Aero1900

This doesn't really stay completely on topic here but an observation: drones and AI powered aircraft make a ton of sense in a military application but not in a passenger carrying one.

If you wanted to develop a drone for military purpose, you can significantly simplify the aircraft by not developing any of the systems necessary for carrying humans. No windows, no doors, no packs, no pressurize cabin, no pressurization equipment, etc. But if you want to develop a passenger carrying "drone" you still need all that. Makes just leaving a pilot up front make more sense.

Secondly, the entire focus of airline operations has been built on the two pilot cockpit. To drop to a single pilot operation would require a complete rewrite of virtually every thing we do. That's an utterly massive change. Almost hard to even imagine. So, maybe the push is to skip the single pilot idea and go straight to a fully autonomous aircraft. That's a heck of a leap to make.

A lot bigger than a Tesla that can cruise down the highway 98% of the time. Im saving aggressively for retirement but I don't see us losing our jobs any time soon

GHawk

Five pages in and all that's been discussed is accidents caused by malfunctions, glitches, oversights, etc. Nothing about intentional acts, say a hacker leaving a passenger jet in a holding pattern until their demands are met or it flames out? Maybe ALPA can finance a blockbuster with that plot and set this back a couple decades.

SonicFlyer

The middle class is shrinking because the government makes it harder for the middle class to survive with taxation, inflation, and excessive regulation.


You must be a lot of fun at parties.


We don't get paid to fly the plane, a trained monkey can do that. We get paid to make decisions, which AI is a long way off from being able to do consistently and reliably. Humans are not perfect of course, but AI is far less perfect than humans are. In 50-100 years that very well may change, but not for the foreseeable future.

Red Forman

They can’t certify decades old technology, Boeing will continue leading from behind.

Cleared4appch

Exactly. I’ve had the same. There are just an infinite number of scenarios I can think of that the designers are going to need to address. Think about the number of write ups we give the mechanics in a given day at a particular carrier. Now think about the number of write ups over the course of a week. A month? A year? And yet we somehow think we’re ready to just catapult this industry to fully autonomous airplanes? Regarding software, until we can design software that never breaks down, freezes, glitches, etc. I’m not worried about this.

A few scenarios I have for Boeing that I’d like to see them address: is the airplane going to ‘see’ that squall line thunderstorm ahead? Will it divert? Will it turn to the south to that nearest suitable airport? Or will a ‘glitch’ in its software cause it to keep heading right into that squall? Another one. If the ILS glide slope fails/goes out of service approaching minimums in heavy wx, will the software command the machine to execute the missed? Or will it ‘glitch’ when it loses vertical guidance and just continue in a steady state descent straight into the ground, and not initiate the flare? One more. On departure climb out, the airplane hits a massive flock of geese. Will it be able to perform like captain sully and do it as quickly as he did?

This is just a few scenarios out of an infinite amount of scenarios that we could sit here all day discussing, that airplane designers will have to address. The flight testing of these machines will have to perform equal to or better than manned airplanes. No exceptions. Any ‘bugs’ in the system will have to be worked out until there aren’t any problems with it. Period. The bar will be set pretty darn high for the manufacturer. It will costs billions in flight testing/certification. I honestly just can’t see this happening in this century with passenger airline ops.

I’m honestly not worried about this. The only people who get so enamored with this stuff are the tech gurus who have ZERO understanding of airplanes and aviation. They have zero idea of just how incredibly complex passenger jets are and the environment we operate in. They don’t seem to understand the safety margins in commercial aviation. We have made aviation incredibly safe with 2 pilots onboard. I just don’t get why we are even thinking about trying to throw something into the mix that has the potential to make this industry incredibly dangerous.

I honestly can see this autonomous airplane program with Boeing going the way of the U.S. army Comanche program. It will be incredibly costly with many accidents.

Halon1211

well said!!!

I don’t get worried about those articles…as some one pointed out it’s just for the top executives to excite the share holders and PR crap.

OOfff

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Ya okay buddy. If not for the government boot on the neck of the middle class, wealth concentration would reverse!

Nantonaku

He might be against it but he was very clear in his Tim Urban interview when he talked Neuralink that no one can stop the train. It is coming.

myrkridia

The other factor here is for AI to get to the point of flying pilotless aircraft anywhere near as safely as 2 qualified pilots would also mean an absurd amount of jobs just became irrelevant. No amount of prepping can really protect you from such a fundamental shift from what an economy looks like right now.

three1five

I think people underestimate the amount of infrastructure that would be required to make pilotless airliners absolutely safe.

The fancy new cars with the driver assist sensors have issues in rain. And construction. Not to mention both. Jeppesen charts take weeks, sometimes months, to update taxiway changes. Fly to somewhere in Central America and think about a computer that could handle BOS LAX on a good day, handling a Central America turn with pop up thunderstorms all over.

It is certainly possible to go fully automated but when you look at the infrastructure standards which must be met at airports, and the burden of aircraft and navigation systems redundancy, pilots might not seem so expensive to keep around.

I had to abruptly modify a flight path to avoid flying directly through a large flock of migratory birds a few trips ago. Not sure a computer could have sensed the threat. (Then again had it been nighttime I wouldn’t have sensed that threat either.)