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FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

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Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#101

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ShorsHammer wrote: post #36
emteycz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that aircraft falls on someone or someone's property.

You wouldn't think twice about someone driving that exact same package 3000 km though right? Planes simply don't fall on people even in worst case scenarios. Losing power is actually what every meat pilot trains for.

In general you're right, planes falling on people is rare, but IIRC sadly one person on the ground died when the Airbus flight PK8303 flight crashed this year in Karachi; some others were injured and most people on the flight were killed.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#102

Post by whiddershins »

bronco21016 wrote: post #89
whiddershins wrote: post #15

If FedEx and Amazon set up private airports dedicated to these machines, only put cargo in them, and make their flight routes distinct from other aircraft, I imagine this could be up and running faster than people think. Edge cases shouldn’t result in loss of life, so getting through regulations and insuring should be much easier than other situations.

The private airport idea is interesting. From a pilots perspective, one of the major roadblocks to these systems being widely integrated into the current infrastructure is managing traffic. If they’re largely operated separately from manned traffic that eliminates nearly all of those difficult problems. The comment about edge cases causes me to think about weather. I don’t think many non-pilots have a good appreciati…

Let’s say you have one virtual pilot for 10 planes. They won’t all be landing at the same time. So that pilot could guide each one down successively during inclement weather.

I bet that would be way more fun than the bunches of sitting around that I imagine is currently part of the job.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#103

Post by hodgesrm »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #85
whiddershins wrote: post #15

If FedEx and Amazon set up private airports dedicated to these machines, only put cargo in them, and make their flight routes distinct from other aircraft, I imagine this could be up and running faster than people think. Edge cases shouldn’t result in loss of life, so getting through regulations and insuring should be much easier than other situations.

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably. An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable,…

That's assuming you can anticipate the problem. The obvious edge case is that something goes badly wrong but the software does not recognize it as outside the design envelope.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#104

Post by asdasfasdfasdf »

ayyyolo wrote: post #93
CommieBobDole wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably. An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable,…

This is a great take. The more we reduce the human survival instinct around these jobs, the better we'll all be. Humans do dumb shit when we're flooded with chemicals, both internal and external.

I mean yes, but a human is probably less likely to see a flat semi-reflective roof and think "body of water"... though I hope there's some possibility for a human to intervene and do some course correction in an event of a crash landing with these systems.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#105

Post by aabnuy »

sargun wrote: post #28
alfalfasprout wrote: post #5

Frankly the tech for autonomous aviation has been around for a while now. I expect even strong crosswind landings will soon be better handled by a computer than a pilot. But then here’s the problem... Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. When you’re driving a car you usually follow traffic rules and…

So, NASA, is in the process of working on some of this. They’re trying to come up with a new ATC model which will work better for drones / eVTOL air taxis / etc. Some of the ideas are around “carving” out corridors, where you would be able to fly, and this corridor could be reasonably large (across multiple towers today). The other interesting thing is hierarchical ATC automation. So, normal ATC would still exist, bu…

Ugh, so a state agency is working on getting people unemployed. But the jobs of the bureaucrats will be safe.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#106

Post by akira2501 »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #85
whiddershins wrote: post #15

If FedEx and Amazon set up private airports dedicated to these machines, only put cargo in them, and make their flight routes distinct from other aircraft, I imagine this could be up and running faster than people think. Edge cases shouldn’t result in loss of life, so getting through regulations and insuring should be much easier than other situations.

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably. An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable,…

> they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably.

I think you immediately have to question how often this has been the source of a disaster. To me, this seems highly unlikely to have been a problem, or to be a problem at all.

Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas, because an airport far removed from a populated area is next to useless in terms of freight or passenger transport.

> An autonomous system doesn't have to do that

Well.. it can't. Which is part of the problem:

> it can spend its remaining time in the air finding and navigating to the most sparsely populated point of impact within its range.

That's a whole separate automation and computer intelligence problem on it's own. There's also no guarantee that a sparely populated area isn't completely empty or even currently unused for any civil or special purpose. Expecting a computer to "solve" this problem is asking a lot.

Just look at the Gimli Glider as an example[1]. Choosing a "safe" place to have an emergency isn't at all obvious and assumptions based upon outdated information are dangerous in and of themselves.

> Find the nearest/largest body of water and ditch into it

Finally.. even if it could make this determination, safely, and with enough sensor observations to reduce human loss of life on the ground, you're presuming a plane without engines can always reach this apparent planned crash site. If your plane can't add velocity, your ability to plan _anything_ is severely curtailed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#107

Post by unionemployee »

generatorguy wrote: post #100
hanniabu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: Would a human pilot be skilled and lucky enough to pull this off a second time?

Yes. The aviation system produced the human pilot who was able to transfer their skills and experience from all previous landings to this new unusual one. I do believe another equally as well trained pilot would have been able to pull it off as well. What would a computer program have done?

Perhaps pilots of previous generations could do this but, having trained numerous pilots for international airlines, as well as pilots for "fee-for-departure" (regional) airlines in the US, I wonder how many crews are up there that could competently handle most catastrophic events. Though I didn't train him directly, the pilot who crashed the Atlas 767 was pushed through the training program I worked for. Described as a "train wreck" in articles, his ability level was characteristic of others I trained (which I regret). Major US carriers do well screening their pilots but, at lower tiers of US aviation employment, I wonder if more automation would be the safer choice.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#109

Post by laurent92 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #39
oliveshell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, maintaining straight and level flight— i.e., not falling out of the sky— is the easiest part of flying an airplane. Computers have been good at that for a while; in fact, that’s how airline flights are controlled these days during basically all of cruise flight (by autopilot). Takeoff and landing are the tricky parts. (I say this as someone who’s firmly on the skeptical side of the spectrum regarding the…

There are landing procedures where the pilot simply follows the machine instructions for a long while already. And it works perfectly well where it's available. Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help. Instead, the hard part isn't flying. it's all the things an airplane…

Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards. They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction, and this happens really often. The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books. I wonder how this can work with computers, given they have very fee sensors compared to humans (« Do you smell smoke coming from the vents? ») and they are not yet capable of reasoning. They need to be trained millions of time for each failure mode. Granted, thanks to 70 years of experience with MD, we have listed those failures quite extensively and this part is well documented.

Re: FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

#110

Post by wespiser_2018 »

Very cool! I wonder what the real economic benefit of removing a pilot from an airplane is, and what the dominant factors are? Assuming that a human pilot is better in some emergency scenarios, and might be able to save you from catastrophic loss: these events are exceedingly rare nowadays, and the savings from liability and scheduling constraints must be massive without a human in the pilot seat.
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