Damn dude, take your inquisition to another thread.

 

That's the reason why I am not concerned with this. Just because a UAV can handle everything a normal pilot could 99% of the time, that last 1% will be the hardest to overcome. And no one is going to step foot as a passenger on a UAV until they can be 100% certain that a human wouldn't do a better job.

 

Google is just demonstrated "driverless" cars and some think "pilotless" planes are a century away. It will happen and probably sooner than anyone guesses.

In my career, it was thought large airliners couldn't fly without a flight engineer and four engines were required for overwater. The L1011, DC-10 were conceived as transcontinental planes, not international.

GF

 

You're welcome to employ the 'ignore' button if there is something you don't like on the forum D2D.

USMCFLYR

 

I can not remember the brand of the HUD but it had the velocity vector. It seemed like Star Wars to us. The Cat III program gave the Dash 50 foot ILS Minimums. We could land in visibility so low that you could not find the taxiway.

Skyhigh

 

At least you can have faith in the Cat IIIs. Those are some TIGHT tolerances applied for certification. I've not done them in IMC thank goodness. I think the new synthetic vision is quite interesting.

USMCFLYR

 

USMCFLYR,

I had an instrument student in a new Cirrus SR22 perspective a few years back that had synthetic vision. A total game changer. In 20 years pilots will be amazed that we had the nerve to fly IMC with small hard to read unlit steam gauges.

I read an article a few years back that suggested that in the future we will not even have an instrument ratings anymore since synthetic vision is the same as looking out the window (better). New pilots will be taught to fly from day one by using the glass as the primary flight reference VFR or IFR. Traffic is on there too. Add infrared and you are flying the Bat Plane.


Skyhigh

 

We'll be very close to unmanned airliners then.

But single-pilot airliners are a lot further off than you think...every year a handful of airline pilots suffer incapacitation. In a single-pilot world, that translates to a handful of smoking holes each year, maybe four or five. The public wouldn't go for that.

To make matters worse the the bottom half of the seniority would get discarded in that scenario...but that's not the group prone to sudden-incapacitation! Unless the airlines could get the FAA to limit single pilot ops to age 39 with invasive medical exams and tests cardio tests.

So the single-pilot airliner would have to be fully autonomous anyway (with all the costs and challenges I mentioned before).

 

You are under-estimating the contribution that the human mind makes to aviation during irregular conditions.

Engines became more reliable (ETOPS).

Systems become more automated (no FE). But these are systems which are very cut-and-dried...it's not to hard to guess every possible switch and valve line-up and program the computer accordingly. The real-world outside the cockpit contains myriad shades of grey and the occasional surprise (Sully's geese).

The pilot is there to pick the best shade of grey, and to get creative when necessary (Sully). The SIC serves two purposes.

1) Backup the pilot's human weaknesses
2) Redundancy in the event of sudden pilot incapacitation.

Computers don't exist which can do the pilot's job. I am familiar with the state-of-the-art, and it's nowhere near being able to do what Sully did. The SIC's has two points of job security, neither of which are going anywhere until they get rid of the pilot.

Sully (and Al Haines) are likely to go down in history as the bench-marks by which a pilot-replacement computer will have to be measured. Actually there is already some R&D to develop flight control systems which can fly a damaged airframe using any combination of control and power inputs. But the Sully problem is much harder IMO.

 

You know I'm new here. Where do I find it? It's not anywhere on your post.