I won't have to. If you're one of the minority that has a job, chances are that you'd be taxed.

Who says I want pilotless airliners?

 

Yes, and it will free them up to do other more productive things. Have you studied history or economics? When lower level tasks are automated that allows a lot of labor to be used for other activities. Maybe we should bring back the horse and buggy and share croppers and elevator operators?




That is called theft, otherwise known as communism. It has failed everywhere it has been tried, not to mention it is antithetical to basic human rights.

 

Threads like this give me a headache.

Large cargo aircraft will go single pilot first.
Once a statistically significant increase in safety has been established, single pilot ops will come to passenger ops
In both cases, the automatic nature will be the primary driver and the human pilot will be the backup.

Then, when a proper infrastructure has been designed, tested, and built, unmanned cargo planes will come online.

But let's discuss the REAL reason for single pilot an zero pilot aviation operations.

Safety, right?
WRONG!!

it's money.
So when it becomes economically advantageous to kick the pilots out, it will happen.
Who to watch? Who will profit?
Google, Amazon, Boeing.

Timeframe?
It's difficult to predict. Cargo will likely happen soon, basically because no one cares if a cargo plane crashes (brutal, but true).

Skip the Sully argument. An automated system would have made it back to the airport.

Final argument:
If people willing fly in Spirit Air to save $25, they will fly on an unmanned airplane to save $25.

The whole "Normal passengers would NEVER feel safe in an unmanned airplane" argument is no match for the inherent cheapness of the average flying commuter.

 

captain obvious

 

Great summary... Now put the bottle down and stepaway from the keyboard; )

 

Perhaps they will. But consider that almost all large cargo aircraft are converted versions of passenger aircraft. So for this to come to pass either:
1.) A company will need to develop and certify custom built cargo aircraft for single pilot ops, or....
2.) A company will need to develop and certify transport category aircraft (pax and cargo) that CAN be used single pilot or two pilot, and cargo operators will then choose the single pilot version, while pax operators continue to operate with multiple pilots.

Either way is going to require the development of new airplanes. I suppose a possible third option would be mass purchase of something like ALIAS (being developed by DARPA) to replace one pilot. The downside to single pilot for any operation is a Germanwings guy or Auburn Calloway type-individual as your single pilot. Yes, there isn't a tremendous loss of life if its just a cargo airplane that someone decides to commit suicide with, but it is damaging to the brand of the company in question. So two pilots is an insurance policy of sorts for the brand (and the value of the cargo on board!). Consider from the perspective of a cargo operator: you have a $250 million dollar airplane that has $50 million of revenue freight in the back, and who knows how many millions of brand value, and you're going to skimp on your "pilot-suicide-insurance" by not having an FO, saving ~$200/hr? You still need to pay the Captain in a single pilot scenario. How many hours of Germanwings/Auburn Calloway-free flight time do you need to do to make this a worthwhile course-of-action? Even discounting the drop in stock price/brand value that would be associated with a total hull/cargo loss, you're talking 1.5 million flight hours to break even from your "pilot-suicide-insurance" savings.

This discussion also doesn't account for the CRM enhancements and flexibility that a 2 pilot crew offers. If something goes wrong with your robot-copilot 8 hours into a 16 hour trip, now you have one pilot to do 8 hours of flying and a landing...could be a tall order depending on the destination. Does he divert instead? RTB if it happens just after departure? What if something happens to the lone human on board? It seems to me that a lot more difficulties arise by adding the complexity of more automation and reducing the CRM and redundancy provided by two human pilots.

The other key point to ask here is: What is a statistically significant increase in safety?

Here is a an article regarding the safety of flying ...the takeaway is that in commercial aviation worldwide in 2014, there were 21 fatal crashes in 30 million commercial flights, or 1 in 1.43 million flights that had a fatality.

Along the same lines, here is an analysis of CPU crashes....admittedly from 2012, but for CPUs with a long uptime (30 days uptime over an 8 month span) there was a crash rate of 1 in 190. If we assume that a robot-copilot will only have one critical CPU, and that failure of this critical CPU will result in fatalities, this is still a failure rate some 7000x greater than what is currently experienced in commercial aviation. (I'll concede that a single CPU failure in the robo-pilot probably won't cause fatalities, but I'm also certain that there will be more than 1 critical CPU in a robo-pilot...ultimately somewhat difficult to quantify the CPU failure -> fatality rate).

I'm sure are other ways to look at this, but the important question to consider (rhetorically) is: How can equipment that is several orders of magnitude less reliable than the current multi-human-piloted-aviation-system achieve a statistically significant safety improvement? How much redundancy would be required? How much would all of THAT cost?

