Since we’re going to be talking about automation quite a bit here, I found Sully’s take on automation in the cockpit to be quite relevant:
> “I’VE COME across a number of people over the years who think that modern airplanes, with all their technology and automation, can almost fly themselves. That’s simply not true. Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate.”
…
“Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?” [0]
[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow
https://a.co/2iSmRDH
I’m going to pull another quote from that section that I think also supports the idea. There are specific cases cited in the book… I just don’t think copying an entire section of a book will be as helpful at getting the ideas out here:
> “Dr. Wiener[0] worried, and I agree, that the paradox of automation is that it often lowers a pilot’s workload when that load is already low. And it sometimes increases the workload in the cockpit when it is already high… For those who believe technology is the answer to everything, [he] would offer data to prove that isn’t the case. He said that automated airplanes with the highest technologies do not eliminate errors. They change the nature of the errors that are made. For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely… Dr. Wiener is not antitechnology, and neither am I. But technology is no substitute for experience, skill, and judgment.”[1]
[0] “Earl Wiener, Ph.D., a former Air Force pilot who is now retired from the University of Miami’s department of management science. He is renowned for his work in helping us understand aviation safety.”[1]
[1] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow
https://a.co/gRNJtON
Automation is more interesting in how it can enhance human capabilities. Humans don't need a whole lot of help keeping the wings straight and level on a clear day. But they do need help landing the airplane in dense fog, and two humans and three computers working together can actually do that. The computers can't do it by themselves, the humans can't do it by themselves, but together, they can!
As a SRE, or what I'm going to term "Operations Automation Engineer" (because like DevOps or Systems Administrator, there's a treadmill of terminology), I have often automated myself out of my secondary responsibilities, the ones that take up the majority of my time. At Google, we liked to joke that "It's SRE's job to automate ourselves out of our jobs every 18 months", and I think that from the perspective of time, that was very true. Whatever we spent most of our time on eighteen months ago should be a trivial task today.
What I can't automate myself out of is my primary responsibility; Making sure that the site or service is up and available and making our customers happy. I can make constant improvements to that, with occasional backslides, but what I'm paid to do and feel comfortable with my job security is to make a reliable, trustworthy service. That's not going anywhere.
> But they do need help landing the airplane in dense fog, and two humans and three computers working together can actually do that. The computers can't do it by themselves, the humans can't do it by themselves, but together, they can!
This is not remotely true. Two humans can easily land in dense fog with instruments alone. If you can't then you shouldn't be flying a plane especially not one with passengers. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
In general, I don't understand the push of humans to want to replace everything we do with machines. What's the point? What's the end goal? We just sit in a vat of embalming fluid consuming media with a feeding tube while machines whir about? Why can't enough ever be enough for humanity?
As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things.
You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks.
There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.
Adding a bit more context to this good post, the control algorithms are designed and developed around assumptions and an operational envelope deemed to be "normal".
An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes.
Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car).
This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over.
It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
The low-hanging fruit of straight and level flight is, I'd argue, appropriate for automation, but they need to get out of the way when the plane goes outside the normal operating envelope.
Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost.
There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!
This topic reminds me of an observation I made a while ago. I have found many folks (esp. non-technical) confuse automation with intelligence (more-so Artificial Intelligence).
Automation ==/== AI. Automation consists of a series of systems that are designed (i.e., programmed using control algorithms, logic rules, machine/deep-learning) to operate under a series of pre-set boundaries. The boundaries are typically defined under "normal" operating conditions, and safe-guards are put into place once the automated systems deviate from those "normal" operating conditions (I see a lot of practitioners esp. in the ML world fail to account for abnormal conditions...may be this is what happened w/ the Uber driver?).
The only comment I will say about AI is that I'm glad I am seeing RL and the like come more into play. I also contend this feels like a supervisory problem.
> As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things.
That’s not really what happens though. I also have some experience in automation. We humans don’t free ourselves up to do human things. We become slaves to the machines and automation. Yes, automating something frees up a human from doing the same thing, but when does it stop? The human just moves on to some other automation task in a never ending quest of scale.
At my shop, our shared goal is to make lives and products better. When done properly, automation is a tool, not a slave-driver. Scale isn't inherently bad, you can make the human experience more comfortable and fulfilling by satisfying basic needs with less effort.
People in a factory I worked in last week aren't gnawing furniture out of lumber with their teeth, nor are they whittling it with stone knives, sawing it with steel hand tools, or cutting it with power tools, they're loading and unloading CNC routers. It's not one person and $500M worth of equipment that lets a forklift operator dump logs in at one side and spit out semi trucks loaded with pallets of furniture, nor is it 2000 people and a bunch of hand tools, and it's about 200 skilled people and $20M worth of equipment. The most important feature of the equipment is the diagnostics, adjustments, and flexibility, allowing their operators to use their human judgement to improve operations.
We have declined a few of potentially profitable projects in the past year because we felt they were not a good match for our values, when customers had specs that required locking out operators from doing more than pressing "Cycle start", were unwilling to invest in training due to high turnover, or otherwise treated people poorly, or especially when they wanted to cut corners on safety, those are just not places that we partner with. This isn't purely altruistic, the effort invested in those undesirable shops is typically less valuable over the long term compared to the rising companies that treat their people better.
Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia.
If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc.
It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
> Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia.
In some alternate world, perhaps.
In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us.
> That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power.
Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain.
Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
I'm not sure why you're taking this as victim blaming. _Everyone_ needs to change, including the corporations and the very society we live in to make it a goal.
If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now?
Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain."
Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects?
To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet.
The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all.
What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.
> If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference.
False. There would only be class difference. Even in Star Trek, some people are starship captains who own French vineyards or luxury apartments in San Francisco while other people can only manage to live in a trailer in the desert, or on marginal planets on the border that are surrendered to the Cardassians, and if those colonists try to declare independence from the Cardassians, Starfleet will literally use weapons of mass destruction to make their homeworlds uninhabitable to human beings.
This is _my_ fantasy world, not bound by the history of Star Trek; the show itself in later series got ruined by awful writers who couldn't figure out how to make a sci-fi utopia fun to watch and instead made a faux-military/action drama for no reason. I want no part in that future.
Second, I think you actually miss the point of these episodes; the challenge in the Cardassian border wars and issues was "how does a space utopia exist with a (comically) fascist regime?" Debatably, the actions of the Maquis and other border colonies were persons stuck in a land ownership mindset which is exactly what I think we need to avoid. Data even proved this in the episode with the Sheliak to convince the people of Tau Cygni V that a place is just a place.
I have no idea what you're referring to about a trailer in a desert, but in actual Star Trek, everyone had a home, had food, had a place to live.
Regarding luxury apartments and vineyards, I must ask: why would you care? If you have a spacious and great apartment that meets your absolute every need for you and your family, why would you care if someone has more square meters or a higher floor on a high-rise? In a world where transporters and shuttlecraft and replicators exist, why would you care where your home is located except that it meets your personal vision of a perfect home? You can live in the middle of the alps and have every modern convenience at your fingertips and just enjoy the snow.
As for the vineyard, again, I think you're looking at this from a very current perspective; in a world with replicators and synthehol where only a few specific snobs care about real alcohol versus replicated alcohol, owning a vineyard and manually tending to it likely is just something where everyone goes "right, have fun with that." (Also, Picard didn't own the vineyard, his brother did. I guess in the Picard series he controlled it also? But never watched it)
I really cannot take the comment seriously as I think you both miss the point of the episodes regarding property/land and also are not considering how people might view apartment sizes and such in a world when transportation, knowledge, information, energy costs, food, basically everything is already taken care of. Remember, even humble Scotty thought he was being given an admiral's treatment in TNG when he got a _basic_ quarters for his stay.
Try to imagine that's what your normal life looks like, and then ask yourself how much you would care if someone has a few extra square meters.
