think of is more emphasis on regular simulator training. It may ultimately undercut the financial benefits of full time autopilot if pilots have to spend a larger fraction of their time on the clock in simulators, plus more sims would have to be built and operated.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

The cockpit could just double as a simulator in non-emergency situations.

gibsonhouse• 6 years ago

simulators might be good enough to train for most situations, maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying the whole time.

Jabbles• 6 years ago

The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can only be trained for in a simulator.

The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.

Simulacra4• 6 years ago

"Russian jet crashed 'because captain couldn't land without autopilot"

https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-c...

lightgreen3• 6 years ago

The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not have an feature to drop fuel and landed over max landing weight and there are other reasons.

Metro is not the most reliable source of information.

carabiner2• 6 years ago

"N crashes prevented due to automation" - A headline that will/can never be written. Net result is that automation saves lives.

alacombe5• 6 years ago

It's not as if a computer didn't crashe 2 737-MAX8 on take-off, despite pilots trying to correct the trajectory !

kovac• 6 years ago

No amount of engineering genius can make up for human greed. Boeing took a gamble and they lost.

st1ck• 6 years ago

I wonder how much practice pilots get nowadays, when there are so few passenger flights worldwide.

darren0• 6 years ago

I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.

boogies• 6 years ago

The article mentions that.

“For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by helping reduce workload. … "For autonomous technologies to improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance, pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in a press release.”

newsclues• 6 years ago

Is that logical?

What are the environmental and economic costs of an automated cargo ship going down vs airliner (cargo for comparison)?

It’s hundreds of millions dollars and fuel.

Avicebron7• 6 years ago

Actually this leads to an interesting point..as far as I know cargo ships are not automated sooner. It seems that it's just as open as the sky...potentially the sea is much less forgiving?

asynchronous132• 6 years ago

If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.

gonehome6• 6 years ago

The Boeing 737 max 8 software couldn't keep a plane in the sky with an army of pilots fighting to save their own lives.

I wouldn't get in one of these until there are better controls on this kind of software, it's not the same as autopilot.

blueplanet200• 6 years ago

The autopilot is still at the control of the pilots, and usually enabled only at higher altitude. Landing/takeoff are still manually flown by pilots most of the time.

I don't have issues with a computers ability to maintain altitude, climb, or turn to a heading. I have a problem with a computer's ability to respond to the unexpected while in the air. For instance, comms failure is a scenario pilots train for and can deal with. I imagine autopilot might have some issues with that.

irrational2• 6 years ago

I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.

bsder• 6 years ago

The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into LAX probably somewhere around 2000.

We were flying through a really big storm front forever. Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours.

Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I had ever experienced.

Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down in that weather on autoland."

Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have turned that on 2 hours earlier?"

Pilots are done.

Simulacra4• 6 years ago

The shipping industry is one where it could be extremely helpful, particularly in thwarting pirates. I've always wondered why cargo ships are not drones, full autonomous until it gets within a certain range of its destination.

alacombe5• 6 years ago

I'm not sure you'd like the fully automatic sentry miniguns associated with drone ships !

alacombe5• 6 years ago

Classic NIMBY'ism :-)

edmundhuber2• 6 years ago

Link to Airbus's press release: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/06/ai... More info here: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-mobi...

Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight.

Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.

buzzerbetrayed• 6 years ago

Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.

usrusr2• 6 years ago

Drivers take almost all information they need for driving from looking through the windows, whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials. That difference alone makes flying inherently more automatable. Automated driving adds a lot of sensing requirements over manual driving, but in flying the manual way already requires most of the sensing you'd need for automation.

edmundhuber2• 6 years ago

Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I pointed out that BI probably has different ideas than Airbus.

To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff, navigating/obstacle avoidance, landing". To the extent that driving a car isn't "what you see is what you get", flight is much worse.

In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither takeoff nor landing), and depending on what kind of airspace you're in you may need to: * listen to ATC for commands, and advise them of what you're doing, * avoid weather, * look out for traffic, * watch your gauges, * stay on a heading, altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is routinely done with autopilot.)

