FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics
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Edge cases shouldn’t result in loss of life, so getting through regulations and insuring should be much easier than other situations.
The comment about edge cases causes me to think about weather. I don’t think many non-pilots have a good appreciation of how much complex decision making goes into operating in and around inclement weather. Fuel constraints, airport constraints in terms of equipment, weather, and traffic, unreliable forecasting, etc. Theres a lot that goes into it and each aircraft begins making decisions that involve several people, including the on-board pilots.
It seems like you can have one operator for 5-10 aircraft but then suddenly the weather rolls through and every single one of those aircraft needs individual attention and planning. Did you save much by still having an operator/craft? Or do you need more stringent weather requirements to operate these aircraft? Or do you try to have the best of both worlds and eventually the autonomous systems just crash themselves in non-populous areas absent other guidance.
If these systems are largely grounded every time there’s inclement weather I can’t imagine the people who advertise “the world, on time” are going to be too keen on operating them at scale. Dispatch-ability is a major factor in these types of operations.
I bet that would be way more fun than the bunches of sitting around that I imagine is currently part of the job.
There's a lot more to managing planes in bad weather than landing them: you can't exactly fly through a thunderstorm.
Furthermore, sometimes go/no-go decisions have to be made a long way out. If it looks like there might be lots of thunderstorms near your destination, it's sometimes prudent to divert immediately rather than risk being near an airport with weather too bad to land AND low fuel.
A great example is a youtube video by stevo1kinevo: he's flying a TBM 850 (fast turboprop) from Florida to Boston International. While checking the weather enroute he decides the chance of storms near Boston is too high, and with the complexity of getting in and out of a major airport, he decides well in advance to divert to an airport on Long Island. This sort of stuff happens all the time and is the very definition of good airmanship.
You can't, but can a UAV? I'm curious how much more tolerant of bad weather a plane can be if there are no people inside. Are storms often strong enough to knock a plane out of the sky?
Simply put: yes. Not just any thunderstorm. All thunderstorms.
All aircraft avoid thunderstorms. It's not a case of discomfort for humans inside it; it's about the risk to aircraft themselves.
Thunderstorms contain severe updrafts and downdrafts and huge windshear between them. Aircraft cannot outclimb the downdrafts so cannot maintain altitude inside them. And severe windshear will tear them apart.
The only reason you don't hear about aircraft lost in thunderstorms is because pilots avoid them. All of them.
If you get hit by the leading edge your plane will get smashed into the ground. If you somehow get to the back part, your plane might end up in the stratosphere, which might be just as fatal due to very low temperature and lack of oxygen.
He mentioned some early gliding pioneers who were insane and lucky enough managed to "ride" a thunderstorm and achieve record breaking flight distance - and somehow not getting killed in the process.
And then some. The forces in a run of the mill thunderstorm could rip the wings off a plane in seconds.
Storms are definitely regularly large enough to bring down even large aircraft, it doesn't happen often because planes of systems on board to ensure they avoid such weather, but it can happen!
I bet a fleet of commercial autonomous aircraft operation out of private facilities would also have a lot more common procedures (all their airspeeds, climb/descent rates, etc would all be the same), so it might even be easier.
Edit: Or maybe, expect the planes to be fully auto, then have a bank of pilots available to take over any plane that is having troubles.
Do it at a workstation in a desk chair with none of the “stress” of the situation and I’m going to find another career. The combination of skills needed and the threat of life and limb just make stuff like that exciting in a visceral way that would never be possible with an RC plane.
As to your argument, yes the load would have to be balanced across flights at various stages. You’d be surprised how many planes are all in a very similar boat though when they’re all converging on a hub in SE USA and a summer thunderstorm comes booming through. Spend an evening watching MEM on FlightAware and LiveATC as FedEx does their thing. What seems like the whole fleet comes marching in through a very narrow window of time.
I’ve flow personally for 22 years. Other than simulator-based training, I have no interest in flying a flight simulator. Why do that when the real thing is available and so much more compelling as you describe? No way I’d fly from a desk either, but that doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t be happy to have that job.
