When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/when-will-we-have-unmanned-commercial-airliners/0

by yread • 15 years ago

45 68 15 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

Hopefully only when the last time a pilot had to intervene on a plane flying itself is only remembered in history books.

Automation today is really good, but only until something goes wrong. Until automation becomes absolutely perfect, I will argue it's even starting to become dangerous - as pilots are thrown into emergencies without quite knowing how the plane got into them and based on what flawed assumption.

weavejester2• 15 years ago

Automation doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to have better judgement than a human pilot.

bulte-rs• 15 years ago

Fortunately for some of us (e.g. me), judging is not something computers are particularly good at right now.

lucasjung20• 15 years ago

Automation is incapable of "judgement;" automation consistently and reliably responds to inputs according to pre-defined instructions. That's why automation works really well in some situations but not others. The more complex the task, the harder it is make a complete instruction set that will result in a satisfactory outcome for every possible situation.

Even human pilots behave somewhat like automatons in some situations: in most situations they follow procedures, which could be described as "responding to inputs according to pre-defined instructions." However, they often encounter situations not covered by the procedures, in which case they must instead exercise their judgement.

The problem with judgement is that it is neither consistent nor reliable. Some humans have better judgement than others. Eventually we will have automation sophisticated enough to handle even to full complexity of aviation, at which point automation will yield safe results more consistently and reliably than human judgement.

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

You would need a better-than-human-pilot AI for that. Until we get there - and are able to reliably demonstrate that, you'll want humans in the loop.

adhipg• 15 years ago

I feel that the biggest problem with automation and AI based systems is the ability to handle 'Black Swan' events - for the lack of a better term.

WalterBright• 15 years ago

The reason for accidents is usually an unanticipated combination of events. Unanticipated means an autopilot will not have been programmed to handle it.

There are many, many aviation disasters that were avoided because the pilot got creative.

jarin2• 15 years ago

"And for nearly two decades, automatic landing systems have been able to drop and stop a jet on the fog-shrouded deck of an aircraft carrier that's barely twice as wide and three times as long as the jet's wingspan—and the ship is moving. Meanwhile, the pilot sits in the cockpit, hands folded."

I know that aircraft carriers have these systems, but having been on two deployments on an aircraft carrier I have never heard of it being used. I think it's only for emergencies when the pilot is injured or incapacitated.

lucasjung20• 15 years ago

There are actually a few levels of automation available to hornet pilots, ranging from (in layman's terms) "a little help staying on-speed and on glideslope" to "fully automatic." Some pilots hardly ever use them, some pilots use them as much as they are allowed (in order to insure proficiency, there are limits in place to make sure the pilots don't become overly reliant on the automation). Most pilots are in-between, using them occasionally, typically when they feel like they're not at their best (e.g. at the end of a 6 hr+ combat sortie into Afghanistan). Even when on full-auto, I don't know any of them who sit "hands folded:" they're ready to take over immediately in case something goes wrong. I've heard stories that some of the test pilots eventually got confortable to take their hands completely off the controls back when this stuff was first being tested, but I doubt if even they made a habit of it.

grecy2• 15 years ago

> I don't know any of them who sit "hands folded:" they're ready to take over immediately in case something goes wrong.

Did you ever hear of something going wrong with the automation?

lucasjung20• 15 years ago

I fly for a living, and I currently work in developmental flight test. One of the programs I am working on is a UAV.

It's going to be a very, very long time before we see autonomous airliners. I'll talk about specific technical hurdles, but I think the biggest issue is psychological: it's one thing to entrust a bunch of freight to an autonomous vehicle, another thing entirely to entrust dozens of living, breathing human beings to such (the article discusses this, including the concept of "shared fate"). I am confident that autonomous airliners will only come into service when autonomous aircraft technology reaches a point where the computers are able to handle every aspect of flight safety better than humans. Right now they can already do some of those things better than humans, and those tasks have already largely been shed by human pilots and entrusted to their computers. I think there will be a gradual transition as the computers are able to take on more and more of the tasks. The article also mentions how this process is already causing basic aviation skills to atrophy in pilots who leave too much to the computers. I think this is a very real problem, and I think it was a major contributor to the Air France flight 447 crash. Prudent pilots do more manual flying than is strictly necessary because that's the only way to maintain proficiency. If this problem becomes severe enough, expect to see the FAA establish more granular proficiency requirements.

