Boeing's next aircraft pilotless
 

This should give pause to any new flight students....you may not have a 30 much less, 20 year career.

Boeing’s next airliner may be designed to fly autonomously, Calhoun said, though it may not operate without pilots from the start. He said that Wisk, a California-based company in which Boeing owns a controlling stake that’s developing a four-seat autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft intended to serve as an air taxi, is one of the company’s key avenues for developing autonomous flight technology.

Full article
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyb...h=1768c91b279d

At the rate Boeing develops airplanes, even my grandchildren won’t see this

This might affect the unborn.

Replacing the nearly-absolute redundancy brought by a modern autopilot and two competent human pilots will be significantly more difficult than developing self driving cars. Self driving car development/acceptance appears to be progressing slowly.

MCAS has entered the chat.

Qantas flight 32.

Software can never ever cover every mechanical problem.

There will always be mechanical failures.

Pilot pay is a crumb of the cost of a ticket.

The vast majority of people are afraid to fly.

United flight 232.

If we got every single ask in our current table position, I doubt it would raise a ticket price $10.

Alex I’ll take a plane with a pilot for $1000 please.

And in a car only 1 or 2 people die.

A big joke…. Airplanes have and will fly themselves for many decades to come. But hear me now, believe me later…. Joe Public is not going to board a commercial airline without pilots. I fly a very advanced aircraft, the latest and it requires input all the time, even when coupled up. Lloyds of London will not allow and cover any plane that doesn’t have rated pilots up front full time. Keep dreaming. Tesla can’t even handle remote pilot on 2D much less 3D. Can’t wait for the autonomous “air taxis” to start crashing…. Saudia just ordered 100 autonomous air taxis…. Good luck.

They'll always be a pilot in the cockpit.

Who else are they going to immediately for Boeing design flaws?

Blaming the pilot is Dodging Corporate Responsibility (and lawsuits) 101.

Always has been, always will be.

Regardless , why not make protections in contracts now.

^^^^^ This ^^^^^^
Now is the time to get this in contracts—not when it is a realistic proposition. No negotiation capital spent to get verbiage now vs every bit we’ve got when this is on the company’s radar.

All current aircraft manufacturers are so good at fu$$$$g up airplane design that full autonomy is a long way off. It is a threat to our careers but Boeing and their anemic R&D and complete commitment to Wall Street is the last player in the game to worry about. After all southwest will always need someone to do a recall check.

Haha. This must be a joke! Maybe in 500 years from now :)

HA! Boeing can’t even keep a software company from crashing…..

Jeppesen experiencing technology outages….

and they have the balls to say their next big thing will be autonomous aircraft!!! Are they that F%$&)ing stupid!?! My god the only reason 2 of the antiquated POS smoked it in was because someONE or two most likely …numerous times…intervened before Boeings best engineered efforts killed any more people.

Ford and VW just shut down an effort they thought would bring Level 4 autonomy to market because it’s in fact too far off. There’s already been over $100 billion spent on it and it’s still not close. And that’s just the technical challenges; before we get to the security ones. What good is TSA when a maldoer can just hack into an overhead 787?

I’ll worry about autonomous jets once they’ve perfected unhackable computers — which won’t be in my unborn grandchildrens’ lifetimes.

It will also be fully green and super sonic, hyper sonic, faster than light. Boeing can't even make regular planes well. I do think the future is single pilot/pilotless but that is very far away since autonomous driving and AI has hit some kind of limit in how well and consistently it can operate. Maybe in 50 years we will see this become a replacement to commercial pilots, and even then it probably won't be from Boeing. It seems like such an easy grift to mock up some CGI and slap together a model and make huge promises then just rake in cash from investors. Why actually invent or engineer something when you can just say you will and collect the money faster for less work. You can even pay people in experience and exposure. We should just say we will 100% all our metrics, and every flight is direct to your personal destination for everyone on the plane. Burbank? Honolulu? Sioux Falls? Amsterdam? Yea we'll be there in 30 minutes.

The fact that Boeing of all companies has the gall to think they have the ability to build an autonomous airliner makes me wonder if this truly is the worst of all possible realities. Talk about a dystopian hellscape.