An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable, it can spend its remaining time in the air finding and navigating to the most sparsely populated point of impact within its range. Something like "Engines out and won't restart? Find the nearest/largest body of water and ditch into it".
I think you immediately have to question how often this has been the source of a disaster. To me, this seems highly unlikely to have been a problem, or to be a problem at all.
Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas, because an airport far removed from a populated area is next to useless in terms of freight or passenger transport.
> An autonomous system doesn't have to do that
Well.. it can't. Which is part of the problem:
> it can spend its remaining time in the air finding and navigating to the most sparsely populated point of impact within its range.
That's a whole separate automation and computer intelligence problem on it's own. There's also no guarantee that a sparely populated area isn't completely empty or even currently unused for any civil or special purpose. Expecting a computer to "solve" this problem is asking a lot.
Just look at the Gimli Glider as an example[1]. Choosing a "safe" place to have an emergency isn't at all obvious and assumptions based upon outdated information are dangerous in and of themselves.
> Find the nearest/largest body of water and ditch into it
Finally.. even if it could make this determination, safely, and with enough sensor observations to reduce human loss of life on the ground, you're presuming a plane without engines can always reach this apparent planned crash site. If your plane can't add velocity, your ability to plan _anything_ is severely curtailed.
Are they?
I'd argue that they generally aren't... except that, over time, cities may grow until they are right next to the airport again. And then new airports get constructed - usually far away.
> terms of freight
Only for certain classes of freight. You distribution center needs ready access to transportation, it doesn't have to be next to your consumers. We are not delivering packages to their destinations with planes, after all. Usually trucks do that.
> If your plane can't add velocity, your ability to plan _anything_ is severely curtailed.
Not an issue with pre-planned routes. There can be contingencies in place for malfunctions at any stage in the flight.
I wouldn't worry too much with engine failures and the like. Worry about sensor problems.
That sounds backwards. Airports get built as close as possible to the cities they serve. For newer airports that ends up being some distance away because they need to avoid existing homes.
> You distribution center needs ready access to transportation, it doesn't have to be next to your consumers. We are not delivering packages to their destinations with planes, after all. Usually trucks do that.
The point of the plane is to save on trucking time though, so you want a distribution center fairly close to population centers.
Airports get built "far away" in the sense that, between land prices and noise abatement, airports are generally on the very outskirts of a city at the time they are built and the city's central train station will be much closer to the city centre.
But apart from military bases on remote islands, no airports are so remote that "don't worry where you ditch the plane if there's a problem, there's nothing near the airport" would be an option :)
The more we reduce the human survival instinct around these jobs, the better we'll all be.
Humans do dumb shit when we're flooded with chemicals, both internal and external.
For example, there's Wilmington Air Park in Wilmington, OH: https://www.wilmingtonairpark.com/
Apparently, Amazon started flying through there in September of 2019: https://airportimprovement.com/article/wilmington-air-park-w...
I would hope there is some regulatory concern about flights over populated areas. Yes, there are a number of ways this concern might be addressed, but like everything else, I expect the FAA to be really anal about it.
I also hope they are concerned about potential remote hijacking. It is probably desirable that these things can be overridden by a human operator, rather than solely relying on the flight computer. But that opens the possibility to attackers as well.
It is usually cheaper to just build your fulfillment center next to an existing airport which already meets these requirements.
Takeoff and landing are the tricky parts.
(I say this as someone who’s firmly on the skeptical side of the spectrum regarding the near-term prospects for fully autonomous vehicle control.)
Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help.
Instead, the hard part isn't flying. it's all the things an airplane does while landed. It's taxing, interacting with other planes, interacting with other vehicles (there are a lot of them in an airport), parking, etc. If the airport is entirely built for automation, I imagine that will become much easier.
I get that the biggest airports have grown organically, but I’m surprised a city building a new terminal or airport (Berlin anyone?) can’t order a standard proven design like they’re building a McDonald’s or Holiday Inn.
Airports are standardized to the degree they can be standardized. There are entire sections of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Design Handbook devoted to airport terminals and other large transportation spaces. But these spaces have to be designed to fit the place that they are constructed in.
