A follow up question from this thread.
Well, are we close? Could we do it? Will the pilots union fight this? Will people fly on planes with no pilots? When a bug happens because the C++ programmer inadvertantly creates an infinite loop sending the plane into one, will the software company be liable? (oops, that’s probably a GD question ;))
hey Winky!!! Your a day late and a dollar short. We already have pilotless planes and we have been using them for some time. Most of them are weather, and spy planes but we definitely do have them. if you are talking about commercial planes, which it appears you may be, we have those too. The pilots take the plane off and land them but don’t do anything during the flights.
Yes, commercial flights. And I know that most flights are flown by wire (is that the right idiom?) besides take off and landing. My question is, are we close to not needing the pilots at all? In other words, computers handling taxi, takeoff, flight, inflight movie, landing, etc.?
You mean you haven’t heard of Omega Airlines?
<in a robotic voice> "This is a completely compuuuterized aircraft. Relax… nothing can go…wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong… 
{I must give credit to my 7th grade History teacher, a seemingly stern man who’d call me out of the classroom and into the hall…to share some bad jokes!}
The misconception that people have with all the automation in modern commercial aircraft is that they think it makes the pilot redundant. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pilot is the most important piece of safety equipment on the airplane. Sure, the plane can fly itself. Some can even take off and land themselves with no direct pilot input. As long as everything goes perfectly. But if ANYTHING goes wrong - and it frequently does - the pilot is there ready to take over. Developing a pilotless commercial aircraft is technically possible, but I’d wager that it would be far less safe.
we are already there , just that pilots are their for safty if the computers fail and for tricky manoeuvers and also to make discisons that computers cannot
also fly by wire :
Fly by wire is when a computer interprets the joystick movements of the pilot and adjusts the alierons to match that of what the pilot wanted , common on unstable aircraft such as F-22 and EF2000 and SUKOI 27 series as aircraft would not be able to fly without this extra stability of the computer correction , also adds limits to the pilot so the pilot cannot over stress the airframe , but the Russians
have soft limits on their fighters so they can fly outside the envelope just in case they need it say they need an extra few degrees turn per second to get a gun shot , and normal g limits disallow him this
What you might really be thinking of are aircraft that can make their own intelligent decisions during a flight/mission. We have had RPVs (Remotely Piloted Vehicles) for a long time and UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles) for a little less time. The spy aircraft metioned earlier go out, overfly and perhaps circle around, and come back without any outside control or interventions. Presently, plans are in the works for air vehicles that can go out and do attack or fighter type missions, adapting to whatever they encounter along the way by themselves. I believe someone has floated the name “Uninhabited Air Vehicles” or some such for these. I bet the SDMB’ers can come up with something more clever, though.
What you might really be thinking of are aircraft that can make their own intelligent decisions during a flight/mission. We have had RPVs (Remotely Piloted Vehicles) for a long time and UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles) for a little less time. The UAV spy aircraft mentioned earlier go out, overfly and perhaps circle around, and come back without any outside control or interventions. Presently, plans are in the works for air vehicles that can go out and do attack or fighter type missions, adapting to whatever they encounter along the way by themselves. I believe someone has floated the name “Uninhabited Air Vehicles” or some such for these. I bet the SDMB’ers can come up with something more clever, though.
Well, we’ve got unpiloted planes, as mentioned - the military has been using them over Afganistan, among other places. A solar-powered version was recently tested over Hawaii. They do have advantages.
On the other hand, some of those planes are as much remote-controlled as “unpiloted” - some guy is sitting in a room with a joystick and a video monitor to give suggestions to the machine if required, if not actually directing most moves.
There are, indeed, systems that allow the machine to do all the flying - take-off, cruise, landing. They are complicated; expensive to develop, install, and maintain; and no machine handles the unexpected as well as a human being. Some of these systems also require equipment on the ground to make them work, which is another level of complex machinery to install and maintain.
It comes down to cost-efficiency. In some applications (the space shuttle, for instance) the most “fiscally responsible” system has the machine as primary and the human as backup. For other applications, training an adaptable human that is self-maintaining and self-repairing to work as the pilot makes more sense than installing very expensive machinery.
Well working in a high tech industry myself, I would never get on a plane that didn’t have a pilot on it becuase I happen to know how easily “high tech” equipment can fail.
Alot of the machines that I work with (robotic type machines)require sensors on them to operate properly and one of the most comon failures on our equipment is a sensor failure. I can only assume that a pilotless plane would require a tremendous amount of sensors. That being said I would guess that comercial flight without a pilot is still a long way to come.
An NPR commentator described the aircraft of the very near future as being crewed by a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job is to feed the dog, and the dog’s job is to make sure the pilot doesn’t touch the controls.