"The touchdown had been a fully manual one, as the vast majority of touchdowns are."
Two words: anomalous conditions.
As we both know, pilots aren't needed in the vast majority of commercial flights. The plane is perfectly capable of taking off, navigating, avoiding collisions, and landing with minimal, mostly unskilled supervision.
We don't need pilots on planes... until something unexpected goes wrong, and we do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
EDIT: Notice that you had to go back 30 years to find your third example of a human pilot saving the day. And automation technology has improved a lot since then.
In the case of two recent crashes (AF447 and this one, assuming pilot error turns out to be the cause as seems likely), it's safe to say that a computer would've easily done a better job than the pilots.
Would be interesting to hear Capt. Sullenberger's take on the question.
On the other hand, if your onboard autopilot is in control of everything, you run the risk of having autopilot bugs causing an accident - indeed, a software issue in the airbus flight protections (which, unlike the autopilot, are always active unless a very severe system failure occurs, and can override the pilot's inputs) has caused an incident that resulted in passenger injuries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
While none of this is impossible, it's certain to be expensive, heavy, have its fair share of bugs at the start, and by quite difficult to get past the regulators. Not to mention passengers probably won't be very happy being on an unmanned plane, even if the system really was perfect. So it's easier in the end to just put pilots on the plane.
(Shrug) Sorry, but given the complexity of the rest of the aircraft's systems, none of these engineering tasks sound impossible. 40 years ago we did this stuff on the freakin' Moon.
Although yes, I tend to agree that any move in this direction amounts to fixing something that isn't broken. (In the "freakin' Moon" example, the human pilot still had to handle the tricky part.)
...
> In the "freakin' Moon" example, the human pilot still had to handle the tricky part.
Since you're apparently well aware that the Apollo missions were conducted with manual docking and landing, why bring it up?
Especially given the relative simplicity of "final approach" on the moon, given the lower gravity, zero wind speed, and slower pace, I don't understand what your point is.
[1] Actually, the Eagle did experience a computer malfunction that almost caused an abort to the landing before an engineer said they could ignore it. You want a computer to judge for itself whether it can still safely fulfill its mission while malfunctioning?
For further terror, consult the Apollo 12 lightning strike. When the computer is FUBAR, how do you propose it fix itself?
The whole point is we're not talking about when things go according to plan.
For that matter, how many times has the skycrane been used? What is its safety record? If you go ask the guys at JPL how many times out of 1000 they think it'll work perfectly, what will they say?
Incidentally, not cool moving goalposts.
You win this one, it looks like. GG.
I just find it fascinating how obsessed people seem with getting rid of pilots. You don't often hear the same discussion about train or bus drivers, or doctors for that matter, even though we are just as close to having automated robotic surgery and expert systems have been around for a long time.
Plenty of cities are getting rid of their subway drivers at least. And if many airport shuttle trains around the world are automated as well.
I think I agree with you in general about this, but that's sort of a shitty and unpersuasive way of making that argument.
That wouldn't do anything for patching in pilots for planes in the middle of the pacific, but I wonder how often that would be necessary.
If it's hard for most of us from varying technological backgrounds to say yes than it's going to be almost impossible to convince the more mature passengers.
This is one of the reasons why all planes look the same (they have the same configuration, low wing with engine below wing) even tho Airbus and Boeing keep churning out concepts. Would you get on a plane that looked even slightly funky?
Given that the most common cause of aircraft accidents (by quite some margin) is human error, I'll take my chances with the computer.
As for completely autonomous, do you seriously think we have the technology available today to make an autopilot handle any conceivable situation without a human being present and ready to take over? (non-IR PP here)
And no, automation can't handle "every conceivable situation", but neither can humans. Furthermore, humans screw up more often than autopilots. Pilot error is currently the single biggest contributor to the overall accident rate.
Mind you, I'm not advocating fully autonomous aircraft. I like having a human in the loop, but that's in part because I am the human in the loop. It's far from clear that human pilots are a net win for safety.
