Guaranteed minimum income, anyone?

 

I know, and it's not happening without them.

 

Any drive to transfer piloting to automation will be driven economically, not by the government.

 

But they're a very key enabler. Having the potential technology (we don't) is one thing, certifying it is another. Nobody is likely to spend the vast sums required to develop the technology to certification-ready levels unless the certification authority 1) sends unambiguous signals that it's at least open to the possibility, and 2) provides a reasonably clear road-map to certification.

The FAA has no incentive whatsoever to go out on a limb with #1, and no ability whatsoever to actually do #2.

UAS certification is trivial by comparison...how often will it fall out of the sky, will it land on anyone, and is it heavy enough to hurt much? Unmanned passenger aircraft will have to not fall out of the sky.

When the time comes congress will have to direct it to happen, and fund it. It's not enough of an economic game-changer to be a priority IMO, and won't open up any new markets or benefit to the customer (other than to make them nervous).

You cannot compare it to these trends...

Small cargo drones have the potential to revolutionize (or at least add lots of fuel to the revolution) of on-demand e-commerce.

Driver-less personal cars can free up many billions of man-hours for leisure, rest, or productivity...plus reduce traffic congestion by not driving like tools.

The closest analogy is driverless trucks. There are literally millions of truck drivers in the US, and trucks will be much easier to certify than airliners. There are only about 100,000 airline pilots...the cost to certify and implement vs. the potential savings is way out of whack for the reasonable future. The airlines are certainly not making the investment, it's too long-term for their ROI tastes.

 

Yeah..... sure. You seem important.

Do you know why there is ANY FAA UAS license?
Because Amazon and Google spoke to the president (Obama at the time) and he TOLD the FAA to make it happen.

So, frankly, it's not up to the FAA, it's up to the people with money.

 

I didn't say anything about how important I may or may not be, that's irrelevant. I just said I was better educated, informed, and qualified on AI, systems engineering, regulatory matters, (and probably economics) than you.

I just hate to see the uninformed foaming at the mouth about pilotless airliners...I'm afraid they'll give concessions to management. There are plenty of real issues to worry about instead.


That's what I said, if you read the rest of my post. But the people with money aren't ready to spend trillions of dollars to put 100,000 pilots out of work. Until they're ready to do that, nobody is going to tell the FAA to make it happen.

 

That's not true at all. It sounds good, but it's not true.

 

Except that it IS true.

And some in the FAA aren't too happy about it.


Let me guess, you read an MQ-1 manual once.

 

It really isn't. Must be some of that "fake news" that the politicos keep trumping about.

 

No but guys who used to work for me wrote the MQ-9 manual.

But preds have nothing to do with this discussion, they're not autonomous aircraft they're just remote control aircraft.