Don't forget that aircraft falls on someone or someone's property.
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.)
Bigger issues like bad weather and other traffic would likely be programmed well in advance rather than leave that to real-time decisions.
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 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.
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.
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.
Planes simply don't fall on people even in worst case scenarios.
Losing power is actually what every meat pilot trains for.