JackStraw

What people don’t consider is that today’s public would be terrified of riding on a drone aircraft, but tomorrow’s public won’t be. The future public will be today’s kids who grew up with internet and iPads. They will have a lot more trust in technology and it’s exponential. It’s coming faster than you think. 20 years maybe.

BoilerUP

I personally think cargo ops are more “at risk” for RPA operations than passenger ops.

That said, consider this:

Major freight airports are generally located in and around large metro areas. How so you think Joe Citizen and Mayor Bagodonuts would feel about streams of unmanned widebodies going over homes in the middle of the night?

Besides public acceptance at large, there are certification concerns about redundancy of aircraft and datalink robustness/security...especially operating on any significant scale.

Capital costs mean the value proposition simply does not exist for civil aviation, even discounting vaporware technology to enable it.

The Air Force will have remote piloted C-17s full of material and personnel going into hostile AOs *well* before the robots start to take our jerbs...

aiir

I feel that there are many more things that plane manufacturers need to iron out before concentrating their efforts on unmanned airplanes.

The general public would value improved speed of airtravel a whole lot more than pilotless airplanes. Spending less time in the tube would be gravy for them, and even better for airlines since it means more flights and or better utilization of aircraft. Cargo moving faster would also be amazing.

Fuel technologies need to be improved. Our general public is increasingly more aware and worried in this area, and greener planes would be up on their list of wants.

I could list more things. Lol... but I suspect that no customer of any airline goes like, gee, you know what I really need right about now as I’m barreling down the air in this tube, is for the pilots to be gone and replaced by a computer. Especially since they know that this won’t in anyway affect their ticket prices.

I suspect that in the future you’re going to have a sort of pilot engineer onboard the aircraft. Someone who knows how to fly, but at the same time, it won’t be a maverick that will dazzle you with their stick and rudder skills. It’ll be a guy who is very intricately familiar with the systems of the plane and can trouble shoot any problem with the software. This will go on for a while until he is slowly phased out. But I still think this is at least 50 years away. The magnitude of the systems and testing that must be done is still very massive, along all of the safety mechanisms and back up systems that must be figured out. I suspect that by the time this happens, a great part of our world will have gone down this rabbit hole and our landscape will be very different.

Things don’t happen in vacuums or as single events. If you have large planes that can fly themselves, it means that we have taken a big stride as a species in other areas as well. Remember, the airplane itself had to come after the car, because we needed an engine that was light enough that fly with.

Anyways, let’s see what this “new” Boeing plane will look like because Airbus is certainly pushing the envelope of technology with those big screens on the A350 that display the same information that a 320 did like 30 years ago, and same goes for the 787 and C-Series. All great planes, but certainly moving at a snails pace on their way to being fully autonomous, and certainly don’t warrant all these threads on APC regarding the subject. Lol

BlazingSaddles

This is one issue to pilotless aircraft.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/2017/11/08/boeing-757-testing-shows-airplanes-vulnerable-hacking-dhs-says/

Another issue is GPS. Almost everything we fly nowadays is GPS based so if gps gets compromised so does navigation. Now yes I know gps reverts to vor/vor or dme/dome and yes I know INS systems exist but until the worked out both of those issues I don’t see pilots going away. I could see maybe a single pilot aircraft but even then I feel like that’s a stretch due to incapacitation issues.

CaptainHvac

It's an interesting question for sure. Reading the posts I see some people dont understand the exponential nature of technology evolution. (Moores law= Computing processing speed doubles every 18 months as a very basic example) Yes, if technology growth remained linear then no way would we have pilotless or minus one pilot aircraft in 20 years. If you think about business advantages and exponential technology growth, then there will become time in the future and almost instantly, where if Fedex, UPS, and Amazon DONT have a pilotless plane then they will be at a severe financial disadvantage and wont be able to compete. The public wont care if large planes are flying overhead if its proven without a doubt a pilotless airplane is much much safer than a human flown one, and that time will come sooner than later (it wouldnt matter if they did either...large companies tell the public what they want, not the other way around). Its all about exponentail growth of technology. Heck, IBMs Watson is already proven to be better in legal cases than a human Lawyer.

esa17

In this thread we see who doesn’t know a think about unmanned aviation.

I firmly believe we will see single pilot 121 operations in our lifetimes with an unmanned datalink backup.

Also, the Iranians didn’t “hack” anything.

FlyNavy628

Ok I'll bite. WRT to UPS the salary cost of the pilots is ~$630 million (average $225k*2800+/-) which is about 1% of their gross income. Fuel is ... way more than 1%.

Do I think we are going to lose the IRO on transcon in the next 30 years? Possible. Pilots in the cockpit for T/O and Landing in those major metropolitan areas. Going down to 1 pilot doesn't make sense. The whole point is redundancy and a second set of eyes on the human element. The cost savings doesn't justify the change in risk.

Do I think we are going to go pilotless for big airplanes in the next 30 years? No. There are too many vulnerabilities in the spectrum that it just doesn't make sense to rely solely on it. Additionally there is too much risk of that computer going haywire .0000001% of the time. What was it 2 months ago in ATL where the system and all the back ups failed?

Is AI good? Sure, but what happens when you have a plane take off out of JFK fly through a flock of birds and the computer computes that it try to Teterboro because a HUMAN!! programmed it, but crashes in Hoboken? It'll be the end of pilotless airplanes that's for sure.

If I was in charge, I'd be looking for technology to bring my fuel cost down, and efficiency up before cutting the man in the loop. Then again I'm just a pilot.

Harrisburg

So you think cargo pilots have the inside knowledge of when robots are taking over?

fenix1

A rimshot sounded in my noggin as I read this - well played, sir/ma’am, well played

fenix1

This definitely concerns me. Also, the idea that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is disconcerting as the pilot shortage (pay shortage??) deepens. But there’s so many practical things to overcome and the carrot (reduced labor costs) aren’t nearly as significant to the bottom line as many perceive them to be. There’s plenty of inputs going both ways toward unmanned aviation, but the fact that so many of you scoff at the question is reassuring.