What could possibly go wrong?????
The technology is already in commercial use. The Garmin Auto Land system will land a plane with no human intervention once it has been activate. It’s intended to get a plane safely down in the event the pilot is incapacitated. Any non-pilot passenger can simply push a button on the panel and the system transmits an emergency code on the radio, finds a suitable landing strip, lands the plane and shuts the engine down. It’s currently installed on the Piper 600 and Cirrus Vision Jet. It’s quite amazing.
An intermediate step to fully autonomous flight is single-pilot operations. Most operations involving larger jets require two crew members at all times. The single-pilot concept places one in the cockpit and another on the ground. The pilot on the ground might be monitoring several flights and be able to ‘fly’ the plane to landing from the ground via computer in the event of pilot incapacitation.
This would save considerable expense, but would also require no small measure of public acceptance before it would be used for passenger flights. It’s an interesting concept, and one in which improvements in connectivity technology increasingly supports.
Here’s a 2014 NASA paper on the subject.
https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/publications/HCIAero2014_Bilimoria.pdf
After WWII America owned the private plane industry. That industry is practically gone today. Why? Lawyers. Every plane sold today has built into its price a major lawsuit with payout. Frankly, I’m astonished Tesla still exists. Even if the technology is perfect and works every time, it will still be blamed for deaths and, as the lawyer will say while pounding the desk, “Someone’s got to pay!”
Planes without pilots have been flying for decades already for the US military. What’s new about that?
Haven’t flown in decades. Yeah this will make me want to take to the skies now. /sarc
Make trains run without crews first then we’ll talk.
Make trains run without crews first then we’ll talk.
Eastern is already achieving this with hardly a pilot on board employment idiocracy.
HELL TO THE NO!!
An OLD joke from the 1970s: Welcome to the first fully automated trans-Atlantic passenger flight. Everything has been thoroughly tested. Be assured nothing can go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...
Old news. I remember reading of this going to happen about 35 years or more ago.
Why not? Driverless has worked so well for cars and trucks.
/s
The biggest cause of accidents I see now is too much automationa and too much reliance on that instead of flying the airplane. When the automation quits or fails, and it does, the pilots are behind the event trying to figure out what happened instead of being able to fly the airplane.
This idea of pilotless airplanes is ambition and greed gone out of control.
Hackers check our routs