Here’s an interesting article on current opinions about pilotless aircraft transport:
……in a debate at the (Royal Aeronautical) society earlier this year, with pilots, engineers, scientists and airline representatives debating autonomous planes, the motion ‘there will be no need for pilots in 40 years’ was carried by approximately 60 votes to 40.
Is flying really different from trains/bus transport/autonomous cars?
I’m 100% sure the technology, or more importantly, the secure technology, will be there one day to enable pilotless passenger flights…arguably no radically new technology even needs to be developed ….
However we are talking about the full spectrum of the flying public….I think even if 10% of people want someone up front in charge, with some “skin in the game”, then pilots will still have a job!
What will probably happen is that initially, it will become fully automated from gate to gate, with one pilot still on board in case of malfunction etc.
Over time, the pilot will essentially become an unnecessary expense, having almost never to interfere, and on the occasions they do interfere, it proves to be unnecessary.
As a result the pilots won’t be very skilled (too little hands on time). There will be a few cases where the pilot took control and there was no need to, and as a result caused an accident. The case will be made that it’s safer without a pilot than with an unskilled on.
Then people will be getting into cars and taxis that are fully automated, and perhaps without even any controls for a driver. They will get used to the idea of pilotless airplanes and maybe after some pilot induced accidents, will demand pilotless airplanes.
The leep from 2 pilots to none seems like a big one. But it will happen in stages each making the transition easier.
DP – I agree. The element that will however be interesting is the “ultimate” fail-safe mode. A car or a boat can be instructed to stop “dead in the water” so to speak in the event of a catastrophic failure of some type. An aircraft would seem more dependent on a data link which as with any data link (cars and boats as well) could catastrophically fail. I don’t see how the onboard computer systems could be totally self contained so for example if an airport or series of airports closed how would the onboard systems know where to divert without an external data link. In a car or boat if the data link was lost the car or boat could be brought to a stop – not so with an aircraft.
I cannot see this ever happening using any current technology.
The most basic issue is that you have a radio link, which can always be jammed, even though it cannot be jammed “for ever” unless someone attaches the jammer to the aircraft.
It’s like the Amazon drone delivery proposition. A lot of people talk about that. When you get into it, there are just so many challenges to solve…
Also is the cost of the crew a significant % of operating say an Airbus or a Boeing? I just cannot believe it is. Even at the high-end bizjet level, the crew is almost insignificant on the total operating cost scale.
And if you are going to have one pilot then the incremental cost of one more is even more insignificant.
And you can already do totally programmed flight using existing technology (to CAT3 airports, at least) with both pilots sitting there. Rotate, autopilot on, etc. They don’t actually do that but they could – well, not to non-CAT3 airports which there is an awful lot of.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
I don’t see how the onboard computer systems could be totally self contained so for example if an airport or series of airports closed how would the onboard systems know where to divert without an external data link.
Same as with current communication loss scenario. Follow the flight plan.
IMO secure technology will need to be self-contained….not telemetry dependent…it will require Artificial Intelligence…the building blocks already exist to a large extent…
Peter wrote:
Also is the cost of the crew a significant % of operating say an Airbus or a Boeing?
For Lufthansa, publicly available numbers look like that: Turnover 2015 – 32 billion Euros (American billions = 10^9, we call them “Milliarden”, our billion would be 10^12), number of pilots employed – 5400, yearly income per pilot including training and pension 100,000…150,000€. This would result in a crew cost factor of around 2% of the turnover or 65 Million Euros which could be saved annually. Or a price reduction of 2% for the ticket which hardly any passenger will notice.
For a low-cost carrier the figures look somewhat different.
But the argument that more accidents are caused by pilots than by technical malfunctions still holds. Personally, holding both a ph.d. in aerospace engineering and an ATPL, I would feel better in a pilotless plane. No kidding, really!
what_next wrote:
For Lufthansa, publicly available numbers look like that: Turnover 2015 – 32 billion Euros (American billions = 10^9, we call them “Milliarden”, our billion would be 10^12), number of pilots employed – 5400, yearly income per pilot including training and pension 100,000…150,000€. This would result in a crew cost factor of around 2% of the turnover or 65 Million Euros which could be saved annually. Or a price reduction of 2% for the ticket which hardly any passenger will notice.
For a low-cost carrier the figures look somewhat different.
That turnover is group-wide and includes non-aviation revenues (5 billion LH Technik, 3 billion Sky Chefs etc.) and also revenues from investments in GermanWings, Brussels Airlines, and SunExpress. I’m not sure if the number of pilots would have to be corrected for the latter mentioned revenues as it may not include the crews of such (partial) subsidiaries?
Both would have a positive influence on the % figure.
A pilotless aircraft would have to be 100% autonomous. It would have to be able to fly from A to B without any further input than what is needed to navigate. Even so, I don’t believe that the captain would disappear. Someone would have to interact with that AI and the rest of the crew and the passengers.
