Who goes "Pilot-less" first?
 

Regional or Mainline?

Airbus Says It Has The Technology To Fly Planes With No Pilots, But The Challenge Will Be Convincing People To Get On Them

By Bill Bostock, Business Insider. "Airbus has developed technology to fly passenger jets with no pilots, and is ready to deploy it today, according to one of its top executives. But the company knows that autonomous commercial flight remains a distant prospect because of barriers which are human, rather than technical."

It's coming. This probably won't be a viable career for my 5 year old.

Envoy. Pilots flow to AA to become flight attendants, because their management hates them so much.

In real life, it would take one demonstration of a theoretical radio-controlled 9/11 to keep this from ever happening.

Probably cargo, but after the GPS debacle last week I wouldn’t worry too much about pilotless airplanes.

Name one complex computer system that behaves exactly as instructed, I’ll wait.

How will a pilotless plane participate in the ATC system?
What would you in the event of a systems failure?
What about an event like a loss of GPS like the CRJ has been experiencing?

Pilots use to fly planes, more and more they are becoming automation managers, someone is going to continue to have to manage the automation. It’s frequently does weird things and will continue to do so. I’m not worried.

Off topic -
Why is this in the 9E sub forum?

Check your email.

This isnt happening in any of our lifetimes.

God not this again..

Boeing probably said how cool and technologically advanced the MAX would be.....how’s that working out?

As pilots some of you clearly lack common sense.

The computers that fly the airplanes don't have to be perfect. They just need to demonstrate a better safety record that human pilots. This will happen eventually but I do think we are a way out from it being career threatening. Not because the technology to do it far fetched, but because there will be a lot of bureaucratic red tape slowing the pace down.

And yeah, cargo would be the first to go and I would bet there will always be someone (not necessarily a pilot) on board that is trained to pull a circuit breaker or force reboot of certain systems and such via instructions from someone on the ground. In passengers service, this would be flight attendants... they're a lot cheaper than we are.

Going to have factor in additional weight/cost for chutes when ctrl+alt+del doesn't work.

I will never understand the human desire to replace themselves out of jobs, especially for something like flying an airplane. There’s something to say about getting on a plane with another human who has a vested interest in getting back to terra firma safely. Does a computer? It’ll try I guess.


One day AI gets smart enough and replaces those people whose job it is to replace human being jobs with machines. Maybe then they’ll acknowledge they went too far.

This.... I find most people that support all these jobs including ours getting taken away for robots are usually tech geeks that have little to no involvement in said industry or work as a outsider and not on the front lines. Where does it stop? Who says a computer can’t do “all” our jobs? I not long ago read that IBMs Watson is soon to probably replace accountants becuase it can more accurately predict the economy and better help money management and investments then people. Eventually there will be a point when the people throwing fingers saying everything should be done by robots will find themselves where a robot can do “their” job. That’s when it stops.

Every computer system behaves exactly as instructed.
The problem is that humans are not capable to understand the instructions required by the complex computer system to produce results we expect.
And therein lies the problem.

AI is a paradox. It relies on humans to create and program the AI, thus already is flawed (sorry tech geeks) Thus anything AI comes up with will eventually have a flawed response to something. We are already at a point that most of the world's pilot's skills are degraded as far as actual look at the instruments and fly the plane. Good luck when George craps the bed and a "reset qualified" FA or dispatcher has to figure it out.

At some point they will give it a shot and when one ends up crashing they will scramble to get people back into the cockpits so metal keeps moving. It’s not an if it crashes it when I like knowing there is someone sitting up there that want to get home at night just like I do and I think most the population feels the same.

Haha. There’s no going back to
Human pilots. A software glitch caused two 737’s to crash. They aren’t getting rid of computers because of it

That’s why my autopilot will get behind the airplane sometimes and I have to disengage it and hand fly it myself?

On a different end, how about when the east coast lost gps coverage? Even something as simple as the airline computers crashing. They can’t even get a software to work 100%, but want to stick people in a metal tube with no one at the controls? Maybe it’ll happen in my kid’s life time, but not mine.

Crashes will happen. Crashes already happen though. All they have to do is show it happens at the same rate or less than human flown aircraft.

And to those that say AI only does what a human programs it to do, they are already working on AI that can program itself to solve unexpected problems.

I'm not advocating it, but it's coming eventually. Probably not soon though, for the same reason we fly with such antiquated computer tech in the airplane now.

Luddites crack me up.

They jump up and down celebrating when they get a great deal on an Amazon purchase of some thing-doo-dad, which is cheaper than it used to be because it is now made on a 3D printer. It cost more in the past because it was made by a skilled craftsman. A skilled craftsman who is now out of a job.

But when technology threatens the Luddite's craft, he riots and starts smashing looms.