It already is:

PWA 1.C.9: No aircraft performing Company flying will operate with fewer than two pilots.

Yes. Boeing. Please make a pilotless aircraft. You can’t even perfect the plane you’ve been making for 3 decades. Those are still falling out of the sky, but yes… make one with zero supervision.

I imagine that Boeing is simply ensuring that all human interfaces can be operated by software, ie the gear, flap levers, etc.

So that on the off chance that somebody produces a black box which can function like a human, they can just plug it in.

But as others have pointed out, that's highly unlikely in the foreseeable future... the autonomous car industry has effectively stalled, they've realized they can't program their way around the real world, especially in urban environments. We may well see autonomy on interstates, which offer a high degree of standardization and predictability compared to city streets.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-...=hp_minor_pos1

Peter Thiel’s book “0 to 1” has some good content on automation/AI. Generally, his take is the push for full automation is misguided. Tech is a tool, created by humans to be beneficial to humans. The push to take really good tech/human interfaces and replace the human will likely not be beneficial for many, many years. Paypal experienced this firsthand…it’s a good book.

The way the political winds are blowing I think the emphasis will be on green technology. The industry will use biofuels and claim the flight is "carbon-neutral" on every news outlet with multiple press releases and a few parades. Then claim the next paradigm shift is "electric" airplanes or hydrogen or somesuch nonsense.

​​​​​​https://www.traveldailymedia.com/bri...20and%20Airbus.

Bio fuels is the focus.

From the last 10-Q:

Environmental Sustainability. During 2022, we are continuing to develop our climate transition plan and to pursue our short-, medium-, and long-term climate goals. In July 2022, Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) validated our medium-term goal to reduce well-to-wake (lifecycle) scope 1 and 3 jet fuel greenhouse gas emissions by 45% per revenue tonne kilometer by 2035 from a 2019 base year. We expect our path toward achievement of these goals to depend heavily on improved fuel efficiency from fleet renewal, increased use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) which is not presently available at scale or at prices competitive to jet fuel, operational initiatives and technological innovation. In the nine months ended September 30, 2022, we incurred $98 million of expense related to carbon offset credits, which relates to a portion of our airline segment's 2021 and March 2022 quarter carbon emissions. As we continue to work on accelerating our long-term, net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goal, our vision of the path forward will require multiple initiatives, centered on a long-term strategy of decarbonization; we therefore expect substantially all of our investment going forward will be focused on solutions other than carbon offsets.

At least we are getting away from the offset (forest hostage and racketeering) business.

Boeing:

We just lost billions on a failed MCAS system? Hold my beer.

Let's spend hundreds of millions on something that will never get approved and will finally bankrupt us.

May be time to play nice with the AFA. They can attempt to design, engineer, and legislate us out of the cockpit...but I con't see them legislating FA out of the cabin. If the AFA refuses to fly on airplanes without 2 pilots, it would shut the industry down.

Its already in there. We need to have minimum two pilots.

Might want to try reading the PWA first.

PWA 1.C.9: No aircraft performing Company flying will operate with fewer than two pilots.

I’d be down with some one-pilot ops if they’re willing to bring back positive space commuting…

Full self driving on crazy roads, bad paint, obstacle threats, etc is far more difficult than full self flying airplane, imo, but the difference is the car can stop if things are not right. The airplane cannot so to the average person it’s a nonstarter.

Airplanes are a mature technology.

Magic materials (light, strong, flexible, etc) and hyper efficient power plants that improve operating costs by 1 or 2% are probably a better bet than removing a couple of bozos at the front end who:

1. Aren’t that expensive in the grand scheme of things
2. Are extremely useful to blame when things go sideways (to be fair, it sometimes is pilot error)
3.Occasionally do something darned useful.

Even if this is somehow true, it will take decades to develop. Even the next gen of engines is 20 years away. Adapting SAF to current engines will be the focus.

I keep reading the title of the thread as "Boeing's next aircraft pointless."

Prolly the most accurate read. Embrace the bus.

How’s the 777X coming along, Boeing?

If you're talking 737, that's 5 decades plus. It entered airline service in 1968.