Originally Posted by
robthree
Fully self-driving airplanes are old news. Like 15+ years ago we used autonomous drones for recon. Self-landing airplanes are even older.
Error resistance to the 4th decimal place is what they are working on.
Self driving cars are here. Now. Self driving cars that kill people less frequently than human driven cars are a refinement that billions of dollars of research are going into as we goof off on this forum. Technological change will not occur at the rate we are accustomed to. It will happen exponentially faster. Human adaptation will be the limiting factor. Don't send your kids to truck driving school. Nobody cares about freight. They will automate that as soon as it is potentially cheaper than people without a second thought. Ever seen what an auto plant used to look like? Ever seen what one looks like now? Robots are limited by computing power. And we're at the point where that's just feasible in a high decision environment like driving. In a year the cost will be half to perform the same number of processes per second. In ten the cost will be 10%. In twenty it will be .01%. Are you old enough to remember when long distance calls were so expensive that calling home on a trip was almost cost prohibitive? Or cellular roaming charges? Now they are essentially free - included with basic service. In just about a decade.
Single-pilot jet widebody freight ops are going to happen in the next decade. Zero-pilot widebody freight ops in under 15 years. Even if not in the US, somewhere in the world they will allow it, and it will work, and it will save that company money and give them a competitive advantage. How long a track record of zero accident flying in all-cargo ops will they need before they hold that up as a model for passenger carriers to emulate? Five, ten years? How long did it take the iPhone to displace Blackberry as the gold standard in cell phones? One year? Two?
Constant change is the only constant.
Comparing a car to a plane is ridiculous. They have been working on self-driving cars for over a decade. They still haven’t deployed them yet. You can teach a teenager how to drive a car in 5 minutes its that simple. Making the jump to an airliner is an exponential leap, and its not tech that is the limiting factor, its the infrastructure. Boeing and Airbus would first have to start designing a plane to fly autonomously, which nobody will buy now. Also ATC and the existing human-powered system won’t integrate well with autonomous planes. The risk factor is basically ZERO for aviation, and much higher for cars. Also you over-estimate how expensive human pilots are. We are 7-8% of the total cost of a ticket. How much more is it going to cost to redesign planes to operate without humans. More than 7-8% of an existing plane for sure. How long will airlines have autonomous planes sitting around because nobody will fly in them. How long will manufacturers build them if airlines stop buying them? If just ONE crashes, then NOBODY will ever get on one again. Comparing cars to planes is ridiculous. I got this from listening to my brother-in-law who is an engineer at Waymo (you can google them). He said 30 years at the earliest for commercial aviation, and it won’t happen first in the US. He said its been a monumental effort with Billions of dollars of investments to just get a fricking car to drive by itself. He also told me when I asked “Why is it so important to self-drive a car. Its not that hard”. He said the #1 reason is the TIME OF THE DRIVER. When you commute to work, and its an hour is many cities, that time is virtually wasted. You could be working on something, sleeping, doing whatever, but NOT driving. That makes it very valuable to people. People on a plane already aren’t doing anything. So whether there are pilots, or not, it doesn’t matter to them.
No investor, venture capitalist, or startup founder wants to spend that kind of money, time and effort to knock 7-8% off the cost of an industry. There isn’t enough money there. Economics are what keeps us in our seat. Yeah, if there was some massive pilot shortage and 30% of all flights had to be cancelled and they needed to solve the problem of lack of pilots, there would be enough impetus to do this, but there isn’t.
There are just enough pilots who are worried about being replaced because someone at McDonalds lost their job to a machine that takes a customer’s order, so airline pilot must be next.
The level of self-importance of airline pilots never ceases to amaze me.
I only have 15 years left as a pilot. I’m not worried about it at all.