Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner than You Think. Here's Why
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner than You Think.
Here's Why
The technology is here, but will we trust planes without
pilots?
by Dan Falk / Oct.11.2017 / 10:00 PM ET
With self-driving cars and trucks coming on fast, it’s
only natural to wonder if self-flying planes might be next. In fact, the
aviation industry is pushing to make autonomous passenger aircraft a reality —
and sooner than you might think.
Airbus is developing an autonomous air taxi dubbed
Vahana. The tilt-wing, multi-propeller craft is designed to take off and land
in tight spaces and able to fly about 50 miles before its batteries need
recharging.
Vahana is intended for short urban hops — but what about
long flights? How far away are we from a pilotless airliner?
Project Vahana intends to develop a self-piloted
passenger aircraft. Airbus
Airbus’s main rival, Boeing, has hinted that such a craft
might be on the way. At the Paris Air Show last summer, Mike Sinnett, the
company’s vice-president of product development, said “the basic building
blocks of the technology clearly are available.” Key elements, including the
artificial intelligence system “that makes decisions that pilots would make,”
will be tested next year.
Even before truly pilotless airliners show up, we may see
a reduction in cockpit crew numbers.
SHRINKING COCKPIT CREWS
“What the industry is telling me is that they would like
to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a
single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest
cockpit redesign, so that a single pilot is able to operate all of the
controls. “There might also be a remote-control pilot on the ground, in case of
emergencies, like a heart attack,” he adds. “This remote pilot could monitor
many airplanes [at once].” But eventually “they would like to remove the last
pilot.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the aviation industry has
cut back on crews. In the 1950s, it took five people to fly an airliner — two
pilots, a flight engineer, a radio operator, and a navigator. By the 1960s, the
radio operator and navigator were gone. In the 1990s, flight engineers
disappeared. Given this trend, fully automated aviation may seem inevitable.
One motive for the trend, not surprisingly, is financial.
A report released last August suggests that by transitioning to self-flying
aircraft the aviation industry could save $35 billion a year.
Whether air travelers are ready to board a pilotless
plane is another matter. The same report found that only one in six passengers
would feel comfortable in a fully automated plane.
Of course, passengers may not realize just how much a
pilot’s job has already been automated. “On an average flight, the pilots
manually control the plane for about three to six minutes, and the rest is
autopiloted,” says Rice. He says some airlines don’t let their pilots fly
manually once the plane has reached cruising altitude “because they understand
that the autopilot is actually safer.”
Which brings up another consideration in the move toward
pilotless airliners: safety.
AVERTING AIR DISASTERS
By almost any measure, commercial aviation is one of the
safest modes of transportation. More than 30,000 die in the U.S. each year in
car crashes. The number of people killed in airliner crashes rarely exceeds 50
a year, and in many years it’s zero. And in those rare cases when something
goes wrong, pilot error is often the cause. Pilotless flight could make
aviation accidents even more of a rarity.
Consider three recent crashes. In 2013, a UPS cargo jet
crashed in Alabama, killing both pilots; an investigation blamed the crash on
fatigue and pilot error. The following year, a Malaysian Airlines flight
strayed off course and vanished; though the cause of the presumed crash remains
a mystery, the jet is believed to have plunged into the Indian Ocean. In 2015,
a Germanwings plane crashed in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board; later
it was determined that the pilot was mentally disturbed and had crashed on
purpose.
Improved automation might have averted at least some of
these disasters — for example, by making it harder for pilots to override
autopilot system. A plane could be programmed to reject a course change that
would take it too far from land, for example, or a change-of-altitude command
if it would direct the plane below the height of surrounding terrain.
“You’re looking at very simple calculations,” says Ella
Atkins, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.
Automated systems can crunch the numbers and determine if, for example, a plane
is flying dangerously low — “and if the answer is yes, then the automation can
and should stop that accident from happening.”
Such “refuse-to-crash” software is already in use. Since
2014, the U.S. Air Force’s F16 fighter jets have used Lockheed Martin’s
Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, which is credited with saving the
lives of four pilots. In the case of the UPS crash, “more advanced
refuse-to-crash automation would have prevented the plane from being flown into
the ground by a tired flight crew,” says Atkins. “To my knowledge there really
wasn't anything wrong with the plane.”
SAVING THE DAY
Then again, there have been times when pilots have saved
the day. When a U.S. Airways flight lost power after striking a flock of geese
shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia in 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, a
pilot with nearly 30 years of experience, guided the plane to a water landing
on the Hudson River. All 155 people on board survived.
“Sully was an awesome pilot, and did the right things,”
says Atkins. “That said, the reason he needed to do those things is because
that very simple mathematical code was not on that airplane.” Data indicating
the plane’s position and speed, as well as the fact that it had lost thrust,
could have “triggered the software” to execute a safe runway landing, she says.
And yet the very idea of pilotless airliners raises big
questions. How would the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates civil
aviation in the U.S., decide when a pilotless plane is flightworthy? Who — or
what — onboard entity would deal with medical emergencies or unruly passengers?
And how could we ensure that self-flying planes couldn’t be hacked?
Ultimately, Rice says, self-flying aviation will take off
only if the traveling public trusts it. Tests of aircraft might start in remote
areas — perhaps Alaska, he suggests — as pilotless technology is gradually
phased in. If those trials are accident-free for a number of years, the public
may be won over. The technology may further prove itself in the military
sphere, and for carrying cargo.
“Human beings don’t like new things,” says Rice. “They’re
afraid, and they let that fear make their decisions for them. But if you give
them a good safety track record, then they’ll come around.”
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