In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it look so casual.

A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate". This is the basic priorities for your attention. If you're pointed at terrain your priority is to fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you (to some extent) of that first responsibility, especially during routine parts of flight, so that you can do the other things. Airbus is looking for more things to automate to let pilots do more strategic thinking in general.

Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with what BI is thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower, there's no need to communicate, the rules for driving are pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be, without hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and speed limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

The "bail" maneuver is considerably easier in a car.

It's also far more likely to be necessary, but pulling over to the side of the road is easier than landing off runway.

jariel2• 6 years ago

"Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department"

They have pretty deep partnerships with European state schools etc. which is highly rational, at the same time, it puts issues of 'government subsidy' on the table re: trade agreements. Nobody makes such complicated things 'alone', at that level it's going to be a broad mix of national integration efforts. It makes it hard to do trade because everyone else is pointing out everyone else's non-market subsidisations.

timwaagh2• 6 years ago

this is true of most if not all companies in the knowledge sector. Google for example is known for starting as a phd project.

vemv• 6 years ago

This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen.

We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one-trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system.

Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.

chewbaxxa• 6 years ago

So was the person who dubbed statistics ML

anchpop• 6 years ago

from edmundhuber:

Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.

manfredo2• 6 years ago

It's not incorrect to say that automated technologies aren't always better than human operators. But that's not the measure we need to use. The question is does the net failure rate increase or decrease? Say the automated technology fails 2x as much in unexpected failure cases, but halves typical failure rates?

Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good outcome.

Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.

Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.

Avicebron7• 6 years ago

Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.

In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.

kevincox• 6 years ago

Human pilots are also a recipe for disaster. We put two of them in the cockpit for redundancy but they definitely aren't perfect. I'm not saying that we should adopt this right away but one day this will surely be the safer option. And a transition plan of having pilots on board for backup seems very reasonable.

baron816• 6 years ago

I think I might trust an “AI” pilot more than a human one. Human pilots often fail to respond to unexpected conditions as well (see Air France Flight 447). Pilots have also gone nuts and crashed the plane intentionally (see Germanwings Flight 9525).

Something like this should at least allow airlines to use just one human pilot, who I doubt would do much 99% of the time. If there’s something that the computer can’t handle, the human could take over.

mmcconnell16182• 6 years ago

It's relatively easy to get the stats of fatal accidents that did happen, but how difficult is it to get the stats of accidents prevented by human pilots? Both are relevant to evaluating the impact of a 100% AI pilot.

I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records of incidents but I also suspect there could be many unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their career.

Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify? How is this verified?

nabla92• 6 years ago

Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money.

Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get certification to fly in drone mode between remote airfields at first.

A350 freighter seems to be under consideration. https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-of-a350-freighter...

cachvico2• 6 years ago

And when there's zero visibility?

ILS presumably - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system

So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way?

outworlder4• 6 years ago

So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent way?

There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing for decades and can be used by many aircraft today (from both Boeing and Airbus)

All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III approach if it is available and let the old and boring autopilot do its thing.

Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do what pilots already do: divert to an alternate airport.

https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-automatica...

nabla92• 6 years ago

In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing manoeuvres but the pilot is still in control. Complete zero visibility landing is not allowed. Pilot needs to see something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind limits, almost no turbulence is not allowed and so on.

qppo2• 6 years ago

Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but only on the ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between flights that need corrections as problems occur.

Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust communications infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet but it's fun to imagine. I trust machines more than people, unless they're made by Boeing.

pak9rabid• 6 years ago

I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the deadzone issue?

qppo2• 6 years ago

We already have satellite communications for media and voice, but iirc they have fairly limited bandwidth constraints. I think figuring out a way to get the flight recorder data to operators in realtime would be the first problem to solve, and I don't think it's been done yet for commercial flights.

