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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why humans land these planes?

These airports are fixed. We can easily set up transmitters around them to allow the plane to triangulate its position to less than an inch. Even excluding the tragedy of the loss of human life, you would think the lost of a multi-billion dollar airplane even once every decade would push people to automate the most dangerous part of flying (landing) to machines.

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Autoland is often used (mandatory in very low visibility) but requires 2 humans to monitor in case of equipment failure. To develop autoland with sufficient redundancies to require no monitoring, and install accompanying ground equipment at every commercially used airfield is way more expensive than training humans to land aircraft. Airframe loss is an insurable risk at market price.

Presently, the numbers favour accepting human error.

I wonder how the failure rate for autoland compares to that of human-controlled landings (specifically on the Boeing 777). I'm fine with having the human as a backup, but if autoland on a particular plane has a lower failure rate, I prefer to trust my life to autoland.

Because machines aren't perfect either. Airports already have those transmitters and can autoland, but pilots always have to be ready to take over, and sometimes have to. There are just too many things that can go wrong technically to not have trained, proficient pilots in the cockpit.

I didn't argue not having pilots in the cockpit. I'm arguing against pilots being in manual control of the plane when landing when the plane is capable of landing itself. If it isn't, fine, have a pilot take over, but that shouldn't be the case 99% of the time.

If pilots only hand flew 1% of landings, they wouldn't be sufficiently practised to do a good job. The simulator just can't recreate real world conditions accurately enough to be relied on totally.

Hence, pilots must fly a certain number of manual and auto landings in a quarter to stay legal.

Exactly. A contributing cause of AF447 was a lack of high altitude flying experience and training on emergencies there, since the training regime is traditionally focused on the more accident-prone takeoff and landing phases.

The glide slope transmitter for the ILS approach on runway 28L at SFO was out of service since June 1. That said, I believe there is an alternate, GPS-based system that could have been available as an alternative for automated approach.

I'd suppose that given a pilot with low experience on that aircraft and relatively good conditions, this was considered a good opportunity to get a visual approach and landing under his belt. That presumes a lot, of course.

A 777 is about $250m. But yes, the total cost to the airline of the accident will be in the billions.

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