No they can't be dealt with ON A RELIABLE BASIS. Even taxiing around the airport would be complicated. It's not only the aircraft that have to be developed and produced. The whole airport infrastructure would have to be overhauled. Every airport. And what kind of (dispatch reliability) could be achieved with these autonomous aircraft. If it ever happens it will happen with cargo aircraft first. But my guess is cargo operators will dump them when they can't meet their reliability goals. Pilots just aren't that expensive.

 

The single pilot does the taxing. The way this system was described to me at the GTC tech conference, was a primary autonomous flight control system. Since the latest die shrink, and 3D chip design makes these things very small, iPhone size, they were targeting 50 - 100 independent flight control computers. Five to Six independent flight surface control drive units. Three datalink systems, on ground based, on satellite based, and one aircraft based, with up to three backups for each. Don't forget two actual human pilots are in this system, one on the ground, and one in the aircraft.

You're talking about hundreds of system failures, and the death of the singl pilot before any real danger. This is all possible due to small supercomputers that were just recently made available. The cost of this equipment is no more than current equipment, however, the fuel savings would be measured in the $100's of billions for airlines over a decade.

 

It's a ridiculous statement, but keep in mind current pilots are beginning to seriously lack hand flying skills in the current system.

 

Wow, it's really awesome to see how we as a society, race are so eager to make us all unemployed and irrelevant. Think of the jobs that have been lost over just the last 100 years and the jobs that will be lost over the next 100.

Who needs to worry about meteors, nuclear war or global warming, we're getting rid of the need for real, living, breathing humans every day.

 

Exactly.

Interesting how Hollywood can foreshadow the future. Who knew "The Terminator" wasn't about killing humans, but jobs.

Even heart surgeons won't be immune to job loss.

And the techno-dweebs are hard at work trying to create Artificial Intelligence (AI), so even the programmers will lose their jobs too.

Never underestimate the stupidity of human genius.

 

Robotic burger flippers...

 

Pretty soon all these plans to save money by eliminating jobs wont matter when no one can buy any goods because nobody is employed.

 

The jobs went to china, now they are going to robots. This stuff scares me way more than NAI, mid east carriers, etc.

 

You write with the certain conviction of a 14 year old who read an article in popular mechanics.

When was nextgen supposed to be in place? When will it be in place?

Let's talk capital investment, who's going to pay for the bandwidth and infastructure this would require? The Fed govt? You been in a center or TRACON lately? It looks more like the 1950s than the 2015s.

On the airline side, they just gunna refleet? The 88/90 makes up about a quarter of Delta's fleet, a small minority of which have a single GPS, and all of which have an FMS that cannot reliably conduct a level off (I'm not bitter).

The fact that the technology may exist in a lab has little or nothing to do with the practical application of that technology nationally any time in the foreseeable future. Airplanes are expensive. Retrofitting new technologies into existing airplanes is also expensive, and doesn't always work. The real difficulty with what you are predicting so confidently is not really the technology (which is immense issue in and of itself), it is the implementation. Lotta airplanes out there.

 

That's because they don't train for it anymore. Some Airlines mandate autopilot use at 400ft and let it autoland. A simple visual to a 10000ft piece of pavement with no VASI and the gee wiz crap turned off should be mandatory for every training event.