TiredSoul

Here you go making assumptions again.
The technology is there Chief, it just needs to be applied.

TiredSoul

Here you go making assumptions again.
The technology is there Chief, it just needs to be applied.
As long as it doesn’t run on Microsoft.

Eudaimonia

Current CX 350 guy here, so this affects me directly, although I doubt I'll still be at the airline come 2025.

This has been worked on for quite some time; a number of delivery flights from Toulouse have trialed the concept. All the CX 350s have 'auto emergency descent' enabled. In a nutshell, if the cabin altitude exceeds 14000', a 15 sec countdown begins, after which the aircraft automatically commences a descent at VMO - 5 to grid MORA (+ correction for non standard temp & pressure), turns right & intercepts an approximate 3nm offset, squawks 7700, puts TCAS below, extends speed brakes, the whole lot.

So my issue is not about whether auto emergency descent will save lives if the single pilot is incapacitated, but what about the other aspects of effectively single pilot longhaul. Weather avoidance? Keeping awake during your WOCL having signed on at midnight local, when you already lose 12 nights sleep/month? A famous line from Australian Special Forces - "two is one, one is none". One pilot is no redundancy.

No doubt these sorts of things will happen eventually, but this is just a fluff piece news article to fill a void. Sure as hell won't be happening in 2025. The local regulator still thinks its 1970!

Halon1211

I heard Boeing is going to be building a plane for something that can do that. In the article I was reading it said they wanted their best engineers, so they selected the ones designed the 737 MAX...what could go wrong...

RIPV3

If something is fully automated, even with a "secure" link, someone can probably hack into it. Bad idea.

Halon1211

Airbus went to test it out one time and it was actually successfully hack multiple times.

RIPV3

Did they use the same people who set up Hillary's private server?

captjns

The earliest examples of electronically guided model aircraft were hydrogen-filled model airships of the late 19th century. They were flown as a music hall act around theater auditoriums using a basic form of spark-emitted radio signal.

Radio controlled aircraft were used for target practice during WWII.

So now you have an airplane with AI installed with the capability of flying from point A to point B, from preflight initialization… self diagnostic checks… to post flight diagnostics. At the end of the day they will be 450 ton drones with programmed missions. Hey on a high note… regionals will still be around.

But they still have radio control for an override for the just in case factor.

DeadStick

True, but once the AI has fully mastered making cat noises on guard, it’ll be curtains for the RJ bros as well. 🙁

rickair7777

That's part of the problem... a truly secure, sufficiently robust data comm system with the required bandwidth and QoS absolutely does not exist, not even close. It would almost certainly have to be satellite based for global coverage... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

So *somebody* has to make a monumental investment to do that. Government? For what purpose, to eliminate a few thousand highly-paid union jobs? Airlines? They can't see much beyond next quarter's earnings report, much less sinking cash into something that *might* enable autonomy that *might* someday save their distant successors some costs? Naw, let's just do distributions instead. Maybe Boeing and airbus will do a joint venture someday, but BCA is still focused on selling '60's era guppys as it's main product line.


And even after all that, it cannot be totally reliable because SATCOM is a very weak signal and thus very jammable... unless you maybe want to orbit even larger satellites with nuclear power systems on board to provide the kind of signal power output that ground-based systems employ.