You can have whatever fantasy world you want, but it’s still fundamentally incompatible with human nature. Even in the absence of material constraints, human beings will still compete for relative status. If you live in the United States today, you are incalculably wealthier than even the aristocrats of old, but this has not managed to alleviate envy.
Also, class difference has been decoupled from material wealth for centuries already. Just like a prosperous burgher from an Italian city-state in the early modern period was never considered the equal of an aristocrat who held a fraction of his wealth, a successful arctic fisherman, electrical lineman, or oil field worker is still in a lower social class than a less wealthy Ivy League graduate.
A future where the baseline minimum isn't homelessness and suffering in the street simply has not been done before.
Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life, a new world has a chance to thrive.
The past has the burden of dealing with the fact that the difference between a day-labourer and a wealthy elite is the former has to struggle to meet basic survival and participation in society is eliminated the the basic day-to-day is already met.
Human nature will adjust, just like it did to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of data entry specialists were replaced by digital automation; even more land-laborers were replaced by farm automation.
The difference with the future I want is that there is a guarantee of a good and basic living, whereas the past had no ability to guarantee this.
Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them. It becomes a non-issue; just like some years ago emoji were a status symbol (remember, you used to need to _pay_ for stupid emojis), they're a standard now.
The world can be better, we see this everywhere even today with municipal and community efforts, with OSS, and so on. It's already here in many spheres, it's just a matter of accepting that there's no harm in a percentage of society taking advantage of such a system.
The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
> Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life
Literally anyone who was alive during the 19th century would say that we’ve done this already.
> The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
My point was that the oil workers and arctic fishermen are already richer than many of the Ivy Leaguers, yet occupy a lower social status because our elite status games are decoupled from material wealth. Making material wealth even less relevant to daily life will only intensify these trends.
> Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them.
No, it just means those luxuries will cease to function as markers of status. It doesn’t mean markers of status will go away. Most markers of elite status have little to do with money because money is already too easy to get.
Yeah, agree, for a lot of people, social status will be always the primary driver. But if ever achieve a society where everybody has all necessities taken care of without needing to work for them, and people (the ones who choose to) only struggle for social status, that, for all practical purposes, is utopia.
Becase if we didn't, there'd be 95% of us still producing food manually and the other 5% would be blacksmiths and other supporting roles for food production.
Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.
When humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, people actually had less leisure time, worked longer hours, and had worse health. We just keep repeating this ad nauseam. The research shows that even over the last couple hundred years, leisure time has greatly reduced in so-called developed countries.
Let us not forget the anarcho-syndicalist communes. They would take turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week.
But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
Thanks for sharing! That’s exactly it. I really do think that we have the technology and ability to return to a sort of technological advanced system of hunting and gathering with some agriculture. In that, we could apply just enough automation to simplify our lives but then go about just living. Today, life is a never ending grind and to what end? We work and work and work towards the goal of only retiring when our bodies and minds are spent.
Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.
I swear they must be running some cult machinery inside MBA schools. Practically every MBA I’ve met parrots the same language and has the same beliefs and approaches.
About 1/3rd of the cost of an airline ticket is labor. Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working
> Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working
But they’re not because they need the paycheck.
You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential).
In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
Most people I know would stop working in an instant if that didn't mean they ended up living on the street.
But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%
For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely…
That's kind of interesting. It sounds similar to how every once in a while, pre-smartwatches, I would walk a mile or so on my way somewhere before noticing that Google Maps had me pointed in the opposite direction.
Then put the technology in and still have two pilots. This is a rare case, these days, where a democratically elected (kinda sorta) government can exert control over the appropriate degree of automation in an industry. We shouldn’t cave to the airlines. Look what we let happen to the railroads, which will likely collapse in the next few years due to excessive automation.
You are right that current planes are still pretty dumb. It's an artificial restriction though. Certification in this space is very tough for obvious reasons so there are not a lot of companies working on self flying planes because getting solutions in this space past the certification is going to be a long and expensive process. There are a few though and there have already been unmanned cargo flights.
From a technical point of view, flying and landing planes automatically is not that hard. It's a lot easier than self driving cars. And probably also a lot easier than landing a rocket, which is of course something that is not done manually by spacex. Why would they? It's way too complicated for humans and most of the important things require split second decision making far beyond what humans can even do.
The hard part is going to be fixing procedures and practices, which are optimized for humans communicating via 1960s technology. A lot of what pilots do isn't staying ahead of the plane (as they sometimes refer to it) but dealing with a crazy level of communication overhead of people yelling out courses, altitudes, transponder codes, radio frequencies, and weather information to each other over a really poor radio connection, while baby sitting the auto pilot, running down endless checklists, and micro managing it's gazillions sub systems. It's stressful and even very experienced pilots quickly loose the ability to keep up if they don't fly regularly. Because people fundamentally aren't very good at this stuff. They make mistakes. They mishear things. Etc. It's hard but also very much something that could and should benefit massively from automation. Lots more than we have today. All that check listing can be vastly simplified with automation. All the routine sharing of information can be done in text/binary form and be machine readable so the auto pilot can act on it (with or without human confirmation). Etc. But that requires change and the aviation world is extremely change resistant.
The military will likely get there first. The new B21 apparently can fly unmanned. It may still have a crew but it should be able to operate without one.
The actual hard part is dealing with emergencies. It's impossible to anticipate and code for every possible failure mode, but an experienced human pilot can sometimes figure out a good solution from first principles. In the famous case of US Airways flight 1549, the pilots intentionally disregarded part of the official checklist and improvised a new procedure on the fly. Would an automated system have performed as well?
The military is willing to accept a certain amount of operational losses in order to accomplish their mission, especially for unmanned aircraft. Tolerance for losses on commercial passenger flights is virtually zero.
>But that requires change and the aviation world is extremely change resistant.
But that resistance to change doesn't come out of nowhere. Getting complex systems on a plane is hard for a good reason. On a Level A system (which any system taking direct control over airplane controls would be) hundreds of people's lives are at stake.
The certification isn't there to stifle innovation and automated systems aren't disregarded because of a general dislike of "change". These systems are in place because they save lives. Software in planes needs different standards.
Most modern planes can fly themselves to quite a significant extent, but what they can not do is deal with emergencies, which push the plane outside of the design parameters where the software can function, that is where a crew is most needed.
They could deal with emergencies better. Even with the Miracle on the Hudson scenario, automation could have quickly calculated gliding distance, nearby airports with acceptable runway length. Landing on the runway was possible but it required quicker action.
It's ridiculous that pilots are still expected to attempt to calculate glide distance and airport in their head, and they almost always get it wrong.
Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
Emergencies are very often situations in which the plane is operating outside of normal parameters or even outside of specified parameters, e.g. a sensor failure or damage to the aircraft. In those situations software can not reliably control the plane and should return control to the crew.
The nature of emergencies themselve make dealing with them in software near impossible. How do you write software for a condition you can not anticipate? How would you test it? How can you make sure that it is not misdiagnosing a situation and making the problem worse?
The 737max disaster should be enough to demonstrate how dangerous misbehaving software in a plane can be.
Human airline pilot here, I'm not sure where you're getting this from:
> Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
Every modern jet since the early 90s has this. In every family of Airbus you can press the 'ALT' push-button or pull on the V/S knob. Both will level off the aircraft immediately (with slightly different follow-on characteristics).
Edit: to add more context, this works in unusual situations like dives and high-nose attitudes as well. The only difference is the inertia of a modern jet means the leveling off takes a bit longer.
It won't auto-level the wings for you in an airbus, however unless you're in an unusual configuration in alternate or direct laws (requiring a significant series of failures), the bank angle is limited by the aircraft anyway (whether you're on AP or not). For reference, in my 10 years of operating Airbus aircraft I have seen alternate law just once, we train it in the sim regularly but it's not a common occurrence.