There was a startup around like 5-6 years ago (gone now, can't find any info on them, their name was "Flamingo" something or other) that had a proof of concept solution but they burned out quickly.

koatuok• 6 years ago

Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at 500 mph? I had assumed that it only worked with a stationary transceiver.

grishka• 6 years ago

Imagine someone piloting a plane with at least several hundreds of milliseconds of lag.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

What do you think is better about people made by Boeing?

dzhiurgis2• 6 years ago

If ever. Taxi ride costs $50 per hour while flight costs $50k per hour.

Getting rid of driver in a taxi saves 50%, while in plane saves 1%.

There are a lot more taxi drivers around world (although I’d guess they generate similar or just slightly higher value).

seanmcdirmid2• 6 years ago

Automation can (eventually) significantly reduce pilot error; it also has a more reliable way of fixing corrects and avoiding regressions. Automation isn't just about the cost of the person flying the plane, at some point in the development curve it is just a better choice (e.g. why factory robots can do better work than manual assembly workers).

timwaagh2• 6 years ago

1% extra profit is something competitive airlines like Ryanair would no doubt appreciate. Also it could ensure the aircraft operates at optimal fuel efficiency, which is central to their business model. Maybe for national airliners these marginal gains matter less and automation could be a bad look for them.

kirykl• 6 years ago

"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own"

It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is really critical

irrational2• 6 years ago

How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets, fighters, etc.) is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find people to "take over" from the AI pilot in case of an emergency? I suppose you wouldn't need that many since it's unlikely there will be multiple emergencies concurrently.

PinguTS5• 6 years ago

A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago, that Airbus can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It was about 15 years ago.

But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems during take-off and landing, because the pilots don't get practise. But pilots need those practise if they should take over in emergency situations.

The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see automated railways and automated airplanes before we see automated cars.

PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways system to allow mixed traffic of automated and manual railways. Yeah, I know some of the guys doing the saftey certifcations for this.

Zach_the_Lizard• 6 years ago

we will see automated railways

The future is now: there are automated rail lines in a numbers of cities around the world. Some are relatively old, too.

The JFK AirTrain is one such example.

PinguTS5• 6 years ago

Most of the automated railways operate on closed tracks. Many of those even on closed platforms. Here in Germany, my hometown Nuremberg, it runs one of the first underground railways with open platforms and combined with man operated railways. It needs a lot of safety electronics and I know some guys who were responsible for certification after install. (Yeah, I am somehow from the business.)

Don't try to compare closed tracks to open tracks. A closed track is more like an elevator.

Simulacra4• 6 years ago

What are the drawbacks to automated rail? I had to look this up and was very surprised rail is not automated more in America. Is it safety?

plumeria• 6 years ago

The metros in Lausanne, Switzerland and in Copenhagen, Denmark are automated.

sandworm1014• 6 years ago

But we haven't seen automated freight trains. A light rail train hauling commuters along a dedicated bespoke elevated rail line (Vancouver's skytrain, Disney World etc) is one thing, a hundred cars full of iron ore descending a hill behind a preschool is another.

cgh• 6 years ago

Vancouver has SkyTrain:

"SkyTrain is the oldest and longest, fully-automated, driverless, rapid-transit system in the world."

https://www.translink.ca/Schedules-and-Maps/SkyTrain.aspx

PinguTS5• 6 years ago

Which is a completely closed track, much like an elevator.

boudin• 6 years ago

There's a few one that existed before then. Quite crazy to think that some existed in the 70's, almost half a century ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_guideway_transit

ekianjo3• 6 years ago

There are already automated trains in Paris (one metro line), and I can think of several places in Japan with automated train lines as well (not the main ones). It's already proven technology.

