Originally Posted by 2StgTurbine

I don't know of many 8,000 ft runways with no approaches. And actually Garmin has already designed an emergency AP function that will recognize an incapacitated pilot and will land the plane at the nearest suitable (it looks at weather and runway performance) airport and will notify emergency services. It requires no ground navigation soruces, so it can conduct the equivalent of a CAT III approach to any runway in its database.



I sure hope not. I am sure the computer will be smart enough to know that low approaches provide no useful data since the tower controllers are not trained in evaluating landing gear failures from a mile away while the aircraft zooms by at 160 mph. And either way, the computer will run the same checklist whether tower says, "The gear looks like its down" or they say, "The gear is partially down"



The answer to all of these is yes. Humans were able to write all of those QRH procedures, so humans can also program those procedures in code. Whatever techniques you were taught can also be programed with the benefit of perfect recall and execution.

Sure we can try to come up with all the possible scenarios where a human pilot is better, but the programers will think of the same scenarios and will program the same response. There WILL be unthinkable scenarios outside the limits of the programming, but then you have to wonder if the average pilot would do better and even if they could, odds are the safety record on a whole would be better than human pilots. 1549 is a perfect example. Sim tests showed that the flight COULD have returned to LGA if you remove human reaction time. Lots of the pilots who attempted this failed however. Even though the crew of 1549 did an amazing job, a computer could have done better simply because it would have almost no reaction time and could troubleshoot the problem while executing a perfect flight path adjusting for the exact gross weight and winds.

But there is no need to worry, pilotless planes won't be a threat because to make a pilotless plane that is better than a human pilot would require lots of money and more importantly, it would require the entire world to rebuild the airspace system. Considering how long it took the FAA to integrate GPS, the ADS-B out debacle, and the fact that some countries still insist on using meters I'm not too worried.