Pressing ALT is taught as the correct thing when you're not completely sure what to do but for a fully unusual attitude (e.g. really nose-high or nose-low, or an acute bank angle) then currently the procedure is to handle it manually. To be honest, to get a large aircraft into that situation requires a pilot to screw it up badly in the first place, the AP won't get you there (well it might but hasn't happened yet).
A couple of years ago most airlines started training a more verbose method of recovery (disengage, push/pull, roll, thrust, stabilise - is the mantra) in response to studies conducted by Boeing and Airbus. Before airlines I used to compete in and teach advanced aerobatics so I'm not completely happy with that procedure (e.g. why push/pull first if you have huge bank on, only going to make things worse) but it's what the industry is pushing right now.
Overall though I think the bigger issues with pilot error are not things like unusual attitudes, yes they do happen from time to time but far more incidents occur from unstable approaches and silly inputs during takeoff. Hence why most changes in regulation right now are in those areas.
I think there is some confusion here about "automation". The benefits referred to involve providing greater access to information. The problems referred to involve putting more layers of abstraction between you and what you are controlling.
I see this in system admin. It's not a popular view, but automation is not always the best way forward. maintaining your terraform/ansible/etc ecosystem to run a single service on a single raspberry pi that sits in an office running a ticker above reception is far more work than a 5 line instruction manual. Chances are you'll never have to touch that box again until it comes time to move office, and when you do all that automation fails anyway.
The real problem in automation is the area Tesla is in: halfway there.
As pilots age out of real experience, their replacement with by coddled by vr and never manage. Full manual for years until the auto fallback hits them and suddenly they have a huge issue of recall.
So no matter how many pilots you have, automation needs to be all or nothing.
Automation really just takes out the hand-eye coordination part. It helps you fly more precisely. It does not take out the decision-making. It is also comforting to passengers that there are highly experienced people overseeing the operation of the plane.
All you gotta do is watch a few episodes of "Aviation Disasters" to conclude that the pilot needs a backup - the copilot.
After all, when the pilot goes to the potty, who is flying the airplane? The computer? LOL. When something unanticipated goes wrong, the computers are COMPLETELY USELESS because it wasn't programmed to deal with unanticipated problems.
Me, I'll pay a bit extra for my flight to have 2 pilots.
Just look at the MCAS disaster. The only override that wasn't under its control required someone present in the cockpit to basically physically lift the plane using a normally automated control.
This illustrates two things: First the design of the software used in commercial airplanes is bat shit insane and second, the fallbacks require that a trained person is physically present on the plane.
> We have been using remote controlled killer drones for years now.
While Boeing has shown some talent at killing people the goal of commercial airplanes is usually to get their passengers to their destination alive.
>First the design of the software used in commercial airplanes is bat shit insane
At least in that case. But it isn't normal that you blindly trust a sensor, not even Level D (failure is unimportant and easy to deal with) Software would/should do that. It actually takes a significant effort to put Software into a plane, which only increases with safety requirements.
The chain of failure which needed to happen in this case is enormous. Dozens of people need to have looked at the documentation and nobody cared/figured out this blatant security issue. How can a company like Boeing even operate like that?
Yes, safety requirements which include the double buffer of two trained and experienced human pilots being in physical command of the plane double checking themselves and the software/hardware
>Yes, safety requirements which include the double buffer of two trained and experienced human pilots being in physical command of the plane double checking themselves and the software/hardware
A lot of hardware/software is totally automatic and it would be insane if it were constantly checked by humans. Of course none of these systems running totally automatic have the ability to push thevplane into the ground based on faulty sensor data.
My point was that the failure of the MCAS was institutional, you should not be able to bring software like that onto a plane.
On the topic of the number of pilots my thoughts are that the redundancy is for the most part only neccessarry in exceptional situations. But exactly those situations are the ones in which the best thing a plane can usually do is graceful failure and handing control to the crew, which can far more easily overwhelm a single pilot.
> Of course none of these systems running totally automatic have the ability to push the plane into the ground based on faulty sensor data.
The yaw damper does.
There was another crash where the autothrottle was reading data from only one of the radio altimeters, which was giving false data. At 400ft altitude the autothrottle thought the airplane was landing, and pulled the throttles back to idle. The airplane pancaked into the ground.
All avionics software that has control authority can crash the airplane.
What was wrong with MCAS was its reliance on only one sensor, and no way to tell if the sensor was faulty. That's not an issue with the concept of MCAS.
I know a bit about the MCAS disaster. Very few people know that there were *three* incidences of MCAS runaway trim. What happened with the third one (which was actually the first incident)? It didn't crash. The pilot just turned off the stab trim system.
The override was there, it was always there. The thumb switches on the control column overrode it. Turning it off with the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch turned it off.
This procedure was detailed in an Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued to all 737MAX pilots after the first crash. The pilots in the second crash did not follow that procedure.
The pilots of all three incidents used the thumb switches to override MCAS and restore normal trim. The first crew then turned off the trim and landed safely. The second crew never did turn off the trim and crashed. The third turned off the trim when the airplane was in a dive and could not recover.
> Turning it off with the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch turned it off.
> The pilots in the second crash did not follow that procedure.
"At 05:40:35, the First-Officer called out 'stab trim cut-out' two times. Captain agreed and First-Officer confirmed stab trim cut-out."[1]
However they were unable to correct the trim of the aircraft without help of the electrical systems (still being on full takeoff power didn't help).
So around 3 minutes later stab trim cutout was switched back to normal. Pretty much the moment they did that the aircraft pitched down hard, the situation becoming unrecoverable within seconds, followed by the aircraft impacting the ground.
There were possibly ways to save the aircraft (reduce aerodynamic forces that prevented trim by hand by, for instance, reducing thrust), but those weren't detailed in any ADs.
The instructions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive said:
1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches on the column
2. then turn off the stab trim
The electric trim overrides MCAS.
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
> 1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches on the column
That's probably not an easy thing with a computer undoing your work every few seconds and fighting you for control.
And they did try to correct the trim before moving to 2.
5:40:00 AND (here automatic nose down) activates for 9 seconds, computer trimming from 4.60 to 2.1 units, crew trying to counteract by pitching up.
5:40:14 Pilot begins adjusting trim up. Gets to 2.4 units.
5:40:22 AND activates yet again (7s), also pushing trim all the way down to 0.4 units. DON'T SINK warning and PULL UP.
5:40:29 Captain asks the First-Officer to trim up with him. They reach 2.3 units (9s). This interrupts AND.
5:40:38 stab trim cut-out
5:40:43 AND activates again, but at least now it leaves the stabilizer alone.
All in they did fine, considering all this happened in 40 seconds. They regained control of the aircraft and now have time to asses what even happened.
However they still have to apply up to 100lbs of force to keep the nose somewhat pointed up. Only at times when both of them are actually pulling on the stick does the plane gain altitude. On top of that they're getting a MASTER CAUTION "anti-ice left alpha vane", adding to their workload. In the next three minutes they're discussing the warnings they're getting, informing ATC of their problem, and are trying to manually trim the plane (which doesn't work). I'd imagine their arms are getting tired.
So the understandable next step is to switch stab trim cut out back to normal, then trying to correct the trim further.
5:43:11 stab trim back to normal, followed by some short manual electric trim inputs
5:43:21 AND triggers yet again (5s), stab to 1.0 units. Within the first 3.5s the aircraft pitches -8° down, descent rate increases to -5,000 ft/min.
If they had caught and interrupted the AND/flipped stab trim back immediately, maybe this could've been saved. But since the computer got to do its thing for a few seconds, it's pretty much too late to do anything. The pilots are applying up to 180lbs of force, which accomplishes nothing. The plane keeps pitching further down.
5:43:44 Plane impacts the ground at an angle of 40° nose down.
