Flyboyrw

BB will be stoked

seaav8tor

Done. M P L

tortue

How many heavy rail or rapid transit systems operate without human operators?

All heavy rail has locomotive engineers & conductors. Sure, the brakemen are gone, but the other folks are still there.

Every major urban rapid transit system I can think still has operators in the mix, even if they're operating the doors or just overseeing the train while its in automatic operation in the front cab. Up until a few years ago, some cities still had a separate person to operate the doors.

Bad things happen and the infrastructure to make remote flight control is still a far cry from being 100% ready for the scale of passenger or freight flights. RF technology is still spotty and I think the security industry has shown time and time again that the more complex you make a control system, the more apt it is to fail. The nations power, gas and rail signaling infrastructure still runs on some very basic technology for a good reason ("it just works"). I think in the next few years when the FAA rolls the next-gen we'll see how well some of these cost-savings and optimization measures will work...but my guess is don't hold your breath.

PSACFI

Yes, brilliant.....let's hand over all control of the airplanes to the computers. All we need now is a catchy name.....wait I got it.

Let's call it

SKY NET

CAVU

Nah. How about:

iGOTIT

ebl14

100 years ago you had to ride a train across the country and a ship across the sea. 50 years ago we were venturing into space and on our way to walking on the moon. 30 years ago we still had records and A-tracs, and real people welding parts together at the Ford and Chevy plants in Detriot. 20 years ago nobody knew what it meant to Google something, people had jobs making phone books and only a few people carried cell phones. 10 years ago there was no facebook, no twitter, and someone came up with an idea that you don't need to get news from credible sources, you can just "blog" with other people who have the same views as you. Last year we found out that the big three automakers can't even make money when they have machines do 90% of the work that skilled workers used to do and that American corperation's intersts are not the same as American people's interests.

Moores law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integreated circuit doubles every two years and has held true up to this point from when Gordon E Moore (co-founder of intel) published it in his paper in 1965..

15 years ago, could you have imagined having a GPS tell you turn by turn directions to your Grandma's house?

I think we are 10 years from seeing 1 pilot crews in cargo and 20-30 years from having a pilot on the ground flying multiple cargo planes from "the planet" in Memphis. Pax ops will soon follow, granted it will happen at the end of my career, but we are the last of the Mohicans. Artificial intellegince will soon take over our career just like it has taken the careers of tram operators, elevator operators, navigators, flight engineers, welders, machinists, factory workers, and countless other labor groups.

Dubes

Well said Stoki.

SkyHigh

It is true that machines can go astray however they would have a hard time matching the accident rates that people have. The flight director can fly the ILS better than most pilots. The computer does not fall asleep, get hungover or text girlfriends during taxi. Remotely controlled planes are on the way.

It is wishful thinking to hold the position that one day an automated air transportation system will not be as safe or safer than human flown. I can see a future where the plane is ground controlled with pilots sitting there watching the show with arms folded. Much like as it it already done now.

Skyhigh

nyalex

Ask Sully's passengers if they would like to fly on an airplane with no pilots up front. That ought to settle that.

2StgTurbine

With that logic, let’s ask the families of the victims of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 or American Airlines Flight 965.