Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

The humans are required to be there for a reason, and that reason is so important TWO are required to be inside the control cabin at ALL TIMES. If they aren't given the final say in what course of action should be happening at a given moment it's been designed wrong.

"For a pilot, loss of control is the ultimate threat. It's our job to control the aircraft, and if computers and their software, by design, can remove that functionality from the pilot, then nothing good is going to come out of that."

View on HN

Pilot here. 100% agree. An autopilot isn't autonomous (like the most of the public think). It's more like flying the plane by pushing buttons vs manipulating the flight controls. You dial up a heading or altitude and press execute. You still have to watch it closely and it does mess up quite often ie: won't capture a localizer, altitude wasn't armed, etc. Procedure in the cockpit is to call out altitudes like "1000 above" when leveling off.

I've flown an F-16 where the fly by wire system won't let you over G the jet. So, I think some level of automation is good in that regard. But, it's very subtle and you feel in control at all times. I would never fly an aircraft that would actively take over control of the aircraft... because the automation messes up all the time.

HN has had two classes of aviation technology articles recently:

- Horrible examples of automation going wrong, hard to design and failing easily.

- Autonomous app-based air taxis are coming together with automated urban air traffic control (Uber and others). Market estimated to be worth €1.5 trillion by Morgan Stanley analysis.

What's your take?

Air taxis will become possible only when a quiet method of vertical take off and landing is developed, if ever. No current VTOL lightweight aircraft would be able to gain even experimental status in an urban environment, let alone thousands of them running at all hours of the day. The noise levels propellers make are absolutely horrendous.

I've always wondered if blasting inverted phase sounds recorded from the propellers (like noise cancelling headphones) would help a bit with the noise problem.

My eardrums would still blow up!

You can't cancel noise in general, only at specific chosen points. Noise cancelling headphones can work because your ears and in a consistent place relative to the headphones.

You would still cancel normal conversation with that approach.

Thanks for all the replies, I did not know it worked that way.

I came across a recent paper that discusses the cancellation of noise in a continuous 3D space. It seems complex, but not in the realm of impossibility.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6736072

Yeah, living next to a busy street is bad enough that I can't actually use any of the outdoor space in my apartment. VTOL aircraft would make it completely unbearable indoors too.

Have you seen Lilium? Was recently in HN. They propose to do this with many small electric motors supplying ducted fans.

I don't think anyone would describe their prototype as quiet. Have you seen their test flight video? It sounds like a jet.

It was hard for me to get a sense of how loud it might be from a video.

Perhaps an opportunity for an airship service, hovering indefinitely over suburbia charging $5 to silently hoist your air taxi to altitude...

Probably somewhere in between. Automation will keep getting better. And, with the recent pilot shortage, probably make it safer for lower time pilots to operate. For example, some aircraft are now self-diagnosing during abnormal procedures. When something breaks, it'll bring up the appropriate checklist on the screen.

Maybe some kind of augmented reality that lets you land in true 0 visibility, or automation that lets us reduce spacing on approach. Think things that improve safety, reliability, and ops tempo, therefore profits.

But, the stakes are just too high to ever remove a human override, though, imo.

The more automated planes get, the less often a pilot gets to actually fly. Automation is more likely to fail in uncommon situations that an inexperienced pilot cannot deal with anyway.

Even if a pilot is not completely useless and we value a human life at infinity, at some point having a pilot on board is not worth it. If a pilot can save the plane in less than 1/<number of passengers and non-pilot crew> of situations that would have ended in a fatal crash without them, we lose more pilots than we save non-pilots.

Also, it's possible that an autopilot can handle a situation but the pilot erroneously overrides it and crashes.

My take? The majority of HNers strongly support the second group and have an inflated view of the capability of even current automated systems.

> Autonomous app-based air taxis are coming together with automated urban air traffic control (Uber and others). Market estimated to be worth €1.5 trillion by Morgan Stanley analysis.

Those are a bad idea, independent of automation. At least until 100% of our energy is carbon-free.

Even if air taxis can be made to fly safely, there's nowhere for them to take off and land. For safety they would need an open space free of trees, tall buildings, and overhead wires. How many of those spaces do we have in dense urban areas?

And they're generally not going to land on rooftops either. A roof has to be designed with a helipad from the start. It's tough to retrofit one later due to structural issues, and use of roof space for antennas and machinery.

Well, I can imagine the F16 g-limiting system messing with flight controls if the g-sensor is botched.

In my eyes the problem isn't so much that the systems are overly invasive, it's more that the failure modes of automation aren't well understood or signalled and cannot always be remedied.

> I would never fly an aircraft that would actively take over control

Should I read this to mean you don't support AGCAS?

There's a saying that for many years, plane could fly unattended (except the taking off and landing part). But for psychological reasons, pilots are still required to be in control. How off is that ?

These design flaws in the software running on modern aircraft are symptoms of a more fundamental flaw in the philosophy with which modern software is designed: the idea that the authors of the software understand the application better than the user.

I think this is part of the reason people who like free software defend it almost religiously: they understand the dangerous of the authors and users of software being legally segregated.

Some airlines do not require to have two pilots or two humans in the flight deck at all times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com