MEDICAL CERTIFICATION FOR UNMANNED AIRCRAFT PILOTS
Mxsmanic wrote in
:
Fred J. McCall writes:
I would not expect it to be THAT technically difficult.
Not difficult so much as expensive. If every aircraft can be
guaranteed to carry the necessary equipment, it should be possible to
get it all to work. But stuff like this is going to be really
expensive, and how many owners of small GA aircraft could afford
avionics that cost several times more than the airframe? And if
everyone isn't using it, that leaves loopholes through which accidents
can occur.
So you either have to sterilize the airspace in which it is used, so
that no unequipped aircraft enter it, or you have to force everyone to
become equipped before they fly. If you restrict the system to Class
A or something, you might have a useful compromise, but extending it
to the entire airspace would be problematic.
Technically, though, it should work just fine, as long as everyone has
the gear.
The question is trusting the technology that does it and what happens
when you take a casualty. Oddly, we insist on having a fragile human
as a backup to technology when it's the human that is the most
failure prone part of the overall system.
Only because that's not entirely true. Human beings aren't that
fragile, for one thing. For another, they are very, very good at
dealing with completely unexpected and unanticipated situations,
whereas digital systems fail catastrophically when confronted with
anything that their designers did not foresee. An automated system
might not see anything wrong with flying an aircraft inverted if it
comes upon a situation that it isn't programmed to handle, whereas a
human pilot immediately sees that there's something unacceptable going
on, and moves to correct it.
For situations that you've anticipated and designed for, the computers
will always outperform the human beings. But for situations that
you've neglected to plan for in your design, a human being is the best
possible fail-safe mechanism. This is why pilots will be in cockpits
long after the cockpits are completely automated. Only when
experience proves that the digital systems are reliable enough to not
cause unacceptable rates of accidents will the pilots be removed.
That point can eventually be reached. Notice that you have a timer on
your microwave oven, not merely an on/off switch. That's because the
digital timer system is reliable enough nowadays that it doesn't
require a human back-up for unanticipated situations. But we are
still a long way from that in aviation.
It's largely that way now for large modern airliners. Driving them
around on taxiways still requires a human being, but the airplane can
pretty much do everything else by itself.
That's not what all the "real" pilots say here in this newsgroup.
They stridently insist that it cannot be done. But, like you, I know
that it can be done, and it is being done now.
It's my understanding that F/A-18s can take off and land all by
themselves (and this from an aircraft carrier, which is a bit more
difficult than using one of those big concrete ribbons on solid
ground). I gather that the automated cat sequence is used but the
automated trap sequence is typically not. Fighter pilots are not a
particularly trusting lot... :-)
It's good to be cautious. I didn't know that the aircraft could do
that, but it's interesting to learn. Somehow I'd expect fighters to
be the last aircraft to fully automate ... although it's also true
that the weakest component in a fighter aircraft is the pilot (because
the performance of the aircraft has to be limited in order to keep the
pilot alive).
I believe we still have a requirement for trains that they have a
'dead man' throttle. Somebody has to be holding the control or the
train will stop itself.
For regular railways, yes, but for things like subways, sometimes the
system is fully automated, with no human beings at all. Subways have
fewer variables than outdoor railways, though.
I've heard that there are "dead man's throttles" on some aircraft,
too, but I don't have much in the way of details.
No there aren't, fjukktard
bertie
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