Google and the removal of the pilot.
 

“It all started with a dream to fly without a pilot.“I guess I know it is coming but do they have to romanize it like we are a major problem? https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/g...y-merlin-labs/

At least you won't have to worry about wearing a mask in the cockpit.

If you think anyone would get on a plane without a pilot, then you're crazy. The technology exists, but it won't happen. They can't even get a car to drive down a flat road without hitting someone. Won't happen in my lifetime, and probably not my grandkid's either.

Who wears a mask in the cockpit? I haven’t seen it yet.

While boarding passengers while the flight deck door is open? You must be a freight dog.

Yes while boarding. Thought you meant when we close the door.

Just remember not even a month ago bad actors were able to hack a pipeline and hold it for ransom, any autonomous vehicle would be vulnerable to the same kind of attack.

Yup. I'm pretty sure this will be the limiting factor for a looooong time.

Insurance companies will be a bigger limiting factor than anything else.

A bigger factor than "public trust in flying in a remotely piloted airplane"?

People are stupid. So, yeah.

Excellent point.

or works for another airline. Not every passenger airline asks this of their pilots.

We've been flying the Global Hawk for about 20 years, and that thing has a wingspan larger than the 737. How long before they start moving cargo like that? Unless you're 80 years old, I'm thinking in your lifetime, you will see freight dogs replaced, driverless/augmented cars, and some form of automated airborne personal transport in the next 25 years, if not sooner.

The discussion was about moving people. In that context, it will not happen in my lifetime, and I'm no where near retirement.

For all the reasons mentioned in this post, no matter what the price of the ticket, people will not get on a pilotless plane, passengers are not that stupid. Consider the variables that may or may not exist on current drones. Snow storms, Slick taxi ways, slick high speed turn offs, short runways (SNA,LGA,DCA) Deicing, and the thousands of variables that pilots take into consideration every day.

We agree to disagree.

It's been a while since I worked with GH, but I recall several limitations that made me question the viability of GH or Predator/Reaper type ops in the commercial sector.

It's possible that they have been adequately remediated, but I honestly doubt it.

um…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran...Q-170_incident

As long as this is a threat, I don’t see pilotless commercial transport

How does the accident rate of the GH compare to the accident rate of part 121 airlines?

Of all the aircraft to pick why pick a King Air? After retiring from the airlines, and after spending 10 years on the Bus, I got rated in the King Air 300. I had flown an earlier version King Air in the early 1980's. The truly sad thing is how much alike they were. 12 anti / deicing switches, a B-29 pressurization controller that required technique to operate properly. A Byzantine electrical system with current limiters, hall effect devices, and an overall weird buss configuration.

I would think it would be much simpler to remote control a much more automated platform. To me flying a King Air 300 single pilot would be a very high work load, much higher than a lite jet. Yes computers are great and really skilled at doing things but this computerized flight control system will be a one-armed paper hanger just to operate the aircraft systems efficiently. Operating single engine or with a significant degradation in electrical power will be a challenge.

That's my $.02

Most likely because it was the cheapest POS they could get a hold of and will make a non marketable prototype that will commercially fail. Like most GA ventures, it’s going to get some press then will quietly disappear.

That's probably what the guy that drove the elevator back in the day said, as well as the trolley driver. How many of our customers blindly get on a train/people mover at the airport and don't give a crap that there is no one driving it? (LAS/EWR/TPA just to name a few examples)

Once they figure out that you can control a few large cargo transports across the ocean with a few guys in a trailer park, how long will Jeff Bezos wait? That's definitely cheaper than paying a few thousand freight dogs.

Cargo will fall first, while 121 drops its crew requirement down to 1 pilot because of the 'shortage' we will experience. Think about it. Before a worldwide pandemic even ended, two idiots decided now would be a great time to start another domestic airline. One even tried to get free labor by announcing flight attendants would only be for college interns.

The point of the article is that technology is coming for your job. You can ignore it, invest in it, or call your congressman. Telling me that we disagree is just winding the clock.

I have 15 years left. While I believe that someday we will see autonomous airliners, I believe it will take longer to get there than many people think.
Maybe, just maybe I'll see single pilot cargo in my career. Will the tech be available? Sure. Will it make it through the approval process in the next 15-20 years? I doubt it.
Worth less than $.02

We don’t do it, however I’ve flown with two who wore it the whole time.

Agreed, they already control trucking company policies. Automatic transmissions, formal training or two years experience, in-cab cameras, sway sensors, speed governors, electronic logs, etc. If you waive these policies rates skyrocket.

Pilotless planes won't happen for a very long time. It will come down to cost. A pilot will be cheaper than designing in sufficient system redundancy for pilotless planes. It will also be heavier, all those systems, a pilot, relatively speaking is pretty light.

All that tech comes at a cost, and at least for the forseable future, pilots will be cheaper. IF one tries, you also have to account for the additional certification costs that the FAA will certainly require.