That whole timeline was 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
The only way you can reasonably expect a human to deal with a situation like that, which requires a quick response, is if you train them for it. You don't just give a vague warning, a bunch of steps with three IFs attached, and hope for the best.
> That's probably not an easy thing with a computer undoing your work every few seconds and fighting you for control.
Having the trim start running again every few seconds is EXACTLY WHY there's a trim cutout switch. A few seconds is enough time to hit the thumb trim switches right on the column under your thumb, and the then hit the cutoff switch which is right there on the center console.
I don't dispute the timeline. But the fact remains, using the electric trim switches to return trim to normal, then turning it off, would have worked.
The stab trim does not move that fast, they had time to turn it off after trimming to normal.
Thanks for the link. At one point, it was clear the EA pilots did use the electric trim switches to override MCAS. They did turn off the trim at one point. What they did not do was follow the instructions in the EAD.
> maybe this could've been saved
The first incident shows the procedure works. Trim to normal, turn it off. That's all there is to it.
The thing about the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is it came out after the first MAX crash, and was about how to not die if it happens to you. If you were a MAX pilot, wouldn't you take extra care to read that EAD, understand it, and remember it? I cannot fathom ignoring it.
I can see why it they wouldn't have recalled it in the first 40s of that situation. However they got the situation stabilized to a point where they could've kept going for a while and maybe came up with a better plan of action before attempting to correct the trim again (which is what ultimately doomed the flight).
> Having the trim start running again every few seconds is EXACTLY WHY there's a trim cutout switch. A few seconds is enough time to hit the thumb trim switches right on the column under your thumb, and the then hit the cutoff switch which is right there on the center console.
Which is kind of leaving the territory of the AD. The way I'm reading it, it advises to leave the switch set to cutout for the remainder of the flight. They'd have had to come up with that approach (or an approach that would have enabled manual trim) on their own once they had the aircraft flying somewhat straight without immediate danger. Their main mistake may have been to not take more time to assess their situation when they had the chance and not fully grasping the danger of leaving that switch on normal for even the 5s it took the plane to become unrecoverable at the end.
But all those factors pale in the face of inadequate training and the fact that there could hardly be a more dangerous problem with an aircraft than it - out of nowhere - entering an uncontrollable nosedive if the pilots don't properly respond within seconds. I'd maybe rate complete loss of control/"wings fell off" higher.
I still have trouble blaming the pilots because - with the benefit of hindsight - I would have expected such crashes to happen as much as they did, maybe more. The aviation industry generally avoids expected mistakes that result in loss of life and someone was bound to make this one.
> Which is kind of leaving the territory of the AD.
No, it isn't.
> The way I'm reading it
What it says is to restore trim to normal and then turn it off.
> not fully grasping the danger of leaving that switch on normal
Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement is a severe problem which is why what to do about it is a "memory item", meaning you don't have time to read the checklist. All pilots should know that runaway trim is a critical danger.
> out of nowhere - entering an uncontrollable nosedive if the pilots don't properly respond within seconds
There's enough time to respond. All three crews correctly restored normal trim immediately.
> I still have trouble blaming the pilots because
I give the pilots some of the responsibility, because they had all the information needed to counter the problem. The rest goes to Boeing for a bad MCAS design. It's a pilot's job to read, understand, and remember Emergency Airworthiness Directives. If that's unreasonable for them, they need to turn in their wings and drive an Uber.
I find no fault for the pilots of the Alaska crash where the stabilizer trim jammed. There were no instructions on how to deal with that, and they were in contact with the maintenance chief who had no clue, either. The pilots kept trying to break the jam loose, doing things like engaging both trim motors to apply more torque. The result was the jackscrew nut stripped the threads, and then it slid to hard over, then broke the end of the jackscrew off, and it was game over.
Now me, as an engineer who knows how that system works, I would have advised them to leave it alone, reduce airspeed to reduce the loads on it, and land ASAP. The jackscrew motors are way too powerful to let them grind away at it. Also, when it did move, it let off a very loud screech indicating that something awful was happening.
But they weren't engineers or mechanics. They made a mistake, but it was reasonable considering what they knew. They did the best they could.
Give me whoever you consider the best two pilots on earth and I promise you they'll have a collective minute of suboptimal decision making at some point, especially when confronted with an extremely sudden stressful situation. Humans don't work the way you're implying they do.
However we design systems and procedures such that suboptimal usually doesn't mean fatal, and in those specific instances where it would, we train humans so they perform adequately.
If humans were so great, we wouldn't need a lot of the technology in modern aircraft. It's mostly there because humans suck. Taking work away from the meatbags, putting in safeguards, and designing with the human element in mind, produces more desirable outcomes.
And it's not like this crew had the wrong ideas. They attempted all the right things, but execution was lacking and sadly the situation had no room for error:
1. Did use cut out, but left it on normal for a few crucial seconds without any manual input, allowing the computer to mess everything up again.
2. Did try to fix trim before cut out, but only got it halfway there to the point where they could at least achieve level flight and a slight climb. Tried to trim the rest of the way manually, but that didn't work.
> There's enough time to respond.
Disregarding that the situation could have been avoided, the second time this crew didn't have time to react anymore. It took only 3.5s from the automatic nose down engaging to descending at -5,000 ft/min, pitching -8° down and quickly increasing to -40°, despite the pilots pulling on their sticks full force. They had maybe a second or two to nip it in the bud, then had twenty seconds left to somehow arrest the rapid descent of an aircraft that is trimmed precisely the wrong way with the horizon in a place you don't ever want to see it in a commercial airliner. I don't think it was physically possible?
It's not hard imagining situations where an aircraft doing something like that within 3.5s out of nowhere would be disastrous. There certainly wouldn't be time to respond. This crew was warned by earlier misbehavior, so the situation was theoretically avoidable, but there was little room for error and so we should be glad for all the times something didn't happen.
> All three crews correctly restored normal trim immediately.
Are you counting this crew? I don't think they had normal trim at any point once the incident started. They were trying to get there.
Yes, people make mistakes. And we should design systems to be tolerant of those mistakes. With airplanes, we try to think through all the emergencies first, figure out how to fix them at leisure, then write it down in the form of a checklist or an Emergency Airworthiness Directive.
We expect pilots to pay attention to those things. They make mistakes, sure, but they are still responsible for those mistakes. The EA pilots did not follow the procedure laid out as "how to not die like the Lion Air pilots". Seems to me that should be worth reading, understanding, and remembered. Especially as there was nothing complicated about it - trim to normal, turn it off.
Wouldn't you prefer to fly with pilots who did? I do.
I am not a pilot. But given my experience driving cars in video games, and driving them in 3D land, there's no comparison.
A remote operator cannot pick up a fire extinguisher, go into the cabin and look out the window, smell the smoke, feel the weird vibration, relieve the pilot who is pulling on the controls with all his might, fend off intruders with the fire axe, etc.
Remote control is always going to have a lag in it. I doubt one could land an airplane remotely even with just a 1 second lag.
Having your butt in the seat of the airplane is a strong motivator to keep it flying. The pilot always arrives first at the scene of the crash.
We’re getting really close to the old joke - planes will have a computer, a pilot, and a dog. The computer is there to fly the plane, the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.
"Attention passengers, I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is that Captain Ovarwurked has, sadly, passed away while flying the plane. The good news is that a remote backup pilot is now going to fly us to the nearest landing field! Please sit back and relax, and try not to think about the person sitting in the comfort of their home with an Xbox 360 controller who hopefully has a stable internet connection. [1]
On that note, we'd like to ask everyone to please stop using anything wireless, as it runs a small risk of interfering with the delicate connection to satellites overhead, which is currently all that is keeping our remote pilot connected."
If the civil aviation sector suffered hull losses at the same rate as remote control war drone flying does[0] - even excluding those shot down - the entire industry would be bankrupted within a few years.
