Hacker News Reader

Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

It'll never happen. Modern planes are mostly self-flying, but you must have a human expert able to intervene if something goes wrong.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...

Actually, let me correct that. We already have self-flying planes. They're called drones! We don't use them to transport anything as valuable as humans though.

View on HN

Wait, how does the article support your statement? The article concludes with this bit from it’s quoted “expert”:

“Langewiesche thinks that we are ultimately heading toward pilotless planes. And by the time that happens, the automation will be so good and so reliable that humans, with all of their fallibility, will really just be in the way.”

Also, I don’t have a hard number for this, but most commercial aviation crashes (like the Air France one, Colgan Air in 2009, AirAsia a few years ago) are due to pilot error or factors that don’t have to do with automation vs pilots (Malaysian Air that was shot down over Ukraine, TWA 800, and others)

You can't just look at the crashes without giving offsetting credit for crashes avoided by human intervention. (USAir 1549 or United 232 as possible examples.)

True, those are good counter examples, thanks for sharing.

Here’s a reference from the BBC (sourcing a Boeing report from 2003) that states that approximately 80% of commercial aviation accidents were caused by pilot error (when the study was performed in 2003).

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20130521-how-human-error-can...

Just because they are Pilot error doesn't necessarily mean that the machine would have done better.

Very true

Blaming the dead pilots is easy as my Uncle (ex Merchant Marine) said about the Concordia sinking - they always crucify the captain.

You mean that guy who brought the ship dangerously close to an island (300m vs the planned 8km), because he watned to impress his girlfriend and then "accidentaly" fell into a lifeboat and left the sinking ship?

Not the best example IMHO.

True My Uncle had met him when the concordias captain went to Warsash (one of the Uk's training colleges) and wasn't impressed.

I think his point was they always crucify the captain even if its not their direct fault

Langewiesche thinks that, and I think he's wrong. The only craft we've ever managed to automate well enough to eliminate the human operator is the elevator.

In a generation, we'll probably add fighter pilots to that list. Commercial pilots? Nah. Not with the current paradigm of passenger planes.

Interesting, so the purpose of linking the article wasn’t to support your point?

Regarding the elevator comment - what about light rail at airports? Terminal to terminal “air trains” don’t have human drivers.

Also, how would you counter the statistic that 80% of commercial aviation crashes are caused by pilot error (see my above comment for source)? This would seem to suggest that continuing to improve automation with the goal of removing the human altogether would reduce the number of crashes, assuming the automation wouldn’t make the same mistakes as the human.

The story I linked had a lot of information about automation. I've taken the information from that story and combined it with my interactions with computer programmers, business executives, and pilots to synthesize the opinion that fully automated commercial airplanes aren't viable.

"Air trains" and some subway lines/systems are automated. Interesting that the only systems that have successfully been automated are literally on rails, and are generally enclosed.

It's a fair assumption that the automation won't make the same mistakes as a human, but it's quite a stretch to assume it won't make it's own special flavor of mistake.

Also, you've pointed out the crashes that humans caused, but not the crashes that were avoided by humans. This is getting far from my field of expertise, but you've got to be careful to avoid selection bias.

Very good points, thank you for taking the time to respond so clearly and in detail!

Not only light rail at airports - there are whole subway lines and systems that are fully automated (e.g. Copenhagen)

> you must have a human expert able to intervene if something goes wrong

Similar things were said about cars. Humans make mistakes at certain rates, in predictable as well as novel situations. When the autopilot performs, on average, better, humans will become a safety liability.

The autopilot has to outperform trained experts with hundreds of flight hours and an exceptionally high code of personal conduct.

Self driving cars have to outperform the average person who drives like a 100-year-old blind dog who’s texting while driving and drinking a smoothie. Also, their failure mode is easier and much less expensive.

It’s a difficult problem that we have not solved. But you said “must”. That’s a strict word to use for a problem that can be solved within a decade or two.

As someone who isn't afraid of flying (except in the case where the pilot has to suddenly drop the airplane due to turbulence) I still wouldn't trust a pilotless airplane until it's safer then with a pilot, which will be very difficult to prove. I feel also that I'm not alone and many people who fly would be extremely wary of a pilotless system. On the other hand, I would be much more likely to trust a self driving car. The main reason is that, if a self driving car malfunctions, the risk of my death is present but not absolutely guaranteed and with all of the safety features in a car it's likely I would still be alive after a crash, even at high speeds. A plane that has an autopilot malfunction, with no human present, without changes to the safety during a crash, would be essentially guaranteed to kill everyone on board. Until a plane can crash from the sky without killing all passengers in most scenarios, I wouldn't fly in a pilotless airplane.

Agreed, my primary gripe with the original comment was that the OP used the word “must.”

Airline passengers don't generally care about it being safer on average. If the autopilot can't make a landing in a 30 kt crosswind all of the time people won't fly on that plane. People have much higher standards for acceptable safety with aircraft than cars. Also, autopilot isn't really designed to replace the pilot. Its designed to reduce workloads during departure and approach and make cruise less shitty. Autopilots are entirely unable to handle even simple failures and even in many cases do simple things like climb at a specific airspeed or do wind drift corrections. Car are just much simpler, have fewer consequences, and have lower expectations of safety. Until we get more versatile autopilots, aircrew acceptance, and/or lower expectations of safety, I don't see self-flying airliners anytime soon.

Similar things were said about cars.

What an excellent counterexample, with all of the driverless cars that actually exist in real life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com