If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.
The autopilot is still at the control of the pilots, and usually enabled only at higher altitude. Landing/takeoff are still manually flown by pilots most of the time.
I don't have issues with a computers ability to maintain altitude, climb, or turn to a heading. I have a problem with a computer's ability to respond to the unexpected while in the air. For instance, comms failure is a scenario pilots train for and can deal with. I imagine autopilot might have some issues with that.
There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep happening as long as experience is valuable.
Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead
and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused aviation accidents.
Therac-25 wasn’t a “it’s not ready yet!”-type issue. It wasn’t an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.
They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was “impossible” that it could be failing in that way.
Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the lesson.
That isn't really true. It was brought down by stall prevention software that was using input from a single faulty sensor, and there was no way to override the inputs from this software. Further, there were multiple incidents before boeing admitted what was happening, even though in retrospect it looks like they knew what was happening all along.
My point was that it functioned in a manner vastly more similar to a conventional autopilot than what Airbus is proposing to do in this project.
MCAS was a simple algorithm that altered flight controls in a predetermined way upon a limited set of inputs. Airbus is proposing a vastly more ambitious solution that includes additional inputs from computer vision and a global view of the state of the aircraft.
If a relatively simple algorithm was not safe because of bad engineering decisions (or bad management incentives, whatever the case is) - then wouldn't a much more complex system be even more likely to have hard to discover corner cases and failures?
I've read so many stories about drunk pilots, unlicensed pilots (primarily in third world countries), sleepy pilots, unskilled pilots (remember that aircraft that crashed because the captain was pushing down while the copilot was pulling up?), etc. that I think I'd be more comfortable flying with an AI.
“For its passenger jets, though, Airbus states the tech won't replace pilots in the cockpit but will make flying safer by helping reduce workload.
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"For autonomous technologies to improve flight operations and overall aircraft performance, pilots will remain at the heart of operations," Airbus said in a press release.”
Actually this leads to an interesting point..as far as I know cargo ships are not automated sooner. It seems that it's just as open as the sky...potentially the sea is much less forgiving?
I would mainly say less standardized and less regulated. Big vessels already require pilots in and out of ports because the crew isn't trusted. Then essentially every single ship is a custom build with all the years of problems to iron out that comes with.
With less regulated you don't have a required AIS on every canoe or vessel, meaning you need to react on visual and radar input according to the colregs. In the US every aircraft flying already have ADS-B.
So with some worldwide regulation and a modular system able to interface and work with different equipment and sizes to create the economics of scale you have something working in the not too far future.
Though, this still requires the bridge and interfacing systems and sensors to be stable enough. Meaning no vessel today is good enough.
Compared to aviation it is much more hands on based on tribal knowledge. Like on a ship I work on "the remote for the autopilot tends to quit working every 3 months, just reset the whole autopilot, by pulling the breaker, if it does." This information stays on the boat and never reaches the manufacturer, instead of fixing what is probably some overflow happening. And the fix would be replacing the unit instead of deeper troubleshooting. Seen it happen many times.
The shipping industry is one where it could be extremely helpful, particularly in thwarting pirates. I've always wondered why cargo ships are not drones, full autonomous until it gets within a certain range of its destination.
The best landing I ever had was on a Boeing 747(?) coming into LAX probably somewhere around 2000.
We were flying through a really big storm front forever. Drop. Rise. Drop. Rise. For hours.
Finally, we start coming down still bouncing all over the place. About 30 minutes outside LAX, the plane suddenly got as smooth as glass and we touched down with the lightest touch I had ever experienced.
Captain comes on: "Well, we were planning on diverting, but you can all thank the fine engineers at Boeing for bringing us down in that weather on autoland."
Guy next to me who threw up: "Why the hell couldn't they have turned that on 2 hours earlier?"