Also, this is an attempt to reduce labor costs. They aren't going to put a pilot on the ground as primary or backup - they just want to remove the second pilot from the loop entirely.
We have a list of airliner crashes[1], that once we figure out absolute numbers of total flights likely shows that airliners are much, much safer than remote controlled drones (after excluding shoot downs for latter), but what we don't have is data on how many aircraft landed safely but only because the second pilot was there. I'd want to know:
1. How many times did a pilot immediately intervene for a developing safety issue while the other pilot was asleep, in the toilet, or suffering from a medical incapacitation? A huge amount of work has been done to ensure redundancy of human control in such situations, because many crashes have occurred where this process failed.
2. How many times did a pilot make a mistake that was corrected by a second pilot, and if that correction hadn't been made a safety issue would have developed? There are numerous crashes attributed to pilot error and the second pilot failing to correct that error - a huge amount of work has been done to make sure that can't happen again, because everyone knows pilots regularly make mistakes, often a critical time of the flight from a safety perspective: landing.
3. How many times has an automated system shown better error correction performance that saved an aircraft vs a human being?
Until we have this data, the data we have suggests remote controlled aircraft or removing a pilot has the potential to be one of the most dangerous decisions to happen to civil aviation in the history of the industry.
The ones where the second pilot corrected the mistake are not shown on episodes of Aviation Disasters, because they are boring.
The first 737MAX MCAS incident you never hear about because there were 3 pilots in the cockpit, and one of them reached over and turned off the stab trim system.
"Skin in the game" from Taleb argues that yes, it's because the pilot is in plane that the plane is safer. Because the pilot will pay the same price as the passengers for a mistake, it will increase the likelihood of success.
Killer drones main job is killing people, an airlines main job is keeping them alive...
I don't think the comparison to a drone that doesn't need a pilot on board applies to an airline. If there are humans on board, one or ideally more of them should be capable of controlling the aircraft.
Drones fail all the time, so I wouldn't classify that as a success example.
The difference here is that if the drone fails then nothing really happens, the targets might even be spared lol, but if a commercial airplane fails then hundreds of lives could possibly be lost.
I don't think the airline industry is ready for that massive risk. It's already risky enough for them now.
You could theorize a simple remote override that is simply “deviate to nearest appropriate airport and land” but that requires substantial support AND doesn’t handle all sorts of abnormal situations beyond “pilot died”.
It’s skin in the game. A pilot in the cockpit will make sure all safety procedures are followed and correct because his life is literally at play. A pilot at land, not necessarily.
While the show is great, the dialog can be hilarious. "We have to find the cause. Let's check the flight voice recorder." (One always checks the voice recorder.)
> American Airlines Capt. Michael Johnston died of a heart-attack mid-flight from Phoenix to Boston early Monday morning, his wife Betty Jean Johnston told NBC News.
… and where exactly would this second pilot be? The flight deck remains locked from the inside during flight post-9/11. There are a lot of concerns regarding two pilots, not just failure of one of the pilots but also mal-intent of a single pilot.
For the sake of the discussion this isn't an entirely ridiculous notion.
Here in W.Australia Rio Tinto manage and remote co-pilot otherwise fully automated 100 tonne Haulpak dump trucks (that can easily run over and crush a car or pickup truck) from 1,000 km away.
I'm fully in favour of a human pilot and a co-pilot (an advanced trainee even) for short haul flights that don't require shift work for the pilot (eg: long haul Australia -> Europe you'd want a pair of experienced pilots to tag team at least, + copilots and flight engineer) .. but there is an argument to made for emergency remote pilot capability.
The argument against that, of course, is terrorists remote flying a hostage filled bomb.
> Here in W.Australia Rio Tinto manage and remote co-pilot otherwise fully automated 100 tonne Haulpak dump trucks (that can easily run over and crush a car or pickup truck) from 1,000 km away.
Comparing a truck that goes slowly back and forth on a single, unvarying track which never changes to an airplane is not reasonable.
And do you know what happens when those trucks, which drive at slow speeds, lose connection? They stop and wait for the connection to re-establish. Does that work for planes?
> but there is an argument to made for emergency remote pilot capability.
You don't actually make that argument, because there isn't one. Most air emergencies happen in seconds and require situational awareness, and usually some sort of physical input.
You're forgeting, or perhaps unaware, of the many years of remote UAV operation and autopiloting.
Modern aircraft are capable of autonomous flight and large armed drones are able to fly with light supervision switching to tight control as required already (and for some time).
Emergencies such as three way redundant altitude control failing, bird strikes, engine failure, et al are best handled by humans at the controls, sure.
None the less it's both possible and desirable for emergencies such as the humans at the helm having heart attacks or food poisoning to dealt with by remote supervision.
Again, that desirability must be balanced against other security factors.
Yea, I think remote backup drivers for self driving cars is fairly reasonable, but remote pilots just brings to mind thousands of passenger filled bombs.
At least to start it’s pretty simple. Have a single physical pilot with the ability for a remote pilot to take over in the event of incapacitation, bathroom breaks, etc. The real pilot can always override the remote piloting system through some kind of physical disconnect.
That’s a different trade off in the case of a deranged pilot or hijackers. Similarly something easy to disconnect is likely to accidentally disconnect, while something difficult to disconnect might not be fast enough.
A much larger issue is copilots do a significant amount of work especially in an emergency while also gaining experience in the aircraft. This means a steady stream of highly experienced senior pilots on the exact airframe being flown.
I would surely hope that to start they would keep 2 pilots in the cockpit and have a remote pilot on standby and record X number of miles without things hitting the fan.
> Prior to 2010, pilots needed just 250 hours to start flying for a commercial airline. The Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010 raised this requirement from 250 hours to 1,500 hours.
>co-pilots in foreign countries are required to have just 240 hours, with some of those hours occurring in a simulator.
This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely. don't know if the "pilot shortage" is still happening that resulted from lots retiring/taking buyouts at the beginning of covid but it is quite a lot of hours to train for a role that doesnt pay too much.
The pilot shortage is all up and down the stack, including in GA [1], commercial, and military. There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline. It doesn’t help that most PPLs tend towards wealthy professionals who sure as hell aren’t sitting in an aluminum tube nonstop six to twenty hours at a time. Instead of using pilots’ love of flying to siphon off recruits from other professions theyve used it to keep salaries down just like the gaming industry. You reap what you sow.
It’s going to take a generation of higher salaries to build that pipeline back out. Instead they just want to drop a pilot. F that.
[1] private pilots make up part of our natural disaster infrastructure and the FAA has long been trying to get more people into aviation because that’s going to be a painful shortage if i.e. the big one hits the Seattle area and most of rhe highways get eaten by sand
The sad thing about GA is that it’s just so cost prohibitive. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars just to get the basic license, and even then it’s not that practically useful (you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating). I would love to get my PP, but even in a well-paying field it’s just inaccessible without dedicating a lot more than I’m ready to give.
The GA manufacturing industry seems to have entered death spiral. With the fall in popularity of GA, the number of planes made every year went way down which drove the price of both new and used planes up. We went from producing almost 20,000 GA planes a year in the 1970s to under a thousand a year in the 1990s and it's barely recovered since then (1,500 a year IIRC)
Europe is weird about private license; so much so that a vast majority of people in Europe instead travel to the US for a few months to learn flying.
Night flying over LA is great; night flight over the desert or the Midwest away from cities can be effectively IFR; VFR private licenses require some IFR time but I highly recommend spending some time on instruments if you’re going to VFR at night.
And VFR over the top at night I just don’t recommend unless you have an IFR rating.
One of the problems is the way certain airlines, and commercial aviation in general, started to pay and employ pilots. Gone are the days of airline employed initial pilot training. Gone are the days, in some cases, of airline paid type rating training. Which turned the job of an airline pilot into quite a shitty one, especially considering the amount of responsibility pilots have.
