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The thread is about airline operations without pilots. Not about
philosophical considerations of autonomous operation.

And, my point is that you won't have pilotless airline operations without
autonomous capabilities. It isn't a philosophical matter because the
evidence of today's capabilities is pretty clear. If you wish to suggest
otherