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Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably.

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".

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There is at least one autonomous system on the market today that can do just that - find the nearest airport and land.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

That's pretty incredible for those small planes that I doubt have all the sensors jets do

You'd be surprised. Typically, you'll find that jetliners are older and therefore have an older tech stack, but also that they're redundant. Multiple pitot tubes, for example. On newer GA planes, there may be less redundant sensors, but the technology running them can be more modern and more powerful. The tools on the jet get the job done with two pilots and are there to make money, while the GA airplane is going to be piloted single pilot, and more likely for pleasure.

GPS gets you 99.9% of the way there. Runways are 100+ft wide. 10ft precision is fine.

If the runway does happen to have ILS, there's another authoritative source of information too.

Moreover, high end dual frequency GPS receivers like you'd surely put in a plane will typically have sub-meter precision.

Depending on the environment? GPS is still susceptible to signal reflection and LoS blocking.

Sure, depending on the environment. But when an aircraft is in one of those environments where reflections and line of sight to satellites are an issue, GPS accuracy is the least of your concerns.

This is in regards to an emergency response system, so an attacker would have to wait for an emergency to attack and well, you may as well just see how it pans out naturally rather than risk jail time to try and coerce an accident that might already be happening.

It’s not (just) about attack though. If you have your emergency in a place where the surrounds cause GPS to be inaccurate you cannot rely on GPS. Ergo since you cannot plan where to have an emergency relying on GPS is not sufficient.

I don't believe LoS blocking is really an issue as you approach an airport runway from above...

If you can make sure you only have emergencies when near an airport then you've already solved a lot of the hard problems.

> they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably.

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

> Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas

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.

> 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.

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.

Newer airports almost as a rule get built far way not only to avoid homes . Homes get built near airport, then airport gets sued anyway. It is more that it very difficult and very very expensive to get the size of land a large airport needs close to the city. It is also the politics of everyone wanting a piece of development.

Airports get built "close" in the sense that most international airports are named after a city, and the distance to that city is generally minutes rather than hours of travel.

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 :)

Most accidents happen within the first three and last eight minutes of the flight.

That's assuming you can anticipate the problem. The obvious edge case is that something goes badly wrong but the software does not recognize it as outside the design envelope.

This is a great take.

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.

Computers do some pretty "dumb shit" when they're flooded with data and running bad algorithms. I mean 737MAX didn't need a pilot error in order to do something critically bad.

To be fair.. the computer in the 737max was being used to patch over the 737max being bad at flying.

Not bad at flying, but flying not like other 737. Which would have required retraining, which is a hard sell.

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