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Comment by asynchronous13 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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