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.