MaxSez: I remember Buck Rodgers & Dick Tracy’s wrist radio! I saw a man walking on the moon live. Don’t scoff at this article. Some of you will witness the first commercial fully automated pilotless Pax flight in your life time. Just Sayin;
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I remembered when pilotless planes were just an imagination around 1-2 decades ago. I’m sure this will be a huge innovation to the aviation world and airline industry once it enters commercial service 😊
But again, Pilotless planes can be dangerous sometimes especially in the fast growing technology era like today where Cyber-attack is very common. Not to mention system failures and etc. So I think as far as the technology goes even more advanced, human’s role is still needed in order to prevent things that we don’t want to happen
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If they really succeed, I think they should not really allow the plane to fully fly itself. There should be a human being somewhere who should be able to send input and act in a dire emergency when trouble strikes.
I hope that Boeing succeeds with this plan and I hope it is well thought out safety-wise.
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I’m still sceptic that pilotless planes will ever get the acceptance of the customers…
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This along with self driving cars is something I never want to see. Are there going to be any job opportunities for people in a hundred years? This is going to end badly…
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For my generation the Jetson’s kick started our dreams to take to the skies with “car like” aircraft and to move to Mars with towering residential structures well above the ground terrain. With the recent successes of drones it is inevitable that aviation engineers would develop unmanned aircraft. I have mixed emotions on pilotless aircraft to say the least. Cheers
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We need to prepare for an economy with very little scarcity. How are we going to deal with that? That is a question we need to answer eventually. Artificially creating jobs is not the route to go. I have other concerns about pilotless planes, job security is not one of them.
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Any kid who wants to be a future pilot will definitely hate this idea…this means no jobs for them…but still…i won’t be risking my life on a pilotless plane in the name of “advanced technology and how far it has come” for gods sake even machines make mistakes called errors…LOL
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Everyone will love those autonomous flying planes until the first, maybe the second crash. Self flying planes definitely won’t make flying safer.
This article is about a Lufthansa A321 incident in November 2014. There was a malfunction of the A321s ALT indicator reporting the A/P a too high pitch,which caused the autopilot to put the plane into a steep descent not allowing the pilots to take over control of the plane. In the end the pilots had to cut off the power of some systems in order to regain control after some minutes. Investigators treated the situation as a near crash. If there were no well trained pilots aboard, this would have been the death of almost 200 souls.
If people are not even able to build 100% infailable Autopilots, how can they already start to experiment with self-flying planes?
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I think is the best opposing summary… You took the words right out of my mouth
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This looks like an interesting concept but as people have said, the idea of having robot joe and only robot joe flying the aircraft isn’t something I’d be too keen on. Especially with failures etc.
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And remember everything has a possibility of error considering the QF72 incident in which the onboard systems confused the autopilot causing numerous injuries.
I have no problem with ‘bot’ planes as log as they are not used in mass air transport(which might prove very fatal if it does).
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A 99.99% infallible autopilot system could be built, it’s simply dependent upon cost.
The electronics and processing power are with us right now, and deep learning AI systems for improving the software package gets better by the day.
Aircraft are easy to operate compared to cars, and Tesla have nearly sorted out self driving cars.
It will all come down to passenger acceptance and insurance companies.
Once self driving cars are common and safe, I think passengers will accept self flying aircraft. The insurance companies will be the biggest hurdle.
One way around this is to have the aircraft manufacturer offer their own insurance package and liabilities.
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If I do I aint travelling by a plane anymore.
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I second this. I’ll drive!
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The acceptance should be there until the first, maybe the second crash…
The Autopilot of an Airbus is also 99,99% safe, but mistakes happen. That’s how it is in Mathematics, Physics etc.
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I know it’s too early to speculate but given the history of pilotless aircraft. Do you remember what happened to that top secret UAV that was flying over Iran? They were able to hack and land the aircraft at one of their airports. I don’t think it’s wise to remove a human pilot from commercial aircraft.
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What’s wrong with self-driving cars? Sorry, this is abit off-topic, but the number one reason for car crashes: Human Error.
Hoestly, I’m supportive of this. However, I do think there should still be a human in the cockpit monitoring the aircraft. Although then again, that’s bassically what happens today. Autopilot is a good thing. Unless it gets compromised. I’d say self-driving cars and planes should have a different approach. Self-driving cars, yes! Human error is a big factor in crashing. Self-flying planes? Kind of already happens today. If we advance autopilot even more, it could land and takeoff, with a higher chance of safety. However, if there is an error, a human needs to be there to make the decisions. Unless AI gets advanced enough for the plane to do it by itself. But that’s still far into the future. And in terms of jobs… it will open up more programming jobs. I’d think. Annd as I said before, there probably will still be a human there. In terms of cars, there will definitely be programming and manufacturing jobs that open up. Planes may be a different story.
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Good luck trying to get across the world in a car…
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