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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

If you can design the product and environment to fit automation, then automation can be quick and effective.

The less you can change about the product and environment, then automation run slower and less effectively.

Air liner operations could be automated, but the minimum equipment list would be more stringent, the destination airport would not be able to take any equipment out of service for maintenance, visibility minimums would increase, takeoff and landing operations would require more slack time.

Besides all of that, the owner of the airplane would still want to have some crew on board.

In short, it's not worth it yet.

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There is also the paradox of automation: Automation generally makes the hard parts harder and the easy parts easier.

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The current goal of autonomy for airliners is single-pilot operation more than full autonomy.

It's very cool stuff, technology wise, with potentially significant redesigns of cockpits, etc.

But the main thing is the plane basically needs to be able to operate just about entirely autonomously (especially during critical flight phases) in case the pilot is incapacitated.

In theory, once SPO is solved, autonomy is almost solved.

I'm skeptical that SPO will be allowed for commercial airliners in our lifetimes. Pilot workloads are fairly low during most routine flights. But when an emergency occurs then the workload suddenly gets extremely high, to the extent that even two pilots are sometimes overwhelmed. This isn't a problem that current automation technology can solve. There are an infinite number of possible emergency scenarios and engineers can't possibly code for and test every one.

Cargo flights over oceans and (mostly) unpopulated areas might be a valid use case for SPO. Cargo pilots have always been considered somewhat expendable.

I'm maybe less skeptical than you but still not super positive.

At the very least, I'd say it's at least two clean-sheet designs away (which I'd guesstimate at 30 years).

I'm a bit partial to it because I did a brief stint in the Airbus realm. Autonomy for airliners is an interesting set of challenges.

I watched video about incident where plane was really lucky that there was a pilot riding along in the jump seat when engine went out. The pilots were wrestling the plane and the extra guy was able to debug the real problem. Maybe it was figuring out which engine was on fire and shutting it off.

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