The author talks a lot about how much the military is using UAVs, and seems to think that this is a good model for civilian applications. It isn't. The military has an entirely different set of risk considerations than civil aviation. Take the example of medivac UAVs: a medivac UAV will almost certainly have a higher mishap rate than a manned medivac helo, which would be completely unacceptable for civilian purposes. However, for the military that increased mishap risk is more than offset by the risks of putting an entire human crew into harm's way just to medivac a single wounded soldier.

Military UAVs currently in use generally have much higher mishap rates than their manned counterparts, but the military tolerates this because aicrew don't die in UAV mishaps, and UAVs are generally less expensive to replace than manned vehicles. Part of the reason for this is that features designed to prevent or mitigate mishaps cost money, and it is often cheaper to leave many of them out and accept the higher mishap rate, especially when no human crew is involved. However, part of it is that autonomous systems still just aren't as good at flying safely. For the military, the benefits outweigh the costs, but I really can't see a for-profit corporation reachig the same conclusion.

>Northrop Grumman has built some sense-and-avoid savvy into the unmanned helicopters and other UAVs it's developing for the U.S. Navy.

I happen to be intimitely familiar with one such system, and somewhat familiar with another. This sentence is utter BS. I can only assume that the author was fed a line by an NGC PR-type and took it at face value. A more honest way to say it would be:

Northrop Grumman is trying to incorporate limited sense-and-avoid capabilities into the unmanned helicopters and other UAVs it's developing for the U.S. Navy.

Moreover, FAA has a requirement for "see and avoid," not "sense and avoid." The military is trying hard to sell them on the idea that it should be "sense and avoid," of which "see and avoid" would be just a subset, but so far the FAA has remained deeply skeptical. The FAA is right to be conservative about this change: none of the currently proposed systems would be as effective at collision avoidance as the Mark I Eyeball, and thus far the systems I am aware of (to which the quote from the article was referring) are still a very long way from working properly. This seems to me like the kind of technical problem that eventually can be overcome, but it's going to take a lot of work to make that happen.

Because "see and avoid" is so critical to safety of flight, and because UAVs can't currently do it, the FAA does not allow UAVs to operate in its airspace, with some tightly restricted exceptions for military and law enforcement UAVs. I doubt very highly if they would make similar exceptions for civilian purposes, and even if they did, the restrictions involved are so limiting that there aren't many viable applications.

JoeAltmaier3• 15 years ago

In just a couple of years the DARPA challenge yielded cars that can drive themselves in complex urban environments.

I imagine with sufficient smart people working on it, flying airplanes in relatively uncluttered sky would yield results faster.

As for see-and-avoid, perhaps it works for obstacles on the ground, but other aircraft are moving so fast, is it really feasible to eyeball them before they are on you? Perhaps in pursuit, but at any significant angle they flash past at hundreds of miles an hour. Only radar etc has a chance of identifying/avoiding at those speeds. <Edit: spelling>

brlewis• 15 years ago

Commercial airliners, last I checked, suffered one mishap per 1.5 million flights. Human automobile drivers set a much lower standard to beat.

lucasjung20• 15 years ago

>In just a couple of years the DARPA challenge yielded cars that can drive themselves in complex urban environments.

I imagine with sufficient smart people working on it, flying airplanes in relatively uncluttered sky would yield results faster.

As I mentioned, many of the tasks of flying airplanes have been successfully automated. However, there are significant complexities that pilots must deal with that don't apply to cars, and most of those still require human intervention, especially in-flight emergencies. If your car engine quits, you pull over to the shoulder, turn on your hazard lights, and call AAA. If your aircraft engine quits, the response is much more complex. If the power steering on your car quits, you do pretty much the same thing as described above. If your flight controls malfunction in an airplane, the response is much more complex. If your car catches on fire, you do the same as above, plus get out. If your airplane catches on fire, you've got a much bigger problem. I could go on, but I think that gets the idea across.

Also, the sky is not "relatively uncluttered." There are a lot of airplanes flying at any given moment, and most of them are concentrated onto airways. It gets even worse in the terminal area: lots and lots of planes coming and going to and from many different directions, all in a very small piece of sky.

>As for see-and-avoid, perhaps it works for obstacles on the ground, but other aircraft are moving so fast, is it really feasile to eyeball them before they are on you? Perhaps in pursuit, but at any significant angle they flash past at hundreds of miles an hour. Only radar etc has a chance of identifying/avoiding at those speeds.

