Eight years ago, a flight instructor of mine told me that there are automatic systems available, for all airplanes, which can:[ul][li]Taxi a plane from a terminal to the runway threshold,[/li][li]Take off and perform a maximum-efficiency climb to a given altitude,[/li][li]Follow an assigned flight route,[/li][li]Descend into an airport’s traffic pattern at the proper place and heading,[/li][li]Land, and[/li][li]Taxi off the runway to an assigned terminal.[/ul][/li]The only reason these systems have not been integrated together into a completely pilotless airliner before is the fear that, if something goes wrong, we want a human being at the controls who can think on his feet and get the plane out of a tough spot.
However, it was precisely because the airliner’s flight plan could be overridden by a human being that the recent terrorist attacks were possible.
Is it time to consider weighing the potential risks of removing the human beings from the cockpit in terms of the risk of accidents against the risk of allowing hostile human beings to barge into the cockpit and use the plane as a guided missile?
There’s also the concern of judgement. A computer cannot make all of the decisions that a pilot must. At least not today’s computers. Is this weather bad enough to turn back? Now that the plane is crashing, should I aim for the ocean or the city? Is this course of action the best? One of the biggest things they stress to pilots new and old is decision-making. It’s what makes the pilot different from the computer.
Plus, things break on planes a lot more often than hijackings occur. If something really went wrong, could the computer analyse and deal with it?
And what about computer bugs? Or failures? Or a hacker-hijacker combo unit?
Lastly, people just don’t want to get on a plane without that pilot up front. Just like they don’t want to sit backwards, and they don’t want to miss out on the snack.
if our airlines went drone, you would see the largest hack attempt ever, by all of our enemies. And instead of sending 5 guys to die in each plane, you could have one terrorist crash dozens of planes without losing a single one of his people. Just like playing a video game.
Anything that can be cracked will be. Especially such a juicy target deployed on such a large scale.
Pilots are essential in the cockpit as no computer system has the capability to think its way out of an emergency situation. Sure, you can tell the computer about engine out procedures, and the computer will follow them, but what if the procedure isn’t in the book, or is wrong. How do you build the machine to think outside of its programming?
We have plenty of automated systems that will help the pilot, but the human brain is still the only computer capable of accepting a bunch of different sensory information and creating a solution out of it.
Hrm … yeah, if a software glitch in one of these automated airliners sent it into the ocean, that would pretty much end their future use right there – the fact that pilot error has caused accidents in the past notwithstanding.
And, yeah, the control software would have to be designed in such a way that it could never be told to fly into anything that wasn’t an airport. (And even then, there would probably be some way to hack around such self-defense mechanisms, if an illegal software cracker were clever enough.)
Maybe we just need to replace airliners with really really long underground vacuum tunnels and 600-mile-per-hour trains. Trains can’t be driven anyplace where there aren’t train tracks, after all. (Either that, or plate every building in the country taller than 4 stories in 13-inch battleship armor.)
[ul]
[li]Hacker: One who can use computers well, loves to use computers, and does not engage in the kind of BS that characterizes a cracker (see below).[/li][li]Cracker: One who uses computers towards malicious ends. May or may not be skilled (most are not).[/li][/ul]
To make it painfully clear: Hackers design the security systems crackers try to break or get around. It’s the difference between a locksmith and a lockpick.
OK, now that that’s clear, let’s move on.
My biggest problem with a fully-computerized aircraft is not so much the lack of a human pilot (something I think will be done away with anyway eventually) but the fact that such systems will not be peer-reviewed. It will be created in secret and try to gain security from obscurity. Security from obscurity never works, as nearly all closed-source software has abundantly shown. Closed-source software is also notorious for failing at odd times. Usually a software crash is simply annoying, at worst expensive. But a crash at 30,000 feet could too easily end with a crash at zero feet. I wouldn’t trust closed-source software to run a mission-critical computer. Why should I trust it with my life?
I don’t really see a fully automated plane as being very feasible. Rather, a better solution to keeping the human pilots’ flight paths from being overwritten would be to make the door to the cockpit much sturdier with a heavy-duty lock on it. The only drawback i can see is that it would be hard for the pilots to evacuate from the plane with a thick, locked door in the way. I guess you could also try to incorporate a trapdoor or something for the pilots to exit out of in case of an emergency.
It would be undeniably neat, however. Still, when they enter service, I’ll let several thousand trend-setting passengers give the new system a whirl first.
I take it “petrol tanker” is British for gasoline truck. When I first read that, I thought you meant one of those enormous supertanker ships that carries crude oil, like the Exxon Valdez. If someone hijacked a ship that big, I’d have a hard time imagining it being driven out of the water, up onto the roads, and into the middle of a city.
Assuming for the moment that it’s impossible to completely prevent terrorists from taking control of the plane in some manner, we could always get around this problem the way they do on Star Trek.
Namely, we could install a self-destruct mechanism in every airliner.
I can just hear the passengers now: “Boy, I sure am relieved that if any terrorists try to hijack this plane, it will blow up!”