Avicebron7• 6 years ago

I would be very happy to see automated trains, I often see an immediate jump to tackling the hardest cases in engineering before thinking about simple and efficient solutions. Almost everything about the Japanese rail system is something I want to see in the US

mattlondon3• 6 years ago

In London several of the tube lines are automated. There is a driver but all they do is press a button to close the doors at stations and make announcements to passengers "for safety purposes" (i.e. unions)

Kipters• 6 years ago

Same in Milan. The M5 line is completely autonomous (you can also sit in front and look at the tunnel through a large window). The next line, the M4 (no, not a typo) will be autonomous too.

shorts_theory• 6 years ago

I don't ever recall seeing a train driver in my trips on Singapore's MRT either now that I think of it. Is this relatively new technology? Some of the older trains on the North East and Downtown MRT lines are at least a decade old, if not older. It would seem like that such tech should be ubiquitous in most cities with a good public transit system.

amelius• 6 years ago

It's already proven technology.

Automated trains are just like elevators, except they move horizontally.

There used to be an operator on every elevator, but they have been replaced by electronics since a very long time ago.

walrus01• 6 years ago

Vancouver BC has had a fully automated train system since 1986. When it started they were using VAX as part of the control system.

CaptainZapp• 6 years ago

2 actually.

Line 14 was conceived as driver less. In 2012 line 1[1] was converted to fully automated. Others, to the best of my knowledge, are planned.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_1_du_m%C3%A9tro_de_Paris (In French)

jillesvangurp2• 6 years ago

I've been on the metro in Toulouse as well, which is fully automated. Kind of cool because you can sit in the front where normally the cockpit would be. Toulouse is of course a major Airbus city.

kippel• 6 years ago

There are many automated train systems around at different levels, more than we think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

This is a highly underrated insight to autonomous system design. The use of autonomous systems in dense public spaces will usually be driven by programmatic constraints before technical ones.

davidhyde• 6 years ago

It is very difficult to convert trains to run fully automated not because of the technology but because of unions that typically run the show. Don’t underestimate the power of the unions. They have decades of experience in getting their way.

Dahoon• 6 years ago

Very US specific.

cbanek2• 6 years ago

I've always been amazed at the trams in Vegas between the casinos that are I think remotely semi-automated (at least one of them, I've seen an operator in a booth at one terminus, in the Excalibur). Some of them are even elevated! I think the Las Vegas monorail is also automated.

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

I rode the Las Vegas Monorail, which is automated. It is also elevated. When it gets to the end of the line, they tell everyone to exit the train. Well, I didn't (hey, there's no attendant to make me...)

They then switched from one track to the other. This involved moving down past the station to this stub of track that just ends in midair, with absolutely nothing except the control system to keep you from going too far and crashing down 15 or 20 feet to the ground below. That was... a bit nerve-wracking. It all worked, and they don't regularly fall off and crash, but... I don't think I'd do that again.

But yes, they're automated, and it works, and works reliably.

79522• 6 years ago

There are still safety critical things that the Airbus is unable to do itself. For example talk to ATC, make decisions about changing weather conditions, fly a visual approach, or know that the causes of an electrical problem is coffee spilled on the thrust levers.

one2know2• 6 years ago

Exactly, there is a limit to the intelligence that people are willing to pay for. For example, no aircraft manufacturer will go as far as to develop a differential thrust system that replicates how UA 232 pilots guided their plane after flight controls are lost. Its just not cost effective.

joshribakoff5• 6 years ago

Why would there be coffee spilled on the thrust levers of an automated airplane? There is not a robot in there drinking coffee, and presumably they don't just put the thrust levers in the cabin with the coffee drinking passengers. You don't have people in the wheel wells either debugging issues, you rely on the systems to work.

AI can definitely talk to ATC, in fact it could disrupt ATC who could send declarative commands to planes to remove chance of miscommunication.

Even my Telsa makes decisions about changing weather conditions (eg. disables automated lane changes in heavy rain & such, AI controls the wipers)

srcmap• 6 years ago

I love to know if we use https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=air+crash+inves... (Air Crash Investigation Play List ) as test cases for the current Airbus system, how many crashes, or near misses can the automation system handle?

reactor• 6 years ago

In Singapore, many MRT (Mass Rapid Transport, a.k.a Train) lines are fully automated, there are no drivers to drive them around.

vkou2• 6 years ago

Vancouver's SkyTrain (Elevated/underground commuter rail line) is 100% automated - and the first branch of it was built in 1985.