I am alive today because, on countless occasions, I and my fellow aviators have looked outside, seen another aircraft, and maneuvered to avoid a potential collision. I think that you really don't have an accurate mental image of how this works, so I'll try to explain a little bit:

Consider two airliners cruising at 424 kts each, one heading due West, the other due North. The rate of closure is 600 kts. Depending on the atmospheric conditions, they will be visible to each other at about 10 nautical miles, which gives them an entire minute to spot each other and maneuver to avoid a collision. Even if it's two sueprsonic fighters flying right at each other at 600 kts each, they still have thirty seconds to spot each other. A much more realistic scenario would involve two aircraft in the terminal area, where they would be moving much more slowly, giving them much more time to see each other and respond.

I think the most dangerous situations are where two aircraft are on headings that are different by less than forty-five degrees: they are basically next to each other, closing from each other's sides where they are less likely to be spotted. The rate of closure is probably very low, but that's more than made up for by the awkward situation in regards to field of view from many cockpits.

vaksel• 15 years ago

I don't think we'll ever see it.

There are too many hurdles to overcome. The psychological and liability one for actual plane manufacturers.

+ it just doesn't make sense economically. Pilots get paid fairly little now, and as automation progresses, the salaries will go down to ~40K(so ~80K for the 2). At that point, it's really not that much money to give passengers the extra sense of security.

onemoreact5• 15 years ago

It's not just the pilots, cockpits for something like a 747 is not all that cheap to build and adds a fair amount of weight on every trip. If you really need manual supervision of takeoffs and landings you could have a set of pilots at major airports supervising these functions with vary low latency.

mseebach• 15 years ago

Modern glass cockpits are just thin interfaces on avionics you need anyway. I would be surprised if a cockpit-less 777 was significantly lighter than one including it.

As for the weight of the pilots themselves - judging by the cost of excess luggage, I'd say it's negligible for all but the smallest aircrafts.

danielschonfeld• 15 years ago

I am an airline pilot and a programmer who loves automation. While the psychological aspect I think is easy to get over with the public by producing ultra low fares the technological one is quite different.

The author states that even in easy adaptations such as traffic watch we still do not see UAVs and what the author is missing is the cost! Those military UAVs cost almost as much as a private jet in what today using 1950s technology can be achieved for the cost of a used cluncker.

Also, the same inheritable problems that we face fully automating cars, exist in fully automating airplanes. Each is an individual unit and very autonomous with no single 'track' to follow. In addition to this largely autonomous environment you have integration problems, where you would integrate the old with the new automated environment and still be able to offer the same capacity of airspace usage.

As frustrating (and yes it is for pilots too - more than passengers realize) as air travel seems now days. The achievements of airspace utilization in places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Fran etc is almost mind boggling considering it's used with a mosaic of 1930s radar equipment which honestly can't pin point you to an exact location within a circle of 1 mile around yourself.

edelweiss• 15 years ago

What Commercial Aircraft do you fly, and for how long have you been a Commercial Airline Pilot?

tjmc2• 15 years ago

When someone can tell me with a straight face that the 440 passengers and 29 crew members of QF32[1] would still be alive without the heroes they had up front that day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

pak• 15 years ago

That was a fascinating read, although I must play devil's advocate and ask what prevents a ground crew from taking over a commercial airliner remotely in case of distress? None of what this flight crew did necessitated their physical presence onboard, only their decision-making and operation of the existing aircraft controls.

tjmc2• 15 years ago

Given that the plane was on battery power when it landed, a ground crew may not have still had contact and control of the aircraft. In the case of the "Gimli Glider" mentioned below, there was a total power failure due to fuel exhaustion and IIRC the pilots had to crank down the nosewheel by hand.

parfe• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider also a favorite.

VMG• 15 years ago

What about passengers that were killed due to human error?

crikli• 15 years ago

lucasjung has done such a fantastic job of debunking this idea that they's very little to add; however one aspect that hasn't been expanded upon is the glacially slow pace at which the FAA approves systems for use.

Approved aviation systems are far from bleeding edge; at best the technology in use is five years old, and the 5-year old technology that's in use is only so because some company(ies) invested the considerable resources to jump through all of the hoops required by the FAA to get approval for commercial use.

Furthermore, military aviation is an incredibly poor analogue to commercial (and general) aviation because it lacks the onerous regulatory oversight brought to bear by the FAA. Military aviation is the bleeding edge and the advancements made there trickle backwards to CA/GA at a very slow pace due to the incredible cost of getting certificated by the FAA as well as the fact that the FAA (correctly) places safety and reliability at the top of their priority list.

When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?

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