Why it's probably safer if your pilot is asleep than awake
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The only phases of flight where you really need humans at the controls are takeoff, landing, and uh-oh what the fuck is going on (this being a broad "catch all" category which encompasses everything from an exploded engine and hydraulic failure, see United Airlines / Sioux City, to a medical emergency).
I would never fly on a pilotless airliner, but I'm fine with the pilots being asleep at the wheel during the en route phase of flight. There really isn't much to do except look at the GPS moving map and say "yep, we're over Iowa...... yep, we're still over Iowa". Course/altitude adjustments could all be beamed in from ATC.
I'd prefer them to be rested up for landing, or in case something unexpected pops up.
YOU'RE A GLORIFIED BUS DRIVER. JUST GET US WHERE IT SAYS ON THE TICKET.
But they don't feel the need to disturb 500 people every 20 minutes because they like the sound of their own voice.
It makes you think of all those movies where the protagonist, with no experience suddenly leaps into action and pilots the plane to safety.
Question for pilots - if you learn one plane, can you pick them all up? Or are they all vastly different?
I can't start it; I might not be able to taxi it in to the ramp; I surely can't diagnose system faults on an unfamiliar plane, but it's easy to get it to the ground and generally easy to get it stopped (especially if you choose an 8000+ runway, rather than the 5000 foot that might have been the original destination).
The vast differences don't matter much when everything is working and there are plenty of margins and you only have to land/stop.
I hate this type of sentiment. Guess what: most programmers are glorified plumbers!
There's far, FAR more akin to sailing than driving when you fly aircraft. Fluid dynamics are very similar, regardless of whether it's water or air you're sailing through.
I don't think being a sailor has ever been a shameful profession; much the opposite, in fact.
I disagree with the other pilot (but I'm only PPL) on his views about sleeping during boring stages of flight. Say for instance you've piloted badly into a CB, you suffer a freezing on your pitot static systems. The autopilot disengages.
If you were asleep, it might take a while for you to get your act together, co-ordinate to ascertain who has the flight controls and start CRM procedures.
If you were wide awake, thinking how to solve this tricksy problem, you might do a better job as your mind is already warmed up!
So presumably you would have an alarm that wakes up the pilot if this happens. Here's the problem: humans wake up pretty slowly. For 10 minutes or so after you wake up, you might as well be drunk as far as your reaction time and judgment are concerned. I don't know if this has been tested in high stress situations, and I would guess that the "warm up time" is faster if your adrenaline is pumping, but it's still going to be a lot worse than having already been awake.
The point is that the several hours en route are a good time for the pilots to rest. Takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight. I'm mainly concerned that the pilots are on top of their game then.
I'd say that 'might as well be drunk' period lasts around 30 seconds for me (the process of getting dressed is generally just a foggy blur...). By the time I'm moving toward the truck, I'm more or less firing on all cylinders.
30 seconds is still an awfully long time in a plane when stuff is going sideways...
On the other hand, sleep deprivation (which as the article mentions, can be far worse than being legally drunk) is common and pilots probably often perform the most difficult parts of the flight while under its effects.
I would think the risks of pilots sleeping (and, very rarely, getting caught unprepared for an emergency) would be minimal compared to the risks of pilots being regularly incapacitated by fatigue during the most difficult parts of the flight.
('bang their favorite stewardess/steward', wait, that still happens? I suppose it could be fitted around a sleep schedule)
1) Flying is incredibly safe
2) Tired, fatigued pilots crash planes
3) Airlines are low-margin businesses
4) There is no economic incentive to have pilots fly less and sleep more
Since there will always be a tension in allowing pilots to sleep more and work less (thus costing airlines more money) we have to conclude that pilots are going to fly without sufficient sleep.
To make the system more resilient to failure, we should take the ad-hoc napping that pilots do now (which is undeniably adding some safety via fatigue reduction) and add a blame-free procedure around it to ensure safety (e.g. when one pilot goes to the bathroom the other one puts on their oxygen mask in case of explosive decompression; something similar should be done for the awake pilot.)
If the autopilot is detecting the pilot is drowsy I'd rather it let the pilot sleep than prod the pilot awake into further drowsiness.
"CREW ALERTNESS MONITOR The FMC continuously monitors the activation of switches on the mode control panel, EFIS control panel, display select panel, CDUs, and VHF/HF push-to-talk (PTT) switches. When a predefined time elapses after the last control activation, the EICAS advisory message PILOT RESPONSE is generated. The PILOT RESPONSE message can be cleared by pushing any control on any of the monitored systems or panels. If there is still no response after a short time, the EICAS caution message PILOT RESPONSE is displayed. If there is still no response, the warning message PILOT RESPONSE is displayed. Any control activation on the MCP, EFIS control panel, display select panel, CDUs, or VHF/HF transmitters resets the PILOT RESPONSE message. The PILOT RESPONSE message is inhibited at all altitudes below 20,000 feet while the aircraft is in a climb and the flaps are not up."
Crashes are tremendously bad for business. Also, the laws about pilot rest are incredibly strict. That doesn't mean that pilots won't break them, but it does mean that the "economic incentive" aspect is pretty much moot.
Holy...
> The pilot is there to feed the dog.
> The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.
Not sure who originally said it.
But also have a multiply redundant remote control system for emergencies the autopilot can't handle. So if something crops up, a crew of pilots trained to deal with nothing but emergencies can take over remotely.
