Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

I don't think commercial jets are an especially favourable target for complete automation, compared to cars.

- Slow iteration, each mistake that you could learn from potentially costs a hundred lives

- No graceful shutdown possible most of the time – if automation fails in a car, you just stop or pull over, you probably won't die. A plane can't just land itself if automation fails unless the comm link works

- Comm link might not always work, it can be damaged from light mid air collisions, bird strikes, drone strikes, other damage, improper maintenance, possibly bad weather, hacking, jamming, over-saturation due to mass automation failures etc.

To me it seems that it's easier to deal with road chaos than acquire an extra couple 9s of uptime in this problem.

"Slow iteration, each mistake that you could learn from potentially costs a hundred lives"

The potential for disaster is absolutely there, but aircraft crashes rarely do cause that many deaths, they are just the ones media loves to cover. The survival rate of aircraft crashes are at about 90%.

Every year millions of people die on the road, amounting to several thousand each day. That means that just a bump of 10% in the death rate of automobile accidents would mean hundreds of thousands more victims every year, they're just distributed across many accidents that would only be reported on during a slow news day. A bump up in aviation death rates would mean a couple thousand more.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/odds-surviving-plane-cra... http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_...

You don't remove pilots overnight, you can keep them on board for as long as needed for safety reasons

Meanwhile flights have been almost completely automated for years already

No one has any doubt that the planes can fly themselves in 99% cases even with todays technology, but bringing this up to a higher uptime while still being fully automated will be very hard I think.

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