[antoinehersen]

Pilots are very reluctant to hand over control to any kind of computer. It goes completely agains their self image. This is more true in certain company than other.

A very similar phenomenon is how the USAF crashes more drones than the Army since they use pilots that insist on flying them in manual, vs the Army operators that do not consider themselves pilot. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/29/young_usaf_predator_...

Commercial flight will become much safer when the persons in the cockpit will considere themselves plane operators vs pilots.

[apaprocki]

Very interesting.. Pilots that want to be rated for Cat II/III ILS landings have to perform them every now and then to stay rated, so I bet a lot of people have been through computer controlled landings without even knowing. Definitely whenever the weather is unmanageable, they have to turn over control already. Here's a really good example of something that would be very difficult for a human to do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXJCHUmuUyw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe_pEK_kRVw

[gnaffle]

I think it's easy to say that without taking into account all the experience that pilots may bring to the table when an incident occurs.

Pilots (and airlines) seem more than happy to turn flying over to the computers, in fact FAA and Airbus are concerned that modern pilots lack hand-flying skills due to over-automation. The AF447 crew did not have training in high altitude hand-flying, for instance.

Until you have a situationally aware computer that consistently beats humans in accident scenarios, we still have to trust humans to do the job, for better or worse.

[omegant]

And still with AI systems taking care of the plane security there would be failures that will knock downd computers , lightning strikes, generator spikes, some kind of fisical damage to the plane, fire at the computer rack. All this is usual enough to keep comercial flights from using drones.

[antoinehersen]

All modern planes are fly by wire. There is a very high level of redundancy for flight computer.

The kind of damages to take down all systems will probably structurally impair flyability.

[omegant]

Hehe believe me computers fail and is not 1 in a million failure more one in a 50 flights or so, you reset them and nothing fatal happens, but they fail! Fly by wire only saves weight removing or reducing cables and hydraulic systems. In fact adding Fly by wire adds more computers and more complexity to the plane. I has taken more than 15 years to fix to airbus to fix lots of bugs.