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Comment by darren0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm not about to fly on this myself.

If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.

The Boeing 737 max 8 software couldn't keep a plane in the sky with an army of pilots fighting to save their own lives.

I wouldn't get in one of these until there are better controls on this kind of software, it's not the same as autopilot.

There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep happening as long as experience is valuable.

    Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
    Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
    Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
    Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead

and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused aviation accidents.

I'm not a luddite, if the software is ready and safer than people then I'd be okay with it.

There's a history of software not being ready while people pretend it is and then it kills people (Therac-25).

I'm just skeptical that we'll know when it's actually safe.

Therac-25 wasn’t a “it’s not ready yet!”-type issue. It wasn’t an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.

They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was “impossible” that it could be failing in that way.

Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the lesson.

My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the "malfunctioning" was the system working as-directed by the user, but the UX was horrible for informing the user what they were doing.

It was a lot worse than that: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

That paper is long, but does a great job of giving the context and going deep on the details.

Thank you!

Don't forget Colgan Air Flight 3407 where the pilot was either too sleepy, or simply didn't know what he was doing.

Most accidents are due to human error, so you are taking way more chances by relying on the ability of pilots, statistics wise.

Doesn't this just mean that today the mechanical parts of a plane are pretty reliable?

It's not much of a comparison to flying software that isn't yet in use since there isn't any data to make that comparison.

Am I wrong? Are planes flown today without human intervention?

Apart from landing and take-off, most flights are in autopilot for most of the flight duration nowadays.

The 737 max was brought down by a classic autopilot style feature.

I imagine full automation will come to air cargo first and gradually find its way in passenger liners as the public becomes less hysterical.

That isn't really true. It was brought down by stall prevention software that was using input from a single faulty sensor, and there was no way to override the inputs from this software. Further, there were multiple incidents before boeing admitted what was happening, even though in retrospect it looks like they knew what was happening all along.

My point was that it functioned in a manner vastly more similar to a conventional autopilot than what Airbus is proposing to do in this project.

MCAS was a simple algorithm that altered flight controls in a predetermined way upon a limited set of inputs. Airbus is proposing a vastly more ambitious solution that includes additional inputs from computer vision and a global view of the state of the aircraft.

Doesn't that make things worse?

If a relatively simple algorithm was not safe because of bad engineering decisions (or bad management incentives, whatever the case is) - then wouldn't a much more complex system be even more likely to have hard to discover corner cases and failures?

In this instance, the simplicity of the system was its down fall.

I think the use of human pilots complicates a system. You are relying on a component to the system that is susceptible to tiredness, distraction, threats, rage, revenge, self destruction, and sudden death. Complete automation would replace one extremely complex and unpredictable component, with a less complex and more predictable component.

The autopilot is still at the control of the pilots, and usually enabled only at higher altitude. Landing/takeoff are still manually flown by pilots most of the time.

I don't have issues with a computers ability to maintain altitude, climb, or turn to a heading. I have a problem with a computer's ability to respond to the unexpected while in the air. For instance, comms failure is a scenario pilots train for and can deal with. I imagine autopilot might have some issues with that.

I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.

The article mentions that.

“For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by helping reduce workload. … "For autonomous technologies to improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance, pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in a press release.”

Is that logical?

What are the environmental and economic costs of an automated cargo ship going down vs airliner (cargo for comparison)?

It’s hundreds of millions dollars and fuel.

Actually this leads to an interesting point..as far as I know cargo ships are not automated sooner. It seems that it's just as open as the sky...potentially the sea is much less forgiving?

I would mainly say less standardized and less regulated. Big vessels already require pilots in and out of ports because the crew isn't trusted. Then essentially every single ship is a custom build with all the years of problems to iron out that comes with.

With less regulated you don't have a required AIS on every canoe or vessel, meaning you need to react on visual and radar input according to the colregs. In the US every aircraft flying already have ADS-B.

So with some worldwide regulation and a modular system able to interface and work with different equipment and sizes to create the economics of scale you have something working in the not too far future.

Though, this still requires the bridge and interfacing systems and sensors to be stable enough. Meaning no vessel today is good enough.

Compared to aviation it is much more hands on based on tribal knowledge. Like on a ship I work on "the remote for the autopilot tends to quit working every 3 months, just reset the whole autopilot, by pulling the breaker, if it does." This information stays on the boat and never reaches the manufacturer, instead of fixing what is probably some overflow happening. And the fix would be replacing the unit instead of deeper troubleshooting. Seen it happen many times.

The shipping industry is one where it could be extremely helpful, particularly in thwarting pirates. I've always wondered why cargo ships are not drones, full autonomous until it gets within a certain range of its destination.

I'm not sure you'd like the fully automatic sentry miniguns associated with drone ships !

Classic NIMBY'ism :-)

The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into LAX probably somewhere around 2000.

We were flying through a really big storm front forever. Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours.

Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I had ever experienced.

Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down in that weather on autoland."

Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have turned that on 2 hours earlier?"

Pilots are done.

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