If the city was competent about the project, they would have actually hired people who knew what they were doing. While new terminals and airports are not as standard as Holiday Inn, there are plenty of constraints in most cities [1], that do not allow a lot of room for radical change, and design usually come out not widely different.
I don't think it's just that take off is easier, but that it's also more dangerous than landing. If something happens during take-off and the computer needs help, it needs the pilot to step in quickly so you don't have time to do a computer -> person hand-off.
I don't think it would affect this proposal (no passengers on board, and package-only airports can be located far away from things to hit) but worth noting.
The same happens at landing, but the airplane is moving faster.
Over simplifying, there are a lot of situations during take-off and landing where stopping isn't an option. During landing, the extra speed helps you take-off and try again (go around) with minimal risk. A computer can pretty easily handle "something's weird, TOGO and have the pilot take over." Take-off doesn't have that safety margin.
It exists:
"Airbus demonstrates first fully automatic vision-based take-off"
https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/01/ai...
This is not the most common way to detect a fire in an aircraft (unless GA). The most common way is "FIRE" being indicated in the annunciator panel.
> Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards.
No they are definitely do not. They will only know the wiring if they are also mechanics.
They need to know which fuses control what, but that's a much higher level.
> They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction
Also no. The first thing to be done is triggering the memory items. Those are memorized. Zero thought here. Pilots have to (and generally will) fall back to what they have been instructed to do.
Next there's the checklists. They will execute the checklists line item by line item. No thinking happens here either, nor it is supposed to.
If all those fail... usually you'll read the resolution in some NTSB report.
> The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books
Not sure if that was the first time, maybe first time in an _airliner_. Also in that particular incident, they had an experience commander, first officer and an instructor for that specific model of aircraft working together (the instructor was handling the thrust levers).
That was also a very extraordinary incident.
> flight crew performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations
> I wonder how this can work with computers
During the Columbia incident, the computers didn't know the wing was melting. But they detected a deviation from the flight path, which they tried to correct with control surfaces. When that failed, they added RCS thrusters too. The 'wing melting condition' wasn't programmed, but still they managed to use all available resources.
For more on how we could allow craft to 'intelligently' respond to failures, take a look at the Remote Agent, from NASA's DS-1 mission.
And this is the problem. We wouldn't have autonomous aircraft without sensor redundancies. Even pilots have multiple redundant instruments.
Takeoff and landing when the weather is fine is already a solved problem. So is taxiing.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-attol-autonomous-airlin...
Compared to a self-driving car where you have all sorts of situations that require complex analysis, like trying to determine if that's a person lying on the highway or an empty garbage bag, this seems like it should be a walk in the park.
That limitation is there because the sensor inputs aren't as good as you think. Looking out the window reacts much faster to wind gusts than receiving a radio signal to determine runway line-up.
If you want to have a computer execute a full autoland in varying and gusting crosswind you'll probably need it to use cameras and computer vision, but then it becomes limited by the same visibility issues humans have.
That might be a slightly less tractable problem than controlling a fixed set of flight systems to maneuver an aircraft with a fixed set of degrees of freedom.
Definitely not to understate the complexity of flight systems software at all, but the analogy to operating systems seems unhelpful.
Sure. But if it does happen, the self-driving airplane needs to have a landing plan that isn't "fall on a population center." It's not insurmountable, but does need to be baked in.
Planes don't simply "fall" though, or more specifically it's not a limiting factor for autonomous flight because if they do Fall (due to total structural breakup) there is absolutely nothing a human pilot can do about it either. The more likely worst problem that is still within the realm of "anything can be done about it" is total engine failure (and with it the potential for failure of systems that depend upon engine power as well). Commercial jet aircraft tend to have glide ratios (how far they can go horizontally for each unit they drop vertically) of high single digits to low teens, though some go farther (the 747 for example is 17:1). So from 35000' say they'll typically be able to travel at least 60-110 miles (with some bonus for their initial velocity).
The power problem has also needed to be considered long since due to all the fly-by-wire systems, though for an autonomous cargo aircraft this may be another area worth a second look since some weight savings from normal life support might be well spent on additional redundancy.
As other posters have pointed out a fully autonomous aircraft just needs to aim for the most sparsely populated area of land or body of water. No need to worry about human life on the aircraft dramatically opens up potential ok ground areas. So a failure at cruising altitude that a piloted aircraft might survive anyway should leave a sizeable radius for an unpiloted aircraft to find a ditch point with low risk to human life. So ultimately while yeah sure, of course this should all be formalized, it shouldn't be a real blocker for this application.
Bigger issues like bad weather and other traffic would likely be programmed well in advance rather than leave that to real-time decisions.
Planes simply don't fall on people even in worst case scenarios.
Losing power is actually what every meat pilot trains for.
We built avionics, software, mechanisms and a comm system that enables automated operation of the plane from a remote command station. The remote operator has a GUI where they can command the aircraft.
This article goes into a bit more detail about how it works: https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/with-tesla-and-space...
What are your thoughts on this?
It's up to governments to ensure the winners compensate the losers. In the long term, this may be an UBI, but for now it should take the form of retraining and economic adjustment packages (similar to what might occur when tariffs are repealed). This should be funded by a super-profits tax on heavily automated industries.
Either way I agree with the parent comment, this is a public policy question about how to make sure people are able to maintain lucrative lives (education policy, monetary policy, social policy) not a question for the business making an existing task more efficient and expecting them to answer what society wants to do with the freed time.
The self-flying use case is, at least from a technical standpoint, far more straightforward than self driving, and the cost incentives are pretty huge. Not to mention the fact that some of this tech has already made its way into private aircraft, with Garmin already having a production system in place where non-pilot passengers can simply push a button on an aircraft and it will completely autonomously find a suitable airport to divert to, communicate with ATC, and land -- even taking adverse weather into account.
There is also a lot of regulatory and tech work at the FAA to also try to ulitize drone-like systems to help operate aircraft. The reality is that the vast majority of time that a pilot is in a flight it is quite low-intensity work (if there is any work to do at all). The thought here is that remote pilots could control the machine (or assist a single pilot in the cockpit) during critical phases of flight. The advatange here, of course, is that a remote pilot could do many such flights over a short period of time, whereas the one on board is stuck to the one flight even in moments where he/she has absolutely nothing to do.
Whichever way you slice it, if you think there is some argument for fully or partially autonomous driving, all of those arguments are orders of magnitude more compelling in flying. Timing, of course, is the real question mark.
You don’t need to deal with making sure pilots are all at the right airports. You don’t need to provide them lunch. You don’t need a bunk for them. Pilots are limited in hours of piloting time and sleep requirements, but they can be instantly transferred between planes instead of walking.
What does it take to be a remote UAV pilot in a civilian setting? What kind of training or experience are looked for or are required?
I'm sure there are many armchair pilots and RC enthusiasts who have similar questions.
Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. When you’re driving a car you usually follow traffic rules and stop lights to get to your destination safely. In an airplane there’s constant communication and things change frequently based on weather, traffic, emergencies, etc. I can’t count the number of times ATC has repeated back an incorrect call sign. As a human we know it was probably meant for us and call back to confirm. Would a computer do that? Even if we used datalink communications then ATC would now have a much higher burden. Also human pilots would lose the situational awareness of hearing instructions for other aircraft on frequency.
Then there’s the question of— in an emergency situation is the computer going to be able to make the right judgement calls? What if its sensors are iced over/inop?
All in all, while technologically I feel this could have been pulled off yesterday, I doubt we will see fully autonomous aircraft operating long routes in controlled airspace anytime soon.
Some of the ideas are around “carving” out corridors, where you would be able to fly, and this corridor could be reasonably large (across multiple towers today). The other interesting thing is hierarchical ATC automation.
So, normal ATC would still exist, but they would interact with a tier of controllers who are responsible for them interacting with UAVs.
A lot of this apparently came from the idea that eVTOL is the future, and we will all be commuting to work in an electric airplane.
If the human can perform better in niche situations but not better in ordinary then that may lead to an overall decrease in crashes or loss of cargo (the metrics we actually care about). If the human only performs slightly better, well it makes sense to switch to autonomous because humans are expensive, especially when things go wrong.
The point is that no one expects the machine to be perfect. You can get caught up in the "well it can't handle x well" all day, but that's missing the forest for the trees. A robot isn't going to get frustrated if you only fly it on VFR days and ground it for 20 hours in Little Rock because weather changed.
That's not correct. Ditching is very hard. Mess up your angle or sink rate or roll even slightly and you'll be in pieces. Same if the water doesn't cooperate.
One interesting thing is that it happened with an Airbus. The flight computers actually modified Sully's inputs on pitch by about 2 degrees, which ensured a softer splashdown than what Sully was commanding.
But that was a very subtle adjustment. Sully was an experienced pilot, with Glider training too.
It was not considered a serious option.
That's basically what pilots do as well. They spent most of their time assessing whether everything is OK via checklists and when it is somehow not OK there's not enough time to think and they reach for some emergency procedure instead. Mostly this never happens and there are whole sets of procedures that most pilots never even handle outside a simulator. E.g. landing a 737 with all engines out is a thing but obviously not something most 737 pilots would ever have to do in a real plane.
ATC obviously needs to be automated too. Automating routine interactions like exchanging altimeter settings, agreeing on what the current weather report is, what the active runway is, etc, would eliminate a lot of need for humans to talk to each other and pass the information on to dedicated computer systems on both ends (which is largely what pilots and controllers do). These systems could, and should, communicate directly. Any autonomous plane would have to be integrated this way. Situational awareness is currently bottle necked on the ability to pass information around, which happens to be something computers are good at.
A stop gap solution is putting a remote human pilot in between to enter information relayed by human atc. The main challenge is not just replacing the pilots but also ATC and standardizing the interactions between them.
Are the autonomous systems better than our best, most experienced pilots? not yet. They are however likely already better than the average pilot. Updating the autonomous software to factor in new scenario is easier than grounding pilots and getting them retrained on the simulator
The expense and availability of type certification and simulators is one of the reasons the 737 MAX was designed to handle like the older model, although it was fundamentally different. After the fixes, if the FAA require separate type rating it will be very expensive and slow process for all airlines.
The autonomous systems will behave consistently under a given scenario, human responses and errors may vary. Fixing the former is easier than quality checking the later.
Planes already fly a lot on their own, they also crash on their own already too, due to software bugs or faulty sensors, 737 MAX is software bug from a faulty sensor reading on the autonomous system after all. It is a blurry line between what we have and a fully autonomous system. The risks are already there, might as well embrace it and test the software lot more rigorously than depend on the human to intervene and override as we do now.
That describes humans as well.
If anything, robotic systems might be more predictable.
I know the rebuttal to this is "override the pilot" but it's really not so simple. Sometimes the pilot has switched off part but not all of an autopilot system, and it makes sense to maintain that capability.
It's a very difficult problem to solve.
Airbus auto throttle is a nice idea when it works (once you understand it), but there's certainly something uncanny about the idea of not having direct control of the primary and secondary flight controls.
If I was coming in with one engine out, the last thing I'd want is the aircraft trying to out-think me and tell me what's right, or decide I'm at risk of stalling (2 feet above the runway), and apply power (which with only one engine available would risk skewing the landing).
It all comes down to this, it won't be solved quickly, but with proper flight routing and use of specialized airports it can all be resolved without endangering the public. For the most part planes are not falling out of the sky on a regular basis but it would be interesting to see statistics on the number of registered events per miles flown.
Human ATC could still be involved, the words used for events can be very specific and the system can know how to respond to all of this. Automated flights would have special call signs and even may end up handled by assigned ATC to keep them separate.
You're correct that edge cases are tricky, but you've made the mistake of forgetting the other possible half of dealing with them that full robotics makes possible: simply sufficiently reduce the cost of edge failure. An aircraft with humans on board crashing is a tragedy, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. In general a cargo aircraft carrying mass produced goods crashing in the middle of nowhere is merely a financial statistic. By far the trickiest part of flying is takeoff/landing and navigation on the ground. But players with shipping volume at the level of FedEx, UPS, USPS or probably even Amazon/Walmart alone can flat out afford their own dedicated airports. With no existing path dependency, they can easily build them quite a ways from population.
