Boeing resolved to make pilots obsolete.
 

https://liveandletsfly.boardingarea....ng-automation/

The irony is palpable. "The only thing that can prevent a crash caused by automation is more automation!" There's a 3-letter organization that uses the same logic, but that's for another time.

Airbus has tried the same philosophy for decades and it has not resulted in a lower accident rate. But they did do it better.

The only thing that has proven to keep the flying public safe is automation that works WITH a pilot who is adequately vetted and trained. I'll say it again, adequately vetted and trained.

And it takes an American corporate executive to draw the perverse conclusion that the pilots were the primary problem after putting them in an airplane with a surprise self-destruct mode built into it.

They can’t even get the Airtrain at EWR to work all the time, I won’t be holding my breath.

The 20’s aren't shaping up to be a good decade for pilots.... this is going to be a tough fight to win.

There is no question that Boeing would like to eliminate a Pilot. The eliminated the engineers from management and destroyed a once great company.

I’m not too concerned yet. Once they eliminate engineers and fully automate trains, I’ll take notice

Maybe Boeing should automate their Management.
Just a thought.

Why don’t they focus on making a plane that is safe first. One that doesn’t land at the speed of the space shuttle. Or self lawn dart into the dirt.
Good job Boeing of alienating your biggest fans and turning them into haters in the name of saving a buck!

Self-flying planes would be a “nice to have” thing. But its not a “need to have” thing. For the cost, it just wouldn’t be worth it. Here’s why.

Planes, ATC, and the entire aviation infrastructure would have to be completely redesigned and rebuilt for pilotless planes. The cost would be tremendous, far more than the 7-8% of total ticket costs that pilots are currently. Also, planes currently being built all require pilots, because that’s how they are designed. Yes, its true that at one time we required 5 people to cross the ocean (2 pilots, navigator, radio operator, engineer) but the difference between 5 and 2 was far less than the difference between 2 and 1, and going from 2 to 0 is likely a century away.

Human pilots are the safest thing going. Anything else would be exponentially less safe. What would happen if someone started building self-flying planes, and one crashed. People are already saying they won’t get on a guppy MAX and that’s with actual pilots that can override the automation. Its the tech they don’t trust, not the pilots.

Don’t tell me about self-driving cars, because the order of magnitude of simplicity to make a car drive itself is hundreds of times easier, and there is far less risk, since one accident might not kill anyone, just scratch paint, etc. While a mishap in a plane is likely a 100% fatality event. Also you can teach a teenager to drive a car in 5 minutes.

Solving simple problems is simple. Solving hard problems is incredibly hard. Far more than most people realize. Watching too much science fiction makes people believe the really hard stuff is easy. Think about it this way...imagine you were transported back in time to 1980 and you met Steve Jobs. You explained that you came from the future, and you had seen the iPhone. You could describe how it works and the apps and everything. He’d just say “yes, we can all envision how that might work, but we can’t build transistors that small yet. We don’t have enough memory to do that yet. The tech to build it is still decades away. The in no infrastructure to build it yet. And the cost would be so great that people couldn’t afford it, and it wouldn’t’ have the critical mass to get adoption to make it of any value.” Just because you can see something doesn’t mean you can build it.

One last thing. If United or any airline said they were going to buy Boeing’s 1st pilotless plane, I imagine that the 1,000 plane fleet of airplanes would come to a halt immediately. If we didn’t already have some kind of scope protection, which I believe we have language that says all planes will be flown by pilots on the seniority list, I can see a day where airline pilots set the parking brake en-masse and refuse to fly.

If airlines really wanted to cut costs, and the FAA would sign off on self-flying passenger planes, they’d also sign off on no FA’s in the back, which would be a much easier way to save costs. You could get rid of them tomorrow like they do on the “new” 50 seat jets with self-serving snacks. Or maybe just have 1 back there to communicate with the pilots. This would be a far better way to save money.

Building and utilizing self-flying planes is a big “chicken and egg” thing and I don’t see us there until well after we are all dead, because its a “nice to have” and not a “need to have”.

^^^ Superb analysis!

+7,000,000,000 (one for nearly everyone on the planet). ;)

They sure did...

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia...e_1907248c.jpg
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/media/US...=1680&fit=crop
https://binged.it/2QHR9Dw

^ ^ ^

FWIW, that A320 is doing exactly what the pilot commanded.

Is there any pilot out there, except perhaps for the one who was flying that day, who thinks full stall demonstrations are a good idea at very low altitudes? Every single Boeing ever made would have also ended up in the trees.