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Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

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

#251

Post by WalterBright »

chmod775 wrote: post #245
WalterBright wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tri…

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 t…

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.

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

#252

Post by constantcrying »

aeternum wrote: post #231
constantcrying wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 disr…

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 priva…

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.

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

#254

Post by rnoises »

philwelch wrote: post #232
csydas wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the least. 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 societ…

> 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…

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.

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

#255

Post by CarbonCycles »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #209
CarbonCycles wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

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 airc…

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.

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

#256

Post by LeifCarrotson »

bmitc wrote: post #221
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

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

#257

Post by philwelch »

rnoises wrote: post #254
philwelch wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Maybe, but it wouldn’t eliminate class difference one bit.

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

#258

Post by wanderingmoose »

jwie wrote: post #181

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.…

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.)

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

#259

Post by cyanydeez »

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…

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.

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

#260

Post by soheil »

pixl97 wrote: post #246
soheil wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

>Also keep in mind buses have one driver and it's just as bad if a bus crashes, Buses go 400MPH at 40k feet? I guess I should travel by bus more often.

A difference without a difference. A bus crash at 60MPH on a freeway can be just as deadly for everyone inside. There is a deadly bus crash with multiple fatalities almost once a month: https://www.google.com/search?q=bus+crash+multiple+fatalitie...
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