[FriedPickles]

Interesting point. Cargo and fuel should be placed on the far sides. Passengers towards the center, perhaps on two levels. Routes could be adjusted to decrease typical bank angles.

Makes me wonder if we'll have cargo-only planes that converge on a different optimum. In full autonomous mode, comfort is not a factor and reliability can also be relaxed. Of course, we'd lose the flexibility of being able to convert the plane for passenger service.

[robotresearcher]

Bank accelerations must be limited, not angles. You could do a full roll without noticing if the acceleration vector pointed mostly through the plane’s floor.

[metadat]

Would this likely become a dangerous "recovery" scenario with the plane spinning around on the center axis and accelerating directly towards the ground? This sounds dangerous for any passenger aircraft.

[robotresearcher]

To be clear, I am against flying passengers into the ground.

Pilots don’t tend to roll passenger aircraft. But given enough altitude and skill they probably could without spilling a tomato juice on a seat back tray table.

[willnonya]

Why would reliability be relaxed? Other than just being silly on the face of it reliability is still important in cargo. It's even more important in the perception of aviation.

[FriedPickles]

For the same reason we don't cover cars in 3" thick steel armor. It's still very important–planes and cargo are expensive. But overall cost might be optimized without quite as many zeros.

This is why old planes long since retired from passenger service are now used for cargo flights, which have an 8x higher accident rate. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=212692...