Pushing for single pilot flight will only make it worse.
> There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline.
Really? Can you back that up with some reference somewhere?
From talking to aspiring airline pilots, it seems that their career trajectory is terrible until they actually land their butt in the seat of a major airline plane.
How can we have such a shortage of pilots and at the same time have such lousy pay and working conditions for the infeed?
See the FAA's US Civil Airmen Statistics spreadsheet for the overall big picture [1]. Specifically, the "Pilot Total w/o Student Category" fell from 490k in 2012 to 470k in 2021, despite the number of instructors growing from 98k to 121k. The number of students has skyrocketed from 120k in 2012 to 250k in 2021 but it's just not translating to commercially viable pilots: we added 30k students last year but lost several hundred airline pilots and only gained 600 commercial pilots. The number of PPLs fell from 188k in 2012 to 161k in 2021.
Not sure if sarcasm, but are you asking how there is a shortage in airline pilots when the incentives to start looking at a career in the field are terrible?
Precisely. The working conditions for the infeed are terrible for pilots as well as flight attendants.
A friend went through flight attendent training recently. She did very well but eventually dropped out when the total compensation was small and didn't include things like the rent you pay to "hot bunk" at wherever you wind up stationed. Compensation also didn't include things like paying for your attorney if you are sued while working for the airline.
So many "shortages" are like the "shortage" of engineers. No, there are plenty of engineers--just none willing to put up with your bullshit at that price.
>This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely.
The other low hanging fruit is to not underpay new pilots in exchange for them hitting the lottery and the career only paying off if they are lucky enough to land a cushy gig at a big airline.
This is the source of the current shortage. It is much more time consuming and expensive just to become a commercial pilot now. This has completely disrupted the progression and training in the pipeline and will not be alleviated by halving the pilot requirements.
When this flight hour change runs head first into a large number of pilots retiring the entire industry is going to be in a state of emergency.
We solve that by going to war; the military is perfectly fine sticking a 19 year old with 20 hours of stick time behind the controls of a supply plane.
And when the war is over we have a glut of pilots.
Why not require a pilot with 1.5k of hours and allow co-pilots with 250+ hours for cargo and 500+ hours for passenger? It would decrease the upfront cost of getting trained as a pilot before getting paid.
Some accidents where caused by pilot and copilot providing conflicting input. Having two pilots pilots with significant training differences has the potential to make things worse.
Which accidents are those? Pilot training has long emphasized the importance of having only one pilot actively flying the aircraft at a time, while the other acts as a monitor.
2009 Air France 447. The copilot was panicking and never let go of the controls even after vocally handing them over. The pilot only seemed to realize this shortly before the crash.
The wiki page for it mentions a lot of other issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 . Including an offhand remark by the pilot that he only had one hour of sleep and warnings that only sounded when the plane was in a remotely sane orientation.
This makes no sense to me. The cost of having a copilot is one shared by every carrier. Eliminating that does not give one a competitive advantage as all carriers will get a similar cost reduction. It smacks an elitist "fuck employees, we hate having them, it's our money"
That's not even considering the safety implications.
Maybe its not competitive advantage against other airlines but is definitely competitive advantage against other forms of transport. If they can reduce cost they can reduce price and this may result in growth of the market. It will also increase the supply of human resources which would make fast market expansion possible.
I don't know about the security implications but I'm inclined to believe that lowering costs is good for business.
What form of travel are airlines competing with in the US? Travel by train is basically so bad that it’s for entertainment purposes only and any distance over 300 miles is more expensive and time consuming by car.
The fact that the airport/TSA experience can be so difficult and airlines are still fine is a testament to the lack of viable alternatives.
I don't know, are interstate highways empty? Price reduction can compete against the trips not taken at least.
Also, it might be about the availability of pilots. How is the demand for air travel doing? If it is very strong then 1 pilot per plane would mean twice the pilots in the market. Then it's up to hardware producers to supply the pilots with planes and increase market.
My understanding is that qualified pilots are in short supply and by removing the position of copilot, the collective pilot pool doubles which also somewhat reduces the leverage pilots have over airlines due to supply shortage.
Safety implications are total bs, the moment a plane that has one pilot goes down congress will pass a law than requires a minimum of 6 pilots for every plane. So that would be idiotic on the part of airlines to lobby for if they suspected significant additional risks. Also keep in mind buses have one driver and it's just as bad if a bus crashes, but I suppose you don't care since you don't take buses much, talk about "elitists".
No one is "fucking employees" when that leads to bottom line growth in a crippling and money losing industry with insane regulations and red tapes like required no smoking signs in brand new airplanes.
So you say that no way a company will prioritise short term profits at the expense of a small long term risk ?
I'd agree that risk is not affected only if the plane can take off, navigate, land and park on the runway entirely on its own (effectively replacing a pilot)
I suspect it has more to do with the availability of employees rather than the cost. But I’ll admit that’s based on my hearing anecdotal tales rather than hard facts.
Isn’t that the same thing? What I’ve heard is that the pay isn’t attractive enough to get enough new pilots and a ton of older ones retired when the airlines screwed them during the pandemic. If you have a reputation for dumping your employees any time you can save a little money, the base pay expectations are going to need to go up.
Plane crashes are a major problem for the airlines. When it happens, we all hear about it, often with horrific imagery of wreckage and talk of hundreds of dead people. That's a problem for the popularity of the industry and they'd probably rather pay the victims/insurance than have people lose trust in their safety.
I'm generally anti-union, but happy to see the union here pushing back against this. This is definitely not in passengers' interests, and normally passengers don't have an advocate with any power, so it's nice to see our interests are aligned with the pilots' union.
Maybe? Unions like to make sure that employers put plenty of their members, especially senior members, on any given job. That could mitigate safety issues related to inexperience or understaffing. But they also tend to protect members from accountability for unsafe conduct, and resist the imposition of safety measures that members find annoying. They’re just pro worker. Workers are human and prone to incompetence and machismo as much as anyone else.
The main reason American workers are not exploited is that they can easily get other jobs and would be difficult to replace (but when that’s not the case, they are).
Who is “you”? Software development and most IT related occupations are exempt from overtime. Hardly anyone on HN has an 8 hour workday by law. Ditto for professional, managerial, and administrative - careers that most people would not, in fact, exchange for those with rights.
The law can give a bit of leverage to people who otherwise have none, but I’d wager there are more people who have leverage of their own than whose employers are only restrained from abusing them by law/contract. Especially in a tight labor market like today’s (outside tech).
Same here in America. It's just that in America we resent that people with rights cost more, so every mistake any union has ever made must be proof that they want to resurrect Stalin and make him President for Life.
It’s an American thing: there’s been money pouring into promotion of libertarianism and anti-union ideas like “right to work” laws ever since the Great Depression-era reforms lead to better compensation and rights for workers. A lot of influential writers, preachers, etc. got substantial funding and promotion for generations so now you’ll find many people who are conversant with these ideas but never really understood their origin as a coordinated campaign rather than an organic movement.
I’m also anti-union but what’s going on here seems like typical union negotiation tactics.
One side wants something. However, they have no leverage. Accordingly, they make a claim and see if the public will back it up. If so, you now have a token to trade at the bargaining table that you never actually intended to play. If the public isn’t on your side, you just say you’ve learned from the public’s opinion.
We see this garbage with the NFL all the time. Most recently, it was with the manufactured penalties from touchdown celebrations.
Flight law and procedure is painstakingly written in blood, and the thorough analysis of every plane crash is why aviation is so incredibly safe, there is no possible way this would ever be allowed.
I highly recommend checking youtube for crash analysis videos and series btw, the incredible detail these investigations go into is eye opening, and really gave me an appreciation for the field.