This completely changes the calculus and possible responses. If something goes badly wrong on takeoff/landing or at the automated airport itself, it just costs money. There is financial incentive for the players to figure it out, but it doesn't involve anyone else. And once at flight given modern aircraft glide ratios, there is no place on the planet that doesn't have ocean/empty land within glide range. For human flights, ditching the plane as safely as possible, or hopefully making it all the way to an airport, are critical considerations. For a robot plane though experiencing an all-engine out just specifically ordering it to crash somewhere without anyone around is mostly okay (there will be some environmental pollution, but it'd be trivial on humanity's list of environmental damage, and the operator could be fined for cleanup). Robot aircraft could even flat out be equipped with self-destruct systems like the range safety systems rockets have.
So for the specific domain of dedicated cargo craft it seems reasonable that fully autonomous control could exist far ahead of human transport simply by virtue of being more expendable and having infrastructure purpose built exclusively for it in ways that are impractical elsewhere.
The problem is "airspace integration", i.e. how does an unmanned aircraft communicate with other pilots, ground, etc. and what are the rules (right of way, visual separation, etc) with planes in lower classes of airspace.
That problem has also been around for 10 years, and I would say nearly no progress has been made on that front.
If there were progress on that (some kind of regulatory solution/certainty), it would unlock a whole lot of activity here.
However, how will the robotic plances integrate with existing voice-based air traffic control? Would there be a new digital channel, or the planes would it use an on-board voice recognition and synthesizer?
The ATC problem is probably the easiest one to solve, and there are already some solutions in use like D-ATIS and automated pre-departure clearance (PDC).
FAR 91.113.b: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113
Perhaps a lot of that is cabin noise, and without it, the transmissions would become a lot clearer.
If you suddenly transmitted "and I'll have a BLT on rye, hold the mayo", you're almost certainly going to be asked "say again?"
Or perhaps a set of dedicated routes, with ATC actively routing other traffic around the robots?
We pilot drones in warzones remotely, the technology exists to pilot then in peace time.
True but we also are ok with those drones getting destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDhkwHkBKWo
Feeder aircraft suffer from poor pilot / aircraft utilization. Once you go with remote operators you can increase operator utilization significantly. A computer can also fly the aircraft much more efficiently than a human can allowing for significant fuel savings. Other benefits include lifting of crew rest time requirements and improved dispatch rates. Some of this allows for better asset utilization. Finally, you can also re-balance a fleet across geographies more easily to address shifting demand.
One big factor is it often comes down to which worker group has a stronger union and likewise entrenched political interests at local levels, as we've seen in technological progress elsewhere.
Second to that is probably the safety regulatory process. 'AI' or computer automation has also been used heavily in airplanes for a long time so that regulatory process is probably going to happen much more advanced than cars.
Finally, driving regulations often happen at a much more local level (cities can ban AI drivers in their borders for ex) but flights are divided over much wider geographical lines. And there are far fewer airline companies than truck companies to deal with.
The difficulty of automating it metric gives us this order: air transportation, water transportation, inter-city ground transportation, urban transportation.
So I'm personally expecting a mix: air transportation, inter-city ground transportation, water transportation, urban transportation.
Exactly this. For reference see why there are still humans on cargo trains.
+1 vote for heavily regulating noise pollution.
Drones are going to need similar regulation, I agree.
I actually expect that short term there will be an increased demand for pilots as smaller electrical airplanes start becoming more popular. Most of these will be single pilot operations doing short hops. If there are going to be lots of them, there will be a need for lots of pilots too. This too will ramp up over a few decades and eventually that whole business will be autonomous. But not short term.
(you're probably wrong)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland#Civil_aviation
It is not, on the whole, that difficult a problem to actually land an aircraft autonomously. Now that planes can autonomously fly the rest of the route too, it makes sense to just take the pilot out of the cockpit.
Sure, if you have ILS and it's operational.
Large aircraft will not rely on GPS.
It's a far more difficult problem to integrate such aircraft among the existing traffic. You are underestimating the effort of autonomous flight gate to gate.