[treetoppin]

I am only about 20 hrs into my flight training, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I still have yet to hear anyone offer up an explanation how AI will integrate with our current air traffic control system and other aircraft. Right now if I want to fly through certain kinds of airspace (basically any airspace around a medium sized airport, civilian or military) I have to talk to air traffic control, and they tell me what do to. As a pilot in command, I have final authority to deviate from these clearances for safety reasons, mainly because it is my ass on the line.

So if a drone flight is flying an instrument flight plan from point A to point B, how does an air traffic controller command them? Part of the advantage of verbal commands being given to aircraft over a common frequency is that other pilots know what aircraft are doing around them. If a drone is being silently told to avoid for traffic, that doesnt help me if I am the aircraft being avoided. If a drone is told to hold but doesnt have enough fuel, or to divert due to weather, can it recognize a command that would create a state of emergency and over rule the air traffic controllers directions? Since air traffic controllers have need to communicate with aircraft in their airspace, how will these comms be authenticated so someone doesnt spoof ATC to make a drone do something stupid?

I know NASA is working on these problems with the FAA, but I havent heard anything yet. However, aviation isnt a "move fast and break things" area. Regulations are written in blood, and I dont really want to be the guy who gets sacrificed so that the FAA can retroactively fix an issue that someone dismissed as "psychological".

[ibn_ibid]

>As a pilot in command, I have final authority to deviate from these clearances for safety reasons, mainly because it is my ass on the line.

I think this is the most crucial aspect. Machines are excellent at executing patterns and adhering to constraints. Improvisation, not so much. And really, in emergency situations when things go awry and off script, it's that "clutch" factor that makes all the difference.

[diggernet]

And that, in a nutshell, is my concern about fully autonomous cars, and the enthusiasm some express for removing all manual control because "computers are better than people".

[manicdee]

A computer will have notified ATC and all local traffic of intent, and received acknowledgement of the distress call from all affected parties, while the human is still half way through the first "Mayday, …"

One brand's autonomous pilot will only have to be taught about handling unusual conditions once, while humans have to be trained from scratch each iteration. 20 human pilots, about 22 iterations of the same training program.

Come up with a new failure scenario and a strategy for mitigating it? Train the computer once. Train every human pilot independently. The lead time is atrocious for getting software updates out to wetware, so good luck getting every commercial human pilot to be familiar with a new procedure inside ten years, by which time you have new humans to train because some of the old ones died and taken all their training and experience with them.

[walterstucco]

Machines are useful exactly in those emergency moments where human capabilities are taken away by panic

All the emergency features in modern world are either mechanical or electronic