Boeing studies pilotless airplane

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RVR6000
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by RVR6000 »

Good luck convincing the public to get on a pilotless airplane.
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cgzro
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by cgzro »

"everyone is getting very excited about AI lately, whatever that means anymore, last time I checked they can only operate robots by doing heavy pre-programming"

Just as a data point, the current state of the art involves massive arrays of neural network processors in large data centres. The "pre-programming" is essentially done by training rather than programming, so you have to feed these systems massive amounts of training data (100's of millions of flights I suppose) which then causes the neural nets to weight and form pathways, very similar to the human brain. Its a very different model than even a year ago. There was a very significant discovery a few years ago which is transforming these systems and making the training much faster, its why you are hearing more about them today. They don't care about small amounts of hardware failure of course. Currently they are performing spectacularly at visual tasks in particular and are outperforming doctors at various diagnostics problems. Long way to go yet, but you likely may end up with some very good automated advice that you can ignore, modify etc. in the not too distant future.
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Air.Field
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Air.Field »

I see it as a step phase over many years. Like I mentioned, 1 pilot, long range would be augmented. Then drone piloted. Then fully automated. Something like over 30 yrs. By then automation will be in much more faucets of life and likely more acceptable to be transported by it.

Weather can be uploaded real time to automation, computers would also be able to navigate and perhaps more efficiently, control themselves without human ATC in/out of airports within the automated network. Maybe I'm wrong, hope so for the sake of jobs. But in the 40's and 50's landing on the moon seemed impossible.
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Rockie
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Rockie »

Is AI self-aware? Can it exercise judgement, intuition and self-determination? Can it have empathy and provide leadership for the passengers and crew onboard the aircraft?

Once it can do all of those things plus more then a new form of life will have been created.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Old fella »

Although it(pilotless aircraft) has been subject of many a discussion from all angles, I am not convinced this is going to be the new direction. I believe the emphasis will be on the carbon footprint, fuels, new engine designs, better efficiencies. I am willing to bet the next 50-100 yrs engine technology will make carbon based fuels obsolete, what will replace the old gas/kerosene I have no idea but there are probably interesting research ongoing. Engines will be much more efficient than the current latest designs combined with new composite design for aircraft will make them much stronger enabling faster cruise speeds. There are other areas I am sure that are on the forefront........

The always has been human intervention in transportation of people in all modes over the many centuries so I don't know what philosophies are out there that would steer the human race away from this after all it is our nature to be involved. Having said this, rest assured travel through the atmosphere and even above will continue.

:drinkers: :supz:
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Bede »

This has got to be the most intelligent thread on Avcanada.ca in a while. Very good points by all.
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cgzro
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by cgzro »

"Is AI self-aware? Can it exercise judgement, intuition and self-determination? Can it have empathy and provide leadership for the passengers and crew onboard the aircraft?"

Agreed but it can help augment your judgment and intuition and reinforce or challenge it. Clearly the aviation equivalent of Siri should be called Sully ;)
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Meatservo
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Meatservo »

I still don't really understand the "one pilot" thing. I suppose it might make it easier to convince passengers to accept further crew attrition by convincing them there is still a "Captain" on the plane, but other than that, what is to be gained by eliminating the co-pilot? People are always trying to sell AI from a human-error standpoint, so how can having one instead of two humans working together reduce human error? We've already conceded that one person can fly an aeroplane. Having two pilots has never been about aircraft complexity or lack of automation.

This battle is being fought in other areas too- One-man bridge operations or "OMBO" has been a highly contested maritime practice for decades, and has never really been accepted by many of the IMO member states. The UK, US, Australia, and many more maritime states have banned OMBO in territorial waters, especially at night.

Railways, too, have been trying one-man train operations and have been facing fierce opposition not only from Unions but from the general public, particularly after the Lac Megantic tragedy.

What I learned from looking all this up is that the companies and the tech manufacturers (who stand to gain financially) are responsible for 100% of the "positive" research supporting one-man operation, and as for the opposition, you can expect unions to oppose reduced crew numbers, but in the case of railways, a poll in the states revealed that public opinion " overwhelmingly supports" a law that requires two-crew operation of trains.