Perhaps the CEOs (in constant pursuit of profits and bonuses) don't care so much about safety, and are trying to make a play to get society to accept a lower level of safety in air transport? We accept huge amounts of deaths from road transport, preventable illnesses, etc. Air transport is possibly the exception (that is getting in the way of profits)
This must be the last remaining thing they can think of to get the stock to go up and get the CEOs the bonuses they think they deserve. The ultimate short-sighted move because the first crash that happens from this will tank your stock.
No, just no, and I'm increasingly tired of companies eliminating any form of slack or redundancy to save pennies on the dollar. This is in effect taking a 'safety loan' in that you earn a little bit more now, but lose a lot more in the future when you're the subject of a massive lawsuit due to poor safety protocols.
Even if planes become fully automated, a pilot and a copilot should always be present on the plane. One to serve as a check against the automated system, and the other to serve as a check against the pilot.
If an airline offered 2 pilots when every other airline only had 1. Then I would fly them every time.
I know the chance of them having a heart attack or stroke, suicide is statistically unlikely. But putting your life in the hands of a single person you’ve never met vs two is a no brainer to me.
If autopilot can control an airplane, then couldn't someone also pilot the plane remotely (as if it were a drone)? That would provide some pilot redundancy. I imagine airlines could also save money on staffing if the copilot didn't have to be physically present.
1) the autopilot is actually quite dumb ("keep altitude", "fly on course X", "maintain set speed", "change altitude at rate X / to level Y"), doesn't handle exceptions (in fact, autopilots are designed to disengage in case of exception), and is generally totally blind to environment other than heading, speed, altitude and optionally position (but not, for example, detailed environment on the ground)
Airlines are fighting tooth and nail to not spend money to implement video feeds on the black boxes, a rather doable upgrade with huge safety benefits, and you want to mandate expenditures on converting all air ships to full remote drones? That is never going to happen.
-- interesting - total opposite for me - #1 cause of commercial aircraft accidents is pilot error - by a long shot - personally - looking forward to the day humans are not involved in flying an aircraft --
Think it through, get rid of human engineers designing those aircraft, get rid of human mechanics and engineers maintaining them, human pilots flying them and human managers driving all of that. While we are at it, get rid of human passengers, without those there won't be any dead people neither if the machines get it wrong.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Maybe this will be fine when the technology is there, but it's very obvious that doing this change today -- especially when it's being lobbied to be applied to cargo planes first (historically much older former passenger planes w/o modern creature comforts) -- is going only going to increase deaths by pilot error.
Human airline pilot here, a lot of comments about the reliability of automation for takeoff, landing and some emergency scenarios but the proposed regulation is a little more specific. They're trying to allow one pilot at the controls in the cruise phase of flight, this will allow airlines to alter [read: reduce] the pay for the resting second pilot.
What I think the regulators and manufacturers are missing has less to do with the what-if scenario of an incapacitated pilot and more to do with what happens when pilots get bored. Sitting in a cockpit for my 7+hr shift at night over the Pacific is made safer by the fact that I can have a conversation with the other pilot to keep my mind somewhat alert. Take that away and the mind gets dull, complacent and prone to error.
I'm all for more automation as long as there's a measurable benefit to safety. If getting rid of all human pilots leads to a reduction in lives lost per unit of time then it's worth it. Sure there will be major accidents that a human could have prevented, but there will be accidents prevented by the machine too. The crossover point matters.
> Sure there will be major accidents that a human could have prevented, but there will be accidents prevented by the machine too. The crossover point matters.
Interesting how I assume HN is capable of a rational conversation around this, but when the exact same premise is raised around self driving cars, all rationality flies out the window
Good question, I ask myself the same thing every time I come to this site :)
I'm also a programmer in my spare time, I started coding long before I was a pilot. Sometimes I do consulting work and I also have a startup. Flying jobs generally give enough spare time to do these things in a limited way.
Yea know this lobbying effort just screams lawsuit by incompetence.
The execs who are pushing this effort appear to know little to nothing about flying, safety, human centered design, and automation.
I might be as brash to state they may not give a damn as long as they get their bonuses and punch out leaving the other exec holding the bag. The compensation structure and laws regarding claw back clauses must be revamped.
Anyway, as a person w a controls background and system automation, this is a total cluster fvck w out a major investment in sensors and UX redesign.
If this passes, I am going to seriously consider those private plane sharing programs.
You're never going to see the price of airline tickets fall by 50% due to eliminating pilots, or likely any other reason. The companies will just use the increased margins to pad their own pockets while probably raising prices under the guise of innovation or other additional features.
With the exception of a few markets that have price volatility, deflation is a really rare thing. What people get instead are products that are packed with either more performance or more features(whether useful or not) and that is justification for the slight price increases that we see from year to year.
I think the GP comment you're replying to nailed the reason why:
> I take a contrarian opinion on this, the price of a flight in the US outside of major hubs is egregious. Especially during peak times or holidays.
Highly-engineered tubes that fly 10km above the ground at very high speeds, have absolutely amazing reliability and long-term safety, and can navigate all over the world are, unsurprisingly, very expensive. But people still want to hop in one and pay less than a train ticket.
United Airlines is posting anywhere from 15-30 billion in gross profit for each of the last 4 years, AA and Delta are on somewhat similar trajectories adjusted for size. The airlines going bust operate in the only space that they can be competitive in, which is the one with razor thin margins. You can guarantee that prices will never come down if there are only 3 major players in a $140 billion size domestic market.
> I would fly domestic automated flights if the automation was proven as safe, the above conditions were met, and the price was 40-50% cheaper.
You believe pilot salaries are 40-50% of airline ticket prices? A pilot makes ~130K per year and flies, say, 2 trips a day, so ~500 trips a year. So on a plane with 200 people, they are each paying about $1.30 per pilot. Two pilots, round it up to $5 per trip. That's how much you'd save if the automation system was free.
But, hey, I'd also fly an automated flight that was proven safe for a 50% discount. Even a manual flight.
Experienced captains at the major ("legacy") airlines make considerably more than you think. Up to ~$350 per hour (plus benefits, retirement, etc.)
On the other hand, salaries are VERY back-loaded towards the end of their career. A first-year first officer ("copilot") is maybe $90/hr. And if you switch employers, you start all over again at the bottom of the ladder. A strange world compared to hopping around tech companies like most of us here are familiar with.
Also pilots do not work 40hrs/week, and the more common airframe variants are maybe 150 seats on average. Those all somewhat cancel out, but it's probably more like double your estimate. Still not a huge fraction of ticket price.
Part of the problem with a single pilot is how a new person gets the experience in the real world of big boy planes. You need 1500 hours of flight time before airlines will hire you. New pilots often get most of those hours as CFI's tooling around teaching others how to fly a 4-seat Cessna 172. Ready to get in a 737 with them at hour 1501?
You can’t just jump into a 737 from your CFI hours on a 172; you still do need a type rating.
The required hours are a problem; the solution is not to go to one pilot but to go back to three, so the third pilot can build actual flight hours in type without issue.
1. Free fuel. Fuel is the biggest cost of flights. For domestic flights, about half the ticket cost.
2. No taxes/government mandated fees (including fuel taxes). These are the second biggest cost, and for international flights, can easily be half the ticket price, but for domestic flights, about 20% of the ticket price.
3. Free planes. Planes are the third biggest cost.
4. Free administration. The Airline bureaucracy is the fourth biggest cost.
Reducing convenience - replace as many possible flights between city pairs with as few giant jumbos as possible. Instead of many many flights between LAX and CHI just have a few A380s in cattleclass.
Saves a bit on fuel and a bunch on other costs. But people would be unhappy about it.
Larger planes are more efficient, but then ridership drops off when you make things less convenient so it's harder to fill the planes. I'm pretty sure the airlines are already maximizing this and are not optimizing for passenger convenience :)
I rolled that into mandatory fees, assuming the airport was owned by the government. I know there are for-profit private airports, but I was keeping things simple. And yes, airports have to be paid for, as do planes, labor, administration, and fuel :) But we are assuming magical powers here, or the ability to provide all of these services for half the cost.