Sure, you can program a computer to do the turn back, and if you feed in the precise conditions to a program giving it perfect prior knowledge the computer will make it back to the airport. The difficulty that arises with automated aviation is the interplay between two factors, namely: i) The complexity of the aviation environment, and ii) anti-fragility of human thought process vs. fragility of computer algorithms.

i) Many individuals have raised the issue of complexity in aviation, so I won't completely re-hash those discussions, other than to say: The LEAST complex transportation environment is train systems. By and large these are still operated by two humans. Aviation systems differ from train systems in at least several important regards: the effect of weather, the effect of finite resources on the operation (aka running out of fuel), Degrees of Freedom - Aviation has 3 spatial and 3 rotational vs. Train Systems with 1 or 2 spatial and 0 or 1 rotational dimensions (depending on whether you are looking at a single closed loop of track, or a track with multiple branches), the "cost" of significant system failure in a train system is variable from emergency braking to a safe stop up through total loss vs. in aviation a major system failure is far more likely to result in a hull loss.

ii) The anti-fragility vs. fragility discussion will be unfamiliar unless you have read some of the work of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. The short version is that an anti-fragile system is one which grows stronger when exposed to non-equilibrium stimuli. Healthy human beings are GENERALLY anti-fragile (e.g. you catch a cold, your body recovers and develops antibodies that make you less vulnerable to the same illness in the future, e.g. you exercise and incur muscle micro-trauma -> your body repairs and adapts to be stronger for the next bout of exercise). Computers, at this point in history are GENERALLY fragile (e.g. you give a computer a virus, it destroys it, e.g. a computer experiences a crash, its more likely to experience the same crash in the future).

The result of the interplay between these two factors is that complexity generates unknown (possibly unknowable) situations that could overwhelm a fragile system, but may or may not overwhelm an anti-fragile one.

This argument is impossible to validate in any way other than eventually testing in the marketplace. Sure, there are probably some who would make the tradeoff...personally. I think the decision matrix changes when you have a spouse or child you're caring for. For those that have kids, ask yourself this: With the current state of technology, what would the cost savings need to be for me to fly my child on an unmanned airplane? Or, to state it a different way: "If I fly my child on this unmanned airplane, and it crashes, killing them in the process, will having saved $xxx dollars be worth it?"

When someone can successfully make the savings match the value parents place on their children's lives, then maybe you'll see unmanned passenger aircraft.

 

The economic system we have now is a very recent phenomenon. The idea that you learn a skill(a 'career'), and then get paid so you can pay for a roof over your head and buying food, is a very recent phenomenon and probably doesn't exist on a human timeline. The large majority of our time was hunter gatherer, after that then the agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution and now the Information Age. We have never been through this before. Computers are going to be smarter and faster than humans and that is coming quick. Google's 'Deep Mind' already beat 2 players at Go. And this will only continue to accelerate exponentially. I replied to your post above by linking to an article who's title quipped 'Googles AI is creating AI better than its own engineers.' The terms 'Machine Learning' and 'Deep Neural Networks' comes to mind. You replying that we should bring back horses and elevator operators misses the point. We won't be able to be 'freed up' to do higher tasks when Machine Intelligence will surpass the human brain (which stopped evolving thousands of years ago) and do those things with exponentially faster speed.

That said I believe that when pilots are automated out of the picture 'who is flying the plane' won't matter. Life will be radically changed.

 

Until the single pilot freighter goes down and wipes out an elementary school. Then there's plenty of facks given. Your statement is ignorant.

The technology NOT to lose connectivity with remotely piloted (or co-piloted) aircraft is eons away, if ever. The cost-benefit likely won't ever work. We won't see it for three decades or more.

#freightlivesmatter

 

Boy this is a tough one.

How much would UBI be? Who gets to decide that? What if UBI recipients spend all their free time reproducing such that they overwhelm the available resources? Hopefully some tech genius can build a star-drive...

Who decides how much the actual workforce participants get paid relative to UBI? The workers themselves?

The fundamental problems with UBI is (like all socialism) it assumes that everybody has an inherent right to the spoils of "society".

But society is actually a buzzword that represents actual people, who have their own desires and beliefs, and are harder to herd than cats...unless they are enslaved of course.

With a system like that you need either tyranny to keep it running, or it will typically collapse under it's own weight.

And guess what? UBI would probably not solve society's problems. Given UBI as entitlement people would likely not appreciate it. They would find reasons to be unhappy...religion, the fact that the workers have nicer houses, etc, etc. You what they say about the devil and idle hands.

I don't see it working without a strong hand at the helm. Anybody want to run for Emperor?

 

If you really think that there will be some capitalist utopia, you'd be wrong. Have you ever studied history or economics? Or, have you even read a book? (Ayn Rand doesn't count) In your fantasy land, everyone is educated enough for such jobs. Maybe all of society should be esoteric conceptual engineers.



That is called theft, otherwise known as laissez faire capitalism. It has failed everywhere it has been tried, not to mention it is antithetical to basic human rights.

Translation; Communism is one extreme, laissez faire capitalism is the other. Both are as insidious to society.

The fact remains is that with a growing population and and growing automation that replaces jobs, UBI will not only be a necessity, but also the morally correct solution.