Now we know that the public does support some complete automation- the BART system in San Francisco has been automated since its inception, and of course we have all seen the Skytrain in Vancouver happily humming away with no-one in the front.

This makes me suspect that until full automation is achieved, one-person operation will never have a reasonable safety case. As long as there is a human being up there to potentially screw everything up, there is no safety case to be made against reducing that possibility by having two. The public has already accepted one-man operation of aeroplanes with its acceptance of the Cessna Caravan and Pilatus Porter. Although these aeroplanes do demonstrate the concept is achievable, it seems to be kind of a conceptual dead-end. I can't think of what sort of automation could be introduced in these aeroplanes to make them safer than they already are, and that would be the kind of automation we are talking about here. I am not sure anyone has ever believed these aeroplanes are saferbecause of their lack of a co-pilot.

My point is, I suppose, that if we are to accept AI as a way to eliminate human error, we must use it, as robots have long advocated, to "eliminate all humans" not, just some humans.

(I do concede however, that while consciously objecting to one-man operation of public conveyances, the public will inevitably vote with its feet if the cost savings reflect themselves in the freight or ticket prices.)
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Broker »

timel wrote:If this industry wants to attract pilots, they should stopt saying they want to design aircraft without pilots.
True but the 767 has been around for nearly the span of my career and while my days are dwindling, the aircrafts are not quite yet. With all current production aircraft being multiple crew machines, it is pretty safe to say folks starting in the current environment will enjoy a full career behind the controls.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by sanjet »

There will be indeed pilotless airliners, just not in the next few decades.
Military drones don't have a perfect performance record yet and will not for a while. As stated previously, the cost of flying an airliner is still cheaper with pilots than the amount of research and maintenance of systems required to go pilotless.

Public probably has a perception about the industry getting safer and not require pilots, we are obviously doing our jobs right by making sure most situations onboard are handled safely without the public needing to know.
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timel
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by timel »

cgzro wrote:The "pre-programming" is essentially done by training rather than programming, so you have to feed these systems massive amounts of training data (100's of millions of flights I suppose) which then causes the neural nets to weight and form pathways, very similar to the human brain. Its a very different model than even a year ago. There was a very significant discovery a few years ago which is transforming these systems and making the training much faster, its why you are hearing more about them today. They don't care about small amounts of hardware failure of course. Currently they are performing spectacularly at visual tasks in particular and are outperforming doctors at various diagnostics problems. Long way to go yet, but you likely may end up with some very good automated advice that you can ignore, modify etc. in the not too distant future.
You can feed as many data as you want into computers, accidents do repeat, but there are also new cases unseen before. It can be because of new technology, new procedures, aging aircrafts and so on.
Sully is a great example, he lost both engines and made the call to ditch it in the Hudson, the day computers manage this kind of creativity and thinking, there won't be much jobs left on the planet.

I think we have to be careful about what we want, like self driving cars, autonomous airplanes. There is a right amount of automation to make our life easier and perform best, but too much will just make us become dumb and lazy. If they push it too far, in a possible emergency when human inputs will be needed, we will maybe not be able to respond appropriately.
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Last edited by timel on Mon Jun 12, 2017 7:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
timel
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by timel »

Broker wrote:
timel wrote:If this industry wants to attract pilots, they should stopt saying they want to design aircraft without pilots.
True but the 767 has been around for nearly the span of my career and while my days are dwindling, the aircrafts are not quite yet. With all current production aircraft being multiple crew machines, it is pretty safe to say folks starting in the current environment will enjoy a full career behind the controls.
Me and you we know it. But medias and general public, you can tell them airplanes will be flying to Mach 24 next year and pilots will be wearing tutu, and everyone is like sharing it on Facebook and be like wow, waw, amazing!