The 737 MAX crashes were in 2019. These companies don't have our safety as a top priority anymore and things being "proven safe" obviously is not something that can be held high. I don't see how I could trust an automated flight, if even the biggest aircraft producer in the world cannot make automated systems that won't kill 200 people in one go, in a matter of minutes, in 2019, without the pilot's knowledge.
I would hope that auto flying and landing is quite good and robust before considering single point of failure for the pilots. This also assumes that no pilot would act out against the health of their crew and passengers.
In other words, when they can safely fly with no pilots they can have one.
> But many recent examples tend to confirm the unions' argument, including a 2015 crash in Europe. A co-pilot of a Germanwings flight locked the pilot out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and 149 other people, giving credence to the ongoing argument that in an airborne crisis you need two pilots working in concert to save the aircraft
How does that support the argument that two pilots are necessary?
It supports the argument that a determined pilot is going to crash the airplane whether or not there are one or two pilots on the plane!
Because now (at least in America), there are always two bodies in the cockpit at all times. When one of the pilots goes to the bathroom, the head stewardess goes into the cockpit. Someone can always attempt to unlock.
At least another pilot can try saving the plane even if a pilot attempted to crash it. In addition to flight 9525, I remember a Mayday documentary on EgyptAir Flight 990, where American and Egyptian investigators reached a very different conclusion.
American investigators said that it's more likely for the first officer to intentionally nosedive the plane while the pilot was away, and the pilot tries to recover from it, while Egyptian investigators said there's a problem with the elevator control.
You can’t know what was prevented due to the copilot being present. This is the problem. Nobody appreciates the value of the unbroken window. I’m willing to bet a horrifyingly large amount of value exists in a human copilot.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but companies never allocate resources as if that were true.
If prevention becomes a cost center, some jackass is going to try to cut it. They couldn’t measure the prevention. It was just another line item on the wrong side of a ledger.
During any incident, the current CRM is one pilot flies the plane while the non-flying pilot runs the check lists. I hope the single pilot is good at multi-tasking.
(* I am not a commercial pilot but I've watched enough Mayday/Air Accident Investigations to get interested in the FAA publications on CRM. Interesting read. Active work was being done ~20 years ago in this area.)
The entire practice of CRM (crew resources management) exists because of the value of the second human. It is a formal mechanism to recognize that multiple minds, looking at the same input, might diagnose different problems and that the sum of those opinions is more valuable than one alone.
I can’t wait to hear how they are forced to do this because customers are so price sensitive and always pick the cheapest flight (at a price they set…)
It wasn't clear in the article. Does this mean there's only one pilot on the plane, or that only one pilot has to be at the controls but with a second pilot on board?
It would have been nice if the article covered some numbers on different things. Such as how many times a pilot has had a medical emergency or some other issue that renders one of the two pilots incapacitated. Or what kinds of situations benefit from two pilots, or might even require two pilots, such as bad weather/winds, or decisions/actions in emergency situations, including technology failures.
I also wonder about what happens if the single pilot became incapacitated with all the security these days. Would there be the ability for the crew or someone else to gain entry to the cockpit to fly the plane? Or would they essentially replace a pilot first officer with a non-pilot role?
So, their solution to solving a pilot shortage created by sensless changes to existing regulations is to enact more senseless regulation changes?
How about they just revert the flight hour requirements to those that allowed for adequate staffing and safety for decades a d be done with it.
I can't help but suspect the intent is to raise the cost of borh the equipment and pilots required to a point that makes new competition all but impossible.
There are so many reasons why this is a bad idea. With the possible human error and handling of emergency situations already discussed in other comments, there is another obvious objection: how are the new pilots supposed to gain enough flight experience before they are allowed to solo fly commercial airliners? Simulator only?
For passenger flights it's a big no.
But for cargo planes it makes more sense to pilot the plane from the ground, like drones. Automating flights can have significant safety issues but piloting planes from the ground is widely used in military. So we might get away with remotely piloted cargo planes.
There is relatively well-know presentation from 1997 by late American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh [0] called "Children of Magenta" that talked about the risk of crew being too dependent on the guiding magenta-colored lines of the autopilot on their screens:
Generally automation exists on a spectrum, and the pilot should be able to select the level depending on the circumstances:
> In Van’s presentation he describes three levels of automation:
> *The pilot manually flying the aircraft.
> *The pilot using the flight director, autopilot, and autopilot modes to fly the aircraft for a short period of time. For example: Heading select, Flight Level Change, Vertical Speed, Indicated Airspeed, etc.
> *The pilot using the FMS to command the autopilot to fly the aircraft for hours at a time.
Another thought is that if one-pilot planes are allowed, to insist on more training for pilots: if the computer/autopilot can handle the more mundane stuff, then more hours could be spend by pilots in simulators being (virtually) thrown into strange situations (perhaps taken from real-life incidents) to deal with. There are (IIRC) already per-mont flight hour restrictions on pilots, so reduce those by some ammount and move them to the simulator.
“There's language in a new bill now introduced in Congress — the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill — asking the Federal Aviation Administration to reconsider part 121 and to allow the use of a single pilot operation, first in cargo aircraft.”
It seems that it was made into a rule but dropped a year later [0] (by the EASA, so in Europe at least). According to the Wikipedia article on Germanwings 9525, even Germanwings dropped that two-person rule a couple of years later [1]. I don’t know what the FAA rule regarding this is.
Once more corporate greed and bad capitalism show their true faces, reduce cost by having only 1 pilot. And there are people who find this stupid proposal acceptable and have delusions that air ticket prices will fall if there is only 1 pilot :-)
No wonder our society/civilization is going downhill :-(
How will they avoid a situation like the Germanwings crash then?
Or is it forever going to be a catch 22: if you can securely lock the cabin to prevent a hijacking, whoever locks themselves in can crash the plane? :/
>Alone in the cockpit after Sondenheimer left to use the bathroom, Lubitz immediately put his plan into action. He moved the cockpit-door toggle switch, located on a pedestal to the left of his seat, from “normal” to “locked” position, disabling Sondenheimer's emergency access code. Moments later, he reached forward and turned the dial on the automatic pilot to bring the plane down to 100 feet. Just before 10:31 A.M., after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its cruising altitude and began dropping at a rate of 3,500 feet per minute, or 58 feet per second.
>At 10:39, Sondenheimer called for a flight attendant to bring him a crowbar hidden in the back of the plane. Grabbing the steel rod, the pilot began smashing the door, then trying to pry and bend it open. The plane had dropped to below 10,000 feet, the snow-encrusted Alps looming closer. Inside the cockpit, Lubitz placed an oxygen mask over his face. “Open this fucking door!” Sondenheimer screamed as passengers stared in bewilderment and mounting terror. Lubitz breathed calmly. At 10:40, an alarm went off: “TERRAIN, TERRAIN! PULL UP, PULL UP!” The plane dipped to 7,000 feet. The alarm signaled a shrill “ping-ping-ping,” a warning of approaching ground. Sixty seconds later, the Airbus's right wing clipped the mountainside at 5,000 feet. The only further sounds picked up by the voice recorder were alarms and screams. Moments later, the jet slammed into the mountain at 403 miles per hour.
For those saying how obvious it is for us to mandate two pilots:
Should buses have two drivers? A large bus carries about as many people as a small plane. And per distance, road travel is > 100 times more dangerous than air travel.
The failure modes are vastly different and the ability for a passenger to pilot a bus to the side of the road in an emergency is much more probable than the aircraft. This is not a reasonable comparison at all.
> “I’VE COME across a number of people over the years who think that modern airplanes, with all their technology and automation, can almost fly themselves. That’s simply not true. Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate.” … “Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?” [0]
[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow https://a.co/2iSmRDH