Would Air Travel Be Safer Without Pilots?

Well, yes, the easy bits. The problem is that you still need pilots when things don't go exactly to plan, and they never do: http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/

This is not to say that passenger planes can't be automated someday, but we're nowhere near there yet.

A lot of the crashes are due to equipment failure. Take a look at the series "Aviation Disasters". A pilot is needed to figure out what is wrong, and to compensate to bring the airplane back. A computer program can't do that.

Such is far, far more complex and nuanced than dealing with a failure on a car. Just take Sully's landing on the Hudson after a flock of geese took out his engines. What computer program could have figured out why the engines failed, and what was possible for the airplane to do? Evaluate the weather conditions, and make the best choice of landing spot? Phooey.

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I focused on scenarios for removing all security checkpoints and delays from a customer perspective.

Imagine checking in at a kiosk to get your boarding pass, and going though no security lines to board the plane. Bring anything you want with you, but know that the flight is under video surveillance, like retail stores today.

I assumed technologies that work in rudimentary form today and will benefit from Moore’s Law. (The only 12-year forecast that I felt confident about is the continuation of the 100-year abstraction of Moore’s Law, bringing a 256x computational advance by 2018).

So, I started with the assumption that computer-controlled flight would be possible. It’s a pretty safe assumption given what we already have today.

With no cockpit, everything changes. The potential for harm is greatly reduced if the plane cannot be navigated from within. No hijacking. No use of the plane as a weapon.

Bombs become the only threat, and a reduced one.

Personal weapons? A gun or knife-fight could do more damage in a restaurant, or many large group gatherings. Why bother with a plane where criminal activity will be recorded, and the only people harmed are on board?

As for bombs, passive sniffers in a free flowing airport gateway are more plausible than detecting improvised weapons than could be used against a pilot.

At the airport, a quick fingerprint biometric would be a natural way to get a boarding pass (as 12 million people have already done in Florida to get access to an amusement park). So even smuggled bombs would have more capture and downside risk for a terrorist cell than other targets.

Pie-in-sky ideas: hardening a UAV to bombs should be easier than current planes; smaller planes could lower risk; luggage could fly separately; biologic weapon sensors could trigger a flight path to quarantine, etc.

I'm guessing the big element that was missing was sensing track obstacles and braking accordingly - in Singapore/Dubai they have doors limiting access to the track, and in vancouver they have (tending to failure in the winter) track sensors to see if anyone has hopped onto the track.

What we'll probably see first is larger one-pilot aircraft, able to land themselves in case of pilot failure. Also, unpiloted fighter jets are almost inevitable, simply because modern airframes can pull more Gs than pilots can stand. Boeing is modifying old F-16 aircraft into the QF-16, which is unmanned. These were originally intended for target practice, but DARPA is interested in using them for other purposes.

Are we forgetting that it was a pilot in 2009 on US Airways Flight 1549 that safely landed the plane after striking a flock of geese during its initial climbout only to be ditched into the Hudson River shortly after. If a pilot was not in the plane at the time, no computer would have been able to save the plane.

Typically a pilot will turn off the autopilot around 1000 feet and then do the rest for descent and subsequent landing. On takeoff, most pilots will fly to around 10,000 feet, some to cruise altitude before turning on the autopilot. There are some tasks on modern day planes that cannot be currently done without a pilot (at least not safely).

We have to remember things like autopilot still require manual input from the pilot and cockpit crew to get from its departure point to its destination. A pilot doesn't just fly a plane out of an airport, press a couple of buttons and then do nothing for the rest of the flight, this is a misconception perpetrated by the media and so-called experts who have never flown a plane in their life. Autopilot is merely a tool, much like a machine keeping a patient breathing and their blood flowing in the operating theatre is a tool for surgeons. The machines need to be calibrated, have their data input and be closely monitored much like a pilot does on a plane, even with autopilot engaged.

While I applaud the forward thinking from people like Steve Jurvetson, statements like "Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already" would be strongly disagreed with any pilot you ask. No two flights are the same and all flights are made up of individual and manual decisions from the pilot and crew. If a pilotless plane were something that could be a reality, the airline industry which has been struggling for years now to keep costs down amidst rising fuel costs would have already partially integrated this or started to cut down on the number of pilots they hire.

I would like to see a pilotless plane decide what to do when the landing gear fails and an emergency landing needs to be made. I would like to see what happens when a tire blows on a high-speed take off and the plane has to make an emergency landing, or what happens when a plane has to make an emergency detour over rocky terrain.

You would still need people to operate these planes remotely, what happens when contact is lost with a plane and it finds itself flying without a pilot at 35,000 feet who can manually take control of the plane and land it? Is Steve forgetting that a pilot would effectively be replaced with someone in a call centre type building sitting at a computer terminal remotely programming commands and programming things like runway codes and other things into the plane?

Some things just can't and should never be replaced. Is modern day technology meant to replace doctors? Every time a new device intended to help keep a patient alive is created, is its intent to aide or replace a doctor? Of course not. People would never agree with replacing doctors with machines completely.

Looking to eliminate drivers on the ground is one thing, because ground transportation is far more dangerous than air transportation. I agree with driverless cars because we already have the data and vehicle trips thanks to mapping data and technology mean they are predictable to a certain degree. Air travel is the safest kind of travel there is, fatalities and accidents have been consistently going down year after year, the number of accidents with fatalities in the last 10 years on Western commercial airlines can be counted with both hands.

Replacing pilots in commercial aircraft is something that will not happen in my lifetime, or perhaps ever. It is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Not everything can or should be automated for the sake of automating them.

http://independentflightinstructors.com/instructors/2011/11/...

(Automation systems typically tell the pilot where to go with a magenta line, on the G1000 systems I am used to it's an indicator of GPS navigation)

From the opening line: "as we look at this accident history, we find that in 68% of these accidents, Automation Dependency played a significant part".

So automation certainly is not the solution currently, at least not by itself. It handles a lot of the routine very well, but not non-routine situations, which happen frequently enough. Big events like Captain Sullenberger's Hudson landing have been mentioned, but there are many other smaller situations that occur on a regular basis.

On the other hand, automation has been a crucial part of making commercial aviation so incredibly safe and accidents so rare that we no longer really have a statistically relevant sample base. That's an enormous achievement, but automation is only part of the story.

The current amazing safety record has been achieved with the current consensus/compromise setup: humans + machines.

Most of the problems that happen nowadays seem to happen due to problems at the man+machine interface. Asiana 214 for example would have been fine as a fully automated approach just as much as a fully hand-flown approach, but confusions between the automation and the pilots caused a crash.

However, looking at those statistics and saying "we must remove one element" is fallacious, simply because the statistics do not show how many crashes were prevented by having that element aboard.

So while these sorts of radical proposals sound good and appear to make a lot of sense when not examined too closely, I would be very surprised if the objectively best solution is not the combination that we have, refined further to smooth out problems at the computer/human interface.

Automated trains and cars have been mentioned as examples. Planes are fundamentally different, because with any surface bound vehicle you can, in an emergency, just stop and wait for help. For a train, that's literally it. For a car, you'd probably want to pull over somewhere safe, but if worse comes to worse you can stop in place and hope everyone around you stops as well or avoids you.

If you "stop" a plane in flight, everyone on board dies. You have to actively land the plane on a suitable surface at suitable speed and orientation, arguably the hardest part of flying. That's also one reason why requirements for airplane engines are so different than for cars: if a car engine dies, you pull over. If a plane engine dies, you also die unless you find a good place to land in the next couple of seconds or minutes.