Actually... sometimes the bridges of large cargo ships are left unattended. They have autopilot, and radar which sounds a proximity alarm. And if the AP fails, the ship won't roll inverted or anything really bad.

It's up to the master, and prudence dictates you only do that in un-congested open ocean. But prudence doesn't always prevail.

Here's a link to contact your representatives regarding this issue.

http://www.alpa.org/advocacy/cta/faa-744

Wrong, just wrong. Speaking out of your arse.

The pay would increase? The only damn reason the airlines would go for this catastrophically bad idea is to cut costs, why the hell would they increase pay?

I would have agreed that it was coming in 5-10 years. I was one of the firm believers that the public would be all for it so long as a ticket was 20 dollars cheaper. But then two things happened. One was a self-driving Uber killed a cyclist in Tempe. The other was the Southwest incident. Hearing that Captain ask for things like extended final to get configured; asking for medical personnel to meet the aircraft, things like that. You cannot, absolutely cannot, program an airplane to do things like that and keep the passengers safe. And as for the self-driving car blasting the pedestrian, I've heard every argument in the book. But the pedestrian wasn't in a crosswalk! Okay, so what happens when a kid runs out after a ball and the self-driving car doesn't do what it's supposed to do?

My point is, ultimately, the public does not want this crap.

Fighting this is like the blacksmith fighting the automobile or more currently teamsters fighting driverless trucks. We might be able to delay a little while but the writing is on the wall. Single pilot and pilotless planes will happen, the only question is when.

That said, I support ALPA fighting the good fight but all they can do is delay. I wouldn't carry high hopes for any measure of real success.

If I had been driving that vehicle in Tempe that cyclist would be just as dead. It just wouldn't be in the news. People will forget about Captain Cool when they can save $10 per seat to go see the rat.

You should look into the Tempe incident more closely.

I believe lidar was active. (It can “see” far better than any human.)

The initial statement by the sheriff was incorrect. The car should have been able to avoid this accident. Uber’s AI appears to be at fault. Just like I predicted, these systems are just parlor tricks, and people are dying because of it.

Anyone who understands computing at all knows that the kind of AI we now see is not anywhere near ready for this. There as some very basic differences between how computers work and how the brain works. Investors and technology circle jerks are attempting to play like these issues don’t exist. (Hint: all the big evangelists for this stuff have financial stakes. None actually work in AI.)

I think the pedestrian was first spotted about 15 seconds prior.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/03/21/uber-crash-tape-tells-very-different-story-from-police-report-time-for-some-regulations/amp/

This stuff is far from ready for prime time.

I never said the car shouldn't have performed better. I said I would've hit the biker too :). Just because cars aren't ready yet doesn't mean in a few years they'll won't be mostly there. What is easier to fix, a software glitch in a car's autopilot or getting 100 million Americans to put down their phones when they're driving? Once computer driving is common flying won't be far behind.

We won’t end up going from 2 pilots to 1 to zero. It will be directly from 2 to zero. There’s no advantage to single pilot, especially augmented with a remote system.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see the biggest danger of this to be aircraft/pilot related. When talking about advanced networks the biggest danger is network security.

When you automate the second pilot via a remote network, it becomes possible for someone else to intercept and augment that network. It’s the same challenge with the concept of a pilotless aircraft. Hacking a network of pressurized tin cans carrying 100+ people or several tons of cargo gives you a nice little missile to play around with.

The largest argument I normally hear is that “the military has done this for years and never had an incident.” That we know of. And for the record, the military is a small network of several hundred drones that are operated discretely. The pool of people knowledgeable in the operation of the advanced networking of these drones is relatively small, and the work required for someone to intercept and augment the network is high, with I high probability of data interference detection.

Make the same system commonplace and widely deployed across tens of thousands of daily operations and the chance of network intrusion detection goes way down. Additionally, the Regs don’t keep up with the ever-changing technology marketplace. Certifying new, more secure data management systems for aviation is a grueling process. The yield would be that hackers would have access to older coding, technology, and systems that would over time become easier to manipulate.

How that manipulation affects an aircrafts operation is to be determined. But anyone questioning the validity of data systems security need only to ask how hard it would be to bring an entire TRACON to the floor by precisely placing and activating several VHF transmitters on the right frequencies in the right places. Even Guard isn’t safe. The reason this DOESN’T happen is because it would take a serious, concerted effort of labor. An automated airliner network would only take access to a port on the network, which could happen from the comfort of ones couch.

WHEN the airlines, politicians, and manufacturers debut single pilot airplanes and pilotless airplanes, I foresee the first casualty to be the cause of a nefarious individual with an axe to grind, and access to the network.

In data management systems, it’s not if, it’s WHEN will a breach occur.