We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one-trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system.
Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.
Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good outcome.
Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.
Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.
In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.
Most accidents occur when people are distracted, doing stupid things and at the same being sleep deprived and looking on the phone.
Imagine only producing accident rates twice as good as that, what a nightmare.
Something like this should at least allow airlines to use just one human pilot, who I doubt would do much 99% of the time. If there’s something that the computer can’t handle, the human could take over.
I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records of incidents but I also suspect there could be many unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their career.
Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify? How is this verified?
> Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write "self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly a plane completely would be insanity.