If I am 17 years old right now, I have the option to become a computer programmer and make very good money or pay over 100000k to get a pilot license, I read what this guy at Boeing is saying, maybe I would give it a thought.
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parallel60
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by parallel60 »

Great topic. I am wondering what insurance company would get behind the idea. Perhaps there are some that might. But I still think they would need to have a human being to pin it all too.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by parallel60 »

timel wrote:
Broker wrote:
timel wrote:If this industry wants to attract pilots, they should stopt saying they want to design aircraft without pilots.
True but the 767 has been around for nearly the span of my career and while my days are dwindling, the aircrafts are not quite yet. With all current production aircraft being multiple crew machines, it is pretty safe to say folks starting in the current environment will enjoy a full career behind the controls.
Me and you we know it. But medias and general public, you can tell them airplanes will be flying to Mach 24 next year and pilots will be wearing tutu, and everyone is like sharing it on Facebook and be like wow, waw, amazing!

If I am 17 years old right now, I have the option to become a computer programmer and make very good money or pay over 100000k to get a pilot license, I read what this guy at Boeing is saying, maybe I would give it a thought.
Why not do both? You have all the time in the world to do both. Go after both I would say.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Old fella »

Another issue would be developing and third world countries. How would they incorporate this technology(pilotless aircraft) into their infrastructure which as we all know isn't up to international standards in many cases and may never will. The concept(pilotless aircraft) would have applications - it already does but for commercial passenger transportation I am not convinced.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by trey kule »

The public has already accepted one-man operation of aeroplanes with its acceptance of the Cessna Caravan and Pilatus Porter
Pilatus Porter?? :smt040 Has a porter ever been flown with two crew?.

One of the things I understood in my old brain about the new AI is that they are working on them semi-programming themselves.
Thus one can input aircraft data from thousands of flights and the robot will look at deviations from its programmed input and adjust its responses.

I do think it is coming though timing is always a bit tricky. Modern airplanes are really to complex for humans, and the level of automation will increase. A computer can run a human done QRH 30 minute checklist in a fraction of a second...

As to costs. The new fatigue rules are just the beginning. And every time some pilots have an oopsie and crash a plane there is a few hundred million lost with aircraft costs, and people. Every pilot- responsible screw up is another nail in the coffin.
And , it seems to me, that for every Sully saving a hundred people, there are several Air France, Air Asia accidents that kills far more.
Pilots are becoming the weakest link in the evolution of aviation....just as drivers in cars...
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timel
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by timel »

trey kule wrote:

Pilots are becoming the weakest link in the evolution of aviation....just as drivers in cars...
Future.
Programming? Human
Engeenering? Human
Maintenance? Probably human
Let's fix it all with AI pilots. :smt040
Weakest link or last line of defense against human made technology?

Sully was a very public accident, how many will never be known by the general public?
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by Rockie »

trey kule wrote:Pilots are becoming the weakest link in the evolution of aviation..
No, we're the strongest link because a brain is still required during normal ops to tie everything together and make intelligent decisions encompassing more than rote responses. During abnormal ops 100X so.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by xsbank »

I guess I'll just take the stage coach to get some groceries and ride my horse to the airport...

Humans are smart and stupid. The only reason we are not further ahead is we have stupid emotions and complaints and are too greedy. Think about how we waste so much time on CRM because we are basically monkeys in uniform; its a very thin veneer of civilization that keeps us from bashing in the heads of our copilots. Suicide bombers? I want to be one when I blow up...

If we could actually concentrate on the tasks and lose the stupid conflicts we'd be pilotless already. We need another war to kill more of the godless and spur military development - that's how we move forward technologically, we concentrate.
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Re: Boeing studies pilotless airplane

Post by ragbagflyer »

Rockie wrote: No, we're the strongest link because a brain is still required during normal ops to tie everything together and make intelligent decisions encompassing more than rote responses. During abnormal ops 100X so.
Even with current technology levels I'd probably rather send my family on the computer driven airliner over the q400 piloted by two millennials; the captain who just upgraded to his first PIC job (!!!!), and the FO who was up really late and barely slept because his tinder date from the previous night went went really well.
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