kc135pirate

Here Here! There is very little tolerance for risk when it comes to flying. Someday we will see a pilotless aircraft, but that thing will have to have a perfect record during its adoption. Otherwise the flying public will vote with their wallets to shut it down.

742Dash

It took 55 years to go from the 1903 Wright Flyer to the 707. And 55 years after that we had the 787. A large advance, but all at the margins. Better structure, better engine materials, better systems. But the basic science and engineering have not moved much since the 707. In fact it they have not moved much since the B-47 flew in 1948.

And sometimes we even go backwards. It was 59 years from the Wright Flyer to the A-12 (which lead to the SR-71). Yet here in 2017 the number of airplanes that can cruise above Mach 1 can be counted on one hand, and none of them are as fast or have the range of the A-12.

And in the hear and now there are no space shuttles roaming about in space.

METO Guido

C130driver

Does the technology exist? Yes. Does it exist to do it with the level of safety and efficiency of a human? Absolutely not and it will be a long time at that.

The cost of paying for 2 pilots in the jets is miniscule compared to the costs for fielding this technology, the regulatory and liability issues.

Give it a rest guys, my dad wanted me to be a doctor so he tried to scare me away from becoming a pilot stating that by 2020 pilots would be obsolete haha. He is a very smart engineer...clearly we have a ways to go.

e6bpilot

The question here is what is an acceptable level of safety?
For part 121 passenger operations in the US, that level of safety has evolved to a point where it is about as close to 100 percent as you can get. We are an aging workforce flying antiquated equipment in a very complex airspace system and we have an amazing safety record in the last 10 years. People like that. It's why air travel is as popular as it is.
That did not happen overnight.
Airlines would replace pilots with robots tomorrow if they could. Pilots are a huge expense and they have to pay two or more of them to fly each segment. The public would never swallow it, though, even to replace one of the pilots. The level of safety and reliability just isn't there.
The technology is still evolving. Yes, a robot can land a plane in a controlled situation, but so can george right now. How is that newsworthy? The mechanics of flying the plane are such a small part of what we do up there. "A pilot often earns his whole years' salary in one flight."
When machines flying airplanes reaches or exceeds that level of safety and the flying public (not a few engineers or tech geeks) is ready to accept that, then this will slowly become reality. We are many many decades away from that.

Bigapplepilot

Really? It may not work like that now, but once computers reach(and exceed) human intelligence all bets are off I believe. I think Ray Kurzweil has said 2029 for that, and 2047 for The Singularity.

https://themerkle.com/googles-ai-is-...gineers-at-it/

Whiplash6

That's exactly what I'm going to tell you... because a computer COULD do that.. and not submerge the aircraft in the process.

A computer wouldn't need to take time to ask the controller where are the surrounding airports; it would already know. It wouldn't have to call for and run checklists; they would be completed in a blink of an eye. It wouldn't have to take a wild ass guess on whether it could make a return back to La Guardia to land on a runway instead of on a river; it would know precisely how far it could glide given the state of the aircraft and the environmental conditions.

I'm not knocking Sully. He did a great job. Far better than most human pilots could have. But better than a computer? Nah

tomgoodman

Cheaper than a computer? Yah.

SpeedyVagabond

Yup. If it came to pass I''d never ride in the back of a pilotless aircraft. Would any of you?

Caveman

Cargo segment will be first to be impacted by AI. I suppose that's why you'll see most of the more "sensational" responses to discussions in forums like these about augmented cockpits from folks in that segment.

Couple three more hull losses will politically accelerate the development, and make the required infrastructure investments that much more economically viable.

The economic and error management advantages aren't mature TODAY for an AI augmented cockpit.

How long do you think that'll be though?

Hint-Why would Boeing who as a public traded company, beholden to shareholders, decide to invest Millions of dollars into this if it had no immediate merit or value? The answer...they wouldn't.

Anyone want to take a bet on when and which segments will address AI augmented cockpits in future CBAs first?