Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

cbsnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 267 posts

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#221

Post by bmitc »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #155
bmitc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#222

Post by bmitc »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #109
bmitc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#223

Post by bmitc »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #157
Spooky23 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBA types would remove the wings if they could. It’s all about greed and money.

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.

Institutionalization in action. You might me interested in the book Disciplined Minds.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#224

Post by constantcrying »

CyanBird wrote: post #154
constantcrying wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> which only increases with safety requirements 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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#225

Post by bmitc »

projektfu wrote: post #150
bmitc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reminds me of the story of the fisherman and businessman. https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#226

Post by constantcrying »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #163
teeray wrote: post #16

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…

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 techni…

>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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#227

Post by mrfumier »

version_five wrote: post #8

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.

The passengers interests are lower cost and more safety, which automation provides the most over having 2 pilots.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#228

Post by bsder »

smallerfish wrote: post #168
mym1990 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, they're wondering why the market isn't responding to the shortage by increasing compensation, if the shortage is genuine.

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#229

Post by josefx »

nradov wrote: post #211
josefx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#230

Post by Moru »

WalterBright wrote: post #220
PaulRobinson wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cras…

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.

Only because he already had been in an incident himself already the day before and knew what to do.
Post reply on HN