notEnuf

But on the road 1 heartbeat or 0 is just fine. It's just a matter of elevation and time. Fortunately I think it won't affect me but my kids are a completely different story.

gloopy

A truck auguring in is nothing compared to a full of pax anywhere, or even cargo plane anywhere near infrastructure. Not even in the same universe. And its a LOT easier to program a 2 dimensional "autopilot" to pull over when the camera/sensors say its OK. Even if all that fails, the maximum potential disaster isn't even a hundreth of a percent of what a pax plane would be every single time.

Not everything scales infinitely into infinity.

notEnuf

SpaceX just pulled it off going to orbit. The air breathing realm is so yesterday. They seem to be able to do stage seperations and recover booster simultaneously too, not to mention docking. Your Phone could run 1000 Apollo missions but somehow in 50 years there will be no drivers but 2 pilots minimum on every flight?

gloopy

It has nothing to do with computng power. That's been there for decades already. It doesn't matter how awesome a computer is if it can't physically do the things necessary in an emergency. And what needs to be done to prevent a massive disaster is many, many times what existing autopilot/autothrottles can do at the level they'd need to be to do it. You would need to fully automate every single aspect fo the plane with much greater levels of reliability and redundancy. That adds massive weight, cost and MX and would be far more expensive than one additional pilot.

The level that airline safety needs to be in order to remain a valid form of transportation is many thousands of times more than the level drone or even manned space flights need to be. 1% of shuttle flights ending in disaster may be an acceptable tragedy for its balance sheet. One thousandths of that is way too excessive for pax airlines. And the cost to bring it in line with current safety standards would far, far exceed the cost of an additional pilot.

notEnuf

We have a difference of opinion. (loving the debate) I think we are already there technologically, that is not the impediment. Public acceptance and data on autonomous vehicle is the next step. The following step is political and we know political will is powered by money. At some point it will become obvious how reliable and safe the systems are. Trains are already there, in fact stats show human run time pressures lead to more incidents than computer driven auto shut down protocols. I also predict any human function that can be replicated more efficiently will be eventually.

123494

I'm mortgage free, I still live at home with my parents. I'll probably stay in this house forever and remain mortgage free. This will enable me to keep investing those savings into stocks and real estate. Having no wife or kids helps a lot too.

deltabound

I’m a big believer in the not too distant future of unpiloted commercial aircraft. It’s really a matter of AI advancement, not necessarily computing power per se. “AI Superpowers, China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order” has a good chapter on the evolution of how AI used to be studied, and how it’s evolved to something quite different, and much, much more adaptable.

I don’t see the physical controls of the aircraft being much of an obstacle either. As I recall, there’s very few switches/levers in a modern Airbus actually physically to the controlled part. (As opposed to, say the DC-9...aka, the Direct Cable).

Bottom line, as always is customer confidence. When the time comes, not only will passengers fly in an unpiloted aircraft, they’ll flat out refuse to board a plane with a human at the controls. Ditto with cars.

Alas.

Phins2right

You have no concept of the bandwith required to pull off such a plan.

Space Ex, although brilliant, it's a picobyte of data compared to what will need to be flushed for the volume of hard metal traffic required thru the network that must support the travel thru this fluid we call "air".

ERflyer

Once they get the Max flying again - maybe. I mean, seriously. They can’t even get a regular jet to fly without crashing. Without pilots onboard they would have crashed another half dozen before they grounded them. Cargo, who cares. Pax aircraft, maybe never without one human backup to the human designed computer crippled by cost cutting managers.

watch

A couple years ago I read that the successful airline career is retiring having had "one airline, one wife and one _____". I can't remember what the third one is. Anyone know how that goes?