In the meantime, the solution to the human factor isn't to eliminate humans, but to improve training (which is already happening after AF447).
I like having human pilots primarily because I'm a programmer and I know how difficult it is to design robust computer systems. There's been one runway overrun and one serious in flight incident with passenger injury due to software design faults. Now try to design a system that makes sense of audio, video and smell in addition to the existing sensors, and not have it fail in some spectacular unforeseen way..
I can only think of a single example of a "creative" response to an in-flight emergency that actually helped, and that was UA232 in 1989.
The way we have solved reliability in autopilots and FBW systems today is to make them as simple as possible and to give them sensible fallback modes (like the Airbus FBW removing stall protection when missing certain inputs), and even then we have had real life accidents because of programming errors or design errors. So if you think pilot automation is mainly a question of politics as you said earlier, I think you are being overly optimistic (which, of couse, is not uncommon in the software industry).
I think a better approach to removing pilots is to see the strengths in both computers and humans and design systems where the advantages of both are maximized.
If you are interested in reading more on software safety, http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ is a good starting point.
Do pilots typically glide unpowered 767s to landings at abandoned military airfields? (A result, incidentally, that could not be reproduced by other crews in simulators; are you sure it's the crews, and not inadequate programming? Still trust the computer?)
Are you willing to bet your life that the computer on a 737 that looked like this[1] could find its way to a safe landing?
As programmers, we should know better.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243_...
Yes, ditching an airplane that has lost all of its engines is a standard emergency procedure.
> Prior to 2009, how likely do you think it would have been for someone to have programmed an autopilot with such a capability?
What difference does that make? I'm not saying it's a good idea to take pilots out of the cockpit right now, I'm just saying it's a lot more plausible than most people think. The main limiting factor is politics, not technology.
> Are you willing to bet your life that the computer on a 737 that looked like this[1] could find its way to a safe landing?
Sure, why not? Losing the top of the fuselage looks dramatic, but it probably doesn't change the flight characteristics all that much. Also, very good adaptive control algorithms exist that could almost certainly handle this.
Also, you're cherry-picking your anecdotes. There are plenty of examples of flights that would almost certainly have ended safely but for some stupid mistake the pilot made. Controlled flight into terrain accidents, for example, are much more common than heroic rescues, and they could be entirely eliminated if you took human pilots out of the loop.
See my reply to krisoft. You're changing a specific situation into a general one. You can't just say "ditch the plane if you lose power", you have to anticipate every possible variable that may influence whether that is actually the correct course of action, and the manner in which it is carried out. And you have to do that before it ever happens.
> What difference does that make?
Unanticipated situations are unanticipated situations. We don't have AI. We haven't replicated the ability of a human being to adapt on-the-fly. There is no reason to believe we will in the near future.
> Controlled flight into terrain accidents [...] could be entirely eliminated if you took human pilots out of the loop.
The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that so much more could be done to prevent them even without taking the pilots out of the loop, and yet it's not. That does nothing to give me confidence that the right thing will be done when pilots ARE taken out of the loop.
Edit: What it comes down to is this. All you're ultimately doing is completely and irrevocably substituting the unalterable judgement of somebody in a completely different time, place, and circumstance for the adaptable judgement of the person on the plane. When you do that, what you're really saying is "I refuse to give people in a scenario I didn't think about the chance to survive". I can't accept that.
A plane suddenly loses power in a highly urbanized area. It's very near multiple airports. Prior to 2009, I have no expectation that an autopilot would have been equipped to judge whether it should attempt to land in a heavily-trafficked river. (I further have no expectation that it would have been equipped to notice in the highly plausible scenario of one or more small boats being in the way.)
It's not a question of landing on water, it's a question of making the decision to do so and where.
Humans have the judgement gained by a lifetime of learning. Computers only have what it occurs to us to put into them while we're sitting safe and sound in our little offices pushing little buttons that don't threaten our lives.