Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways to have computers do the routine parts of flight.
Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.
Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.
Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I pointed out that BI probably has different ideas than Airbus.
To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff, navigating/obstacle avoidance, landing". To the extent that driving a car isn't "what you see is what you get", flight is much worse.
In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither takeoff nor landing), and depending on what kind of airspace you're in you may need to:
* listen to ATC for commands, and advise them of what you're doing,
* avoid weather,
* look out for traffic,
* watch your gauges,
* stay on a heading, altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is routinely done with autopilot.)
In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it look so casual.
A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate". This is the basic priorities for your attention. If you're pointed at terrain your priority is to fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you (to some extent) of that first responsibility, especially during routine parts of flight, so that you can do the other things. Airbus is looking for more things to automate to let pilots do more strategic thinking in general.
Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with what BI is thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower, there's no need to communicate, the rules for driving are pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be, without hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and speed limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle.
A car can't just stop in the middle of an intersection. Turn signals and traffic lights are similar to air traffic control. The risk of collision is much higher in a car than a plane, this is why you see many more traffic accidents than plane crashes. In both cases the rules are get where you want to be without colliding with anything or making passengers uncomfortable.
All good points, but just a side note on one of my reservations about self-driving cars:
> and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle
Just stopping in a car is always less dangerous than just stopping a plane, but there are cases where just stopping is very dangerous. Desert driving in the absence of sandstorms is probably unlikely to overwhelm an AI. However, in Alaska or the upper Midwest, you'll get snowstorms where you've got 6 inches or more of snow on top of the road, IR and the visible spectrum are limited to tens of feet due to blowing snow, exposed flesh will begin to freeze in under 10 minutes, and you might get hypothermia if you're in your car overnight. Getting out of the car and trying to flag down a passerby is likely to get you struck by an out-of-control car, so your best bet is to call a tow truck and hope they can get to you before the inside of your car gets too cold. In major blizzards, there are so many cars needing rescue, that some people need to wait in their cars until well into the following morning. The local newscast will warn people that driving is potentially life-threatening, but that doesn't mean that essential workers won't be driving. Having half of your trauma surgeons stuck in ditches in self-driving cars during a blizzard isn't a great situation to be in.
People keep candles, matches, and candy/energy bars in old coffee cans, plus water and blankets in their trunks (boots, if you're British) for these circumstances in order to be able to shelter-in-place for a day. Even humans with years of driving experience under icy conditions are pretty bad at driving in these conditions.
Having grown up in the upper Midwest, I was amazed how terrible drivers in the D.C. metro area get with just a dusting of snow or slightly icy conditions. I'm a bit worried that California-based automated driving companies will miss lots of common corner-cases associated with Winter driving in Alaska / the upper Midwest. I expect that if the road is uniformly icy, an AI would adapt fine with the assumption that traction levels here are the same as those up ahead. However, due to lower thermal mass, bridges undergo larger temperature swings and are likely to be icy. There are a bunch of gotchas associated with driving near active snowplows. Sometimes it's best to drive in the ruts created by other cars, but sometimes that's where the road is iciest and it's better to drive offset from the center of your lane. Under normal conditions, your car has a much shorter stopping distance than a loaded tractor-trailer, but in some icy conditions, the much higher tire loading will allow the tractor-trailer to stop in a shorter distance than a passenger car. Many people put sand bags in their trunks (boots) to increase their tire loading during winter.
There are just tons of little rules like this that you're either going to need to hard-code, or get good simulations plus a lot of driving time in International Falls, and hoping that a closed track still gets you conditions that teach the AI when to drive in the center of the the lane and when to drive off-center. Hopefully the AI also learns to visually identify different kinds of icy or likely icy patches.
I'm sure it'll all get worked out, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first Winter or two with self-driving cars ends up with a bunch of cars stuck in ditches in Alaska and the upper Midwest. It might look a bit like the newscasts from when they get icy roads in Texas or Georgia for the first time in decades.
Getting back to aircraft, even for everything that's in the emergency procedures manuals, writing good realistic simulations in order to get enough training data for the AI is going to be very difficult. For situations that aren't in the emergency procedures manuals, both most humans and most AIs are going to be in deep trouble.
Drivers take almost all information they need for driving from looking through the windows, whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials. That difference alone makes flying inherently more automatable. Automated driving adds a lot of sensing requirements over manual driving, but in flying the manual way already requires most of the sensing you'd need for automation.
The act of controlling a plane can be done entirely by looking at gauges, but that's not the only thing a pilot does. Pilots are also interfacing with ATC, flight attendants, dispatch, maintenance, and passengers. Even if you replace these interfaces with a computer usable format, you still need someone with judgment and responsibility for the flight. Pilots exercise their judgment over the information they receive from these other sources, and to coordinate these resources for efficient, safe flight. It's a huge challenge to replace all of this with a system.
I don't disagree at all. If you automated all the controls you'd still have some form of plane manager.
Perhaps a far more meaningful automation push could be done by creating an entirely new ATC scheme with automation in the air and on the ground, designed not defuse the class of mistakes that are typical for humans but to work around weaknesses of automation while exploiting its strengths (relative to humans). I suspect that the error margins needed for one group have very little overlap with the error margins needed for the other and with the general multilevel architecture of existing ATC it should be possible to designate a subset of airspace to the new system and having then coexist.
> whereas pilots take almost all information from looking at the dials.
Under normal operation, yes, a lot of information is available there however all pilot training is underpinned by learning to fly the plane by eye, without relying on avionics. Mainly due to the fact that they can and do fail in new and exciting ways.
Even a plane's interpretation of its own configuration can be incorrect, resulting in automated systems believing a given control plane is oriented a certain way, when the reality is very different.
They have pretty deep partnerships with European state schools etc. which is highly rational, at the same time, it puts issues of 'government subsidy' on the table re: trade agreements. Nobody makes such complicated things 'alone', at that level it's going to be a broad mix of national integration efforts. It makes it hard to do trade because everyone else is pointing out everyone else's non-market subsidisations.