I don't believe you can efficiently retrofit a current design, so it will have to be a clean sheet design with all the systems integrated. Boeing can't get a new design done in less than 15 years now. How long do you think it will take the FAA to come up with regulations to cover a commercial-passenger clean sheet design?

I blame Southwest!

If Southwest were entirely responsible for the perpetual production of the 737, it would have a built in mechanism for the pilots to keep their clothes on.

Comparing automated light rail or other fixed track systems with remotely piloted aircraft is not even a valid comparison.
Just one mishap where passengers are fatally injured and trust in the system will crumble.
How would that Quantas A380 have faired if it were remotely piloted? My knowledge of the incident is that it took all three pilots, each working separate critical action items, to save that plane. I don’t see it happening anytime in near future.

Well the good news is, if a remotely “piloted” aircraft goes down the pilot will be unharmed.

it will still somehow be reported as “pilot error”

When the first ACTUAL driverless Taxi Cab is in operation in an actual city, when the first driverless Bus is running from city to city, when we see driverless trucks on the highway-
Only THEN is the possibility of a pilotless transport a reality.

Sure, for point A to B you could "fly" a pilotless vehicle. They do it now- they are called Drones. But those drones are very specific and limited to where and what they can do.
It will take new aircraft from Boeing & Airbus. Clean sheet aircraft with built in, hardened systems.

Boeing can't even get a 50+ yr old airplane right.. they can't build a 756 replacement.. we are decades from when the first true Cargo Flight happens over populated free world with no one in the pilot seat.

Interestingly enough, it was back in the late teens (2017-2019) that people and certain industries were touting that we would have pizza and amazon deliveries by drones in 2020. Hmmm....

Motch
FS, FP & FtC

232 would have been a crater in Eastern Iowa with no survivors if there hadn’t been four exceptional pilots working together up there.

And that clean sheet aircraft will be designed using the people and processes that brought us the 737 Max.

Once it's designed, the FAA for fear of screwing up the oversight, will take 20 yrs to approve it.

Motch

Hope all is well.

While I have some background knowledge on such a concept, I really can’t go into it. Suffice it to say not only would the aircraft have to be firewalled but the data link comm and the operations center managing the aircraft.

The RQ4 reference in an earlier post demonstrates that very point. DARPA commander told me in 1995 the U-2 would be retired by the year 2000…..

The UCAV would replace manned fighters…..

Not.

We are not even close and agree there will have to be simpler demonstrations of success such as autonomous taxis well before the dynamic three dimensional world of aviation is considered plausible much less viable.

INTERNET Win of the Day!
Ain't that the truth...
Interesting read about the issues they (Boeing) are now having with the 787's in one of the recent AW&ST.

We are WAYS from this happening... though not around the corner- probably somewhere on the distant horizon.


Amen.
All good here, thanks for asking (and PM sent).

Every time I fly, I realize how important a human being is in the cockpit. No matter WHAT they try to do to stream line the operations, the "unknowns" continue to crop up.
Oh, and going into MCO the other evening we got 4 runway changes in a 10 minute timeframe. We stuck with the 3rd one but you have to wonder how a computer/AI would have handled that?!

FS, FP & FtC
Always
Motch

a computer would have handled it very well, in milliseconds with each change.

If it gets overloaded and locks up, you just turn it off then restart it.

The way I see it, it would be remotely piloted. So in the terminal area, you would have a man in the loop, albeit with a slight time delay. A computer/AI would be the follow on spiral, if you will.

Think about it. China decides to build a cargo freighter. Amazon decides to buy it. Will anyone care if a 767 sized drone is flying rubber dog crap from mainland China across the Pacific Ocean? XMN to ANC and back. Once that thing has upset the marketplace, just like other disrupters (i.e. Tesla, Amazon, Apple, etc) it will be game on. Even if the FAA says no to ANC, Canada or Mexico would be happy for jobs unloading that thing on a regular basis. Nobody is going to tell me that Mexico would say no for 'safety' concerns.

At least you acknowledge that there's still a human being in the loop...
So it is one human pilot on the ground for one airplane? or are they controlling numerous aircraft?
What happens when ma and pa kettle pull the chute on their cirrus and inadvertently shut down that airport? Do all these AI/Computer controlled aircraft scatter to other locations with a pilot on the ground there?
This is a Pandora's Box of unexpected issues as one issue happens..

You give the Chinese aircraft industry more credit than I do.
All I have to do is look at what has happened at COMAC and ACAC to realize that what you envision is far from reality.
And I also think the residence of the airspace around ANC will also have something to say.
IF the Chinese develop such an aircraft as you mention, I would expect them to fly it within their own airspace before sending it over the Pacific.

Lets have this same discussion in 10 years and see where the world, China and the US has gone with regards to this..

Motch