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-of-the-most-dangerous-jobs-...
[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/aerial-robots/robocopters-...
Problem is that we don't know about the number of accidents avoided thanks to human interventions. Also, remote pilots will never be sure about the reliability of information transmitted from a failing aircraft.
On Wikipedia, I'm Enigmasoldier.
In some ways, having the pilots outside the plane would be an advantage in an emergency. It's much easier to trust the gauges (which is almost always the right thing to do) when you aren't experiencing any of the physical sensations in the cockpit. There have been countless cases where pilots trust their own sense of up/down/left/right (in zero visibility conditions), and ignored the relevant cockpit indicators, to disastrous result...
Furthermore, pilots are far, far better at detecting that a problem even exists. There's a heluva lot of information you can get from sound, vibration, smell, the 'feel' of the stick, view out the window, etc. Heck, even going back into the cabin and eyeballing the wings and engines have saved airliners from disaster. A Concorde prevented a crash this way.
Software, on the other hand, usually fails to recognize that anything has gone wrong, and pretty much never is able to correct itself, and certainly won't think of anything creative.
It might be fair to say a human has to think a lot like a computer to fly a plane, while a computer has to think like a human to drive a car.
Speak for yourself...
Will never happen:
0. Guidance signal loss 1. Guidance signal jamming 2. Guidance signal hijacking 3. Pilots on the ground don't have a vested interest with passengers, so the survival instinct won't necessarily kick in because they're not there. 4. Cost of mitigating all of the above would be much more than the risks of such a drastic change.
Automated flying isn't as cut and dry as is commonly thought, or as some of the other comments might indicate. Human error is definitely a problem and it's compounded by the realities of pilot working conditions which, unless you're a senior pilot at a major airline, means long hours and low pay. Pay (and most hours counted by regulations) is usually only counted from push-back to the gate and doesn't count hours pilots have to spend commuting, briefing, etc. This is difficult to change with the weight airlines have with the FAA and an industry where an unlimited supply of people who will suffer through anything to fly for a meager living, or in some cases even pay to work (see: "Shiny Jet Syndrome").
Autopilots fly and land extremely accurately [in the US at least, in visual conditions most landings are hand flown, and 'autolands' are done just enough as to keep up with periodic test regulation], but aren't feasible for a complete airline flight. I'm not convinced there is an automated flight management system with sufficient robustness to handle all the contingencies that have to be accounted for on a passenger flight. Drones are a completely different story. They're expendable, and get performance savings from not having life support. An airliner needs a pressurized cabin anyway, so you might as well shove a few pilots inside. And what if the guy remoting into the plane from North Dakota falls asleep? Or the network goes down, for that matter. How long before onboard autopilot figures that out, and has the plane going into survival mode looking for an airport to land (better hope they had great QA), and creates cascading delays throughout the airspace system. Or, hate to say it, another earthquake-tsunami occurs and takes out a couple airports, leaving dozens if not hundreds or airplanes looking for alternates within range. Now you're talking about a total integrated ATC automation. I'm just not convinced we're there yet, or it's coming any time soon. Leave the pilots be and give them some sensible rest/fatigue regulations instead.
The best analogy I have seen is that autopilot isn't flying the plane any more than robots in a modern operating room perform surgery while the surgeon sits back and takes a nap. Maybe they'll write an article about how that might be safer for us tomorrow.
Disclaimer: pilot. Also, I stole a lot of my information from Patrick Smith, who blogs frequently and crusades against common air travel misconceptions on http://www.askthepilot.com/
I take it back.
A lot of dumb pilot stuff comes from overconfidence or a feeling of "it can't happen to me".
This is simply not true - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_7425
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20120922X... (pilot asleep, fatal)
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20020715X... (pilot asleep, fatal)
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20110323X... (ATC-no crash)
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20091223X... (fuel truck driver)
I spent 5 minutes looking, which appears to have been more fruitful than the research the original author did.
Not yet anyway...
I wonder how long until an autopilot landing will be safer than human pilots.
There's nothing 'simple' about landing an airplane in water that is not designed for it, especially a glider.
Most computer guys don't realize this, but you can't save the state of a flight. Most decisions are mostly permanent once made. And some, like for instance all decisions made on an aircraft with no engines, are completely irreversible. So if you don't make the right choice on the first try, you have to live with the wrong choice. At low altitudes under visual flight, a pilot makes multiple such decisions a minute. In an emergency, this number would be a lot higher; on the order of once every few seconds.
Two other points.
1. Driving happens "in 1-and-a-bit dimensions" (i.e., cars are on roads, which are 1-dimensional plus a bit of width) and aviation happens "in 2-and-a-half dimensions" (i.e., planes are in the air, fairly close to earth, but with quite a lot of flexibility as to height), which means that there's far, far more space for planes than for cars.
If all the world's drivers were completely unable to tell where other vehicles were, all the roads would be filled with crashed cars within seconds. If all the world's airline pilots were completely unable to tell where other planes were, the effect would be minimal. Except that there'd be a bit of danger at takeoff and landing -- which, not altogether by coincidence, are two other things that are best done by human pilots rather than unaided machinery.
2. Cars operate in a world where there are also pedestrians, buildings to crash into, etc. Planes, not so much.
It seems to me that, to a very good first approximation, none of the problems self-driving cars need to solve apply to planes in sufficiently similar ways for "we can do it with planes, so why not with cars?" to be a good argument.