Unless they changed it in recent years, I believe it's control systems currently run on OS/2.

askvictor• 6 years ago

One of the few things a pilot needs to do (in normal operation) is to enter the take-off weight of the plane, but they get that wrong sometimes: https://australianaviation.com.au/2011/12/incorrect-data-ent...

m4632• 6 years ago

Around 9/11 I was surprised the airplane manufacturers didn't put in a "big red button", that once mashed would irrevocably autoland to the nearest airport.

they've had the capability.

thetinguy3• 6 years ago

No they haven’t. Flying is the easy part. The hard parts are navigating and communicating. Even then, even the largest airports will only support precision approaches on some runways in some directions because maintaining ILS equipment is expensive. What happens when you push the button and there’s a massive crosswind across the ILS runway? Also communication standards have ossified such that the only way you can talk to ATC is through 50s era radios. That means any fully autonomous aircraft would have to be able to accept verbal commands and produce verbal acknowledgments. The technology is so bad that a simple stuck mic can shutdown an airport. https://youtu.be/Wcq6KipBOro

nharada• 6 years ago

You can buy these for smaller airplanes: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

Basically a "pilot is incapacitated" button, it will pick the nearest airport and attempt to land there, and will even communicate with ATC. I believe the idea is that if you're a general aviation pilot flying with your family and you keel over, they can press this button to get down safely.

PinguTS5• 6 years ago

The problem is security. How do you prevent that such a system is unhackable and can't be misused remotely? That's the number one concern in all of these industries these days.

jillesvangurp2• 6 years ago

Garmin ships a feature called autoland. I think at least one plane is shippng with that.

Austin Meyer (of x-plane fame) actually build an ipad app that can be hooked up to the autopilot (he actually did this at some point but never shipped the integrated product probably for certification reasons) to do exactly this. It's called xavion: http://xavion.com/. Basically the app calculates the safest glidepath to the best airport for you and guides you to that. The feature is designed for engine out scenarios where pilots don't have a lot of time for making good decisions. It basically continously updates its plan as you are flying based on glide ratio, altitude, runway length and a few other factors.

The autopilot integration is probably not all that hard to do. It's just tricky from a legal point of view.

tootie• 6 years ago

I heard similar from a retired pilot in about 1994.

traceroute662• 6 years ago

@PinguTS, well your friend is either mistaken, or you misheard him or a combination of both.

First, auto-takeoff is not possible. Its not possible due to technical constraints (e.g. concerns regarding LOC capture on the ground). It is also not possible due to safety constraints (e.g. the requirement to be able to deal with an aborted takeoff in a timely manner).

Second, automated landing IS used, but it is only used in limited situations. Why ?

- Because not all runways are equipped for CAT III autoland (i.e. the aircraft is not capable of landing itself without a shit-ton of calibrated equipment on the ground being there first, also good luck finding a CATIII autoland somewhere mountainous or with an otherwise tricky approach).

- Because not all aircraft are equipped for CATIII autoland (see above, more kit, more money).

- Because the autoland system itself has DH (Decision Height) and RVR (Runway Visual Range) requirements. The exception to this is CAT IIIC autoland, but AFAIK the vast majority of CATIII certified runways are only to CAT IIIB because that's expensive enough to certify, even for major airports.

- Because of general weather requirements. For example, I don't know about you, but I'd rather NEVER see an aircraft attempting autoland in a Captain's crosswind (i.e. crosswind so strong that the airline prohibits the First Officer from flying it).

- Becuase autoland operations at airports involve ATC increasing traffic separation. Increase separation leads to what ? Yes, that's right... decreased flow rate and increased possibility of delays and cancellations.

stunt2• 6 years ago

Because not all runways are equipped for CAT III autoland (i.e. the aircraft is not capable of landing itself without a shit-ton of calibrated equipment on the ground being there first, also good luck finding a CATIII autoland somewhere mountainous or with an otherwise tricky approach).

I think if you get must of the major airports covered that's still good enough. But, if I understood this article correctly, what Airbus is trying now is to make it happen without those ground requirements. And I'm sure they do not expect to cover every airport and runway to begin with.

PinguTS5• 6 years ago

That's an insight. You use automated stuff only, when the automated stuff is available? Wow. Haven't thought about that.

Of course we are talking only about situations when its is available and some airline then still insists that you don't use it.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

RNAV is making CAT ILS obsolete and might do autoland "soon" https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1395929 (more detailed discussions)

nelox• 6 years ago

Do you mean the “Airbus demonstrates first fully automatic vision-based take-off” type of not possible?

https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/01/ai...

nnain• 6 years ago

First, auto-takeoff is not possible

So was auto-driving; engineering visionaries don't stop at what is currently possible.

sebazzz• 6 years ago

The problem with automated air transport is that the failure mode is going down through gravity and probably not being able to land on a suitable surface. I doubt we have automated pilots developed so far that any failure (and those are a lot!!) can be handled, and even then you might want to manually control.

The failure mode of automated driving is less severe. You're already on a road, gravity holds you down and unless the brakes don't work (although in an electric car or bus, when not accelerating you're braking) the likelihood of accidents is smaller.

maxekman• 6 years ago

It’s always possible to have a remote control station with extremely well trained emergency pilots to take over in those case. That of course requires a very reliable remote control system.

C1sc0cat• 6 years ago

My first job was based at Cranfield University which had an attached airfield - and back in the 80's they where practicing auto landings then

jedisct1• 6 years ago

But can it serve Tomato juice?

supernova87a• 6 years ago

Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them in the plane?

If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale.

That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers.

I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.

DaiPlusPlus4• 6 years ago

Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You’d still have a cabin-crew, too.

joakleaf• 6 years ago

You probably don’t need a crew for freight only flights.

benhurmarcel3• 6 years ago

You save the cost of the pilots, and the cockpit (which would reduce the aircraft price and weight significantly, and increase capacity).

josefrichter• 6 years ago

Might be hard to imagine for you now, but could be completely different story in a few years. Basically there’s no reason to believe people will be always more reliable than machines.

Avicebron7• 6 years ago

I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.

mhh__• 6 years ago

Would you get on a plane with no pilot?

rglover• 6 years ago

Hell no.

At least have qualified pilots who want discounted travel on board (being available for emergency take over pays for their flight—a new pilot takes over at their destination).

lightgreen3• 6 years ago

There won't be enough qualified pilots if most flights are autonomous.

lightgreen3• 6 years ago

Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a plane without a pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?

vkou2• 6 years ago

Would you choose it if it were 0.5% cheaper?

Keep in mind that when you have a human pilot on board, they ultimately make all decisions about safety. And they have skin in the game. They are the ones who push back if they do not feel confident in weather conditions, or in the mechanical state of the aircraft to fly it. Would you prefer that those decisions be made by beancounters in a corporate office, who are more concerned about not having to refund people's tickets, than getting the plane safely from one destination to the other?

Compare the safety-obsession culture of commercial flight, versus, say surgeons - who, as a profession, aggressively push back on even trivial safety improvements - like checklists.

If the surgeon were killed every time they made a serious surgical mistake, you'd probably see a much better safety culture in that profession.

numpad06• 6 years ago

Would an airline choose a plane without a pilot if it’s 10% more expensive but 0.5% more likely to operate predictably on schedule?

kilo_bravo_3• 6 years ago

What's the error rate of pilots compared to computers?

If we, today, completely eliminated all human pilots for all flights on all aircraft and replaced them with the best automated systems available in one fell swoop would deaths increase or decrease?

I'm sure there would be incidents where "A simple software bug killed 200 people today".

I'm also sure that bug can be fixed, and there are also "dumb human error killed 200 people today".

I don't know if any amount of human skill, trained for an entire human lifetime, using the best pedagogical methods, with infinite resources devoted to training, can beat a computer in the long run.

Navy jets have auto-takeoff, tons of passenger planes have auto landing (which, apparently isn't as smooth as human landing), and planes spend most of their time on autopilot already. I think some military UAVs can do all or most of this stuff already. What are their accident rates compared to commercial airlines?

ggm• 6 years ago

Whats the publicly available data on the crash rate of autonomous drones in the military, unrelated to targeted attacks. It is the best indication, noting that they fly in adverse weather and uncertain routes with possibly less visibility to fall-back systems, and on long-delay operators.

I would expect domestic autonomous flying to incur at least comparable rates of failure to the military for routine operations with root causes in weather, or systems problems, given the likely sharing of weather, and IT systems behind autonomous vehicles.

It would be interesting to see take off, cruise and landing distinctly to understand their risk profiles.

There is also the public perception problem: We tolerate a level of crashes in air transport, predicated on a belief the system is self-correcting. the 737 MAX was withdrawn from service. The lithium battery problem in the 787 was identified. The square windows in the Comet were identified as a root cause.

Will we tolerate a 0.0000001% effective crash risk rate, from autonomous vehicles with 400+ passengers?

dreamcompiler• 6 years ago

Old pilot joke: "The airplanes of the future will have a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot's job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."

jb7752• 6 years ago

The hard sell here will be convincing passengers it's safe enough. Not sure if I'd be willing to fly on a pilot-less flight even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me.

parsimo2010• 6 years ago

convincing passengers it's safe enough

This is a pretty tough problem, different than self-driving cars because people see driving as something easy, but flying is seen as hard (just look at the difference in training and salary between a bus driver and a commercial pilot). Trained pilots/meat-computers will soon be worse than an automated system 99.99% of the time, but in those strange 0.01% corner cases the meat-computer really shines. There are several cases like Flight 214 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214) that computers would have helped, but there's still a few "Miracle on the Hudson" that any computer short of a general AI would have botched (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549). It will take a lot of work to get to where people will accept an automated flight without a safety pilot on board, and if you have to pay a safety pilot to ride along, you aren't saving as much money.

even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me

HA! Like that will happen. The only time that airlines "pass on cost savings" to the customer is when a low cost carrier starts offering service for the same route.

l0b0• 6 years ago

There will probably be something like hundreds of flights in unpopulated areas, then overseas freight, then inland freight, then passengers.

wuunderbar• 6 years ago

$250,000 pilot cost per year (including their benefits and training, correct me if I'm too low) 261 working days 1 long-haul flight a day 300 seats in a 777 (disregarding class)

Comes out to ~$7 cost savings for two pilots per flight. Doesn't seem that impressive for a long-haul unless I'm missing something.

hobofan2• 6 years ago

Just introduce it on a low cost airline, where the passengers literally don't care about a single other thing than price.

jb7752• 6 years ago

I feel like this could backfire from a marketing perspective.

Imagine an airline integrating pilot-less flights, then a competitor starts using the slogan "We use real pilots, because we care more about your safety than increasing profits".

galaxyLogic• 6 years ago

What about the air-hostesses?

gpmcadam• 6 years ago

Part of me wonders, in the future, how we'll view the attempts to automate pilots and drivers.

It feels like a natural step now in the technology but perhaps it'll be viewed like trying to make a robot ride a horse instead of looking to invent the car.

I wonder what the next order-of-magnitude leap for transport will be. Cheap, fast, safe. Hyperloop maybe?

Will we look back at holding on to air and road travel as a bit of a reckless endeavour?

hencoappel• 6 years ago

If you took humans off the road and made the roads suitable for only automated cars it would be so much easier to automate, its only hard because we have to make it drive with the signals/lines and such that humans require rather than just broadcasting things like the traffic signal in an easy way for cars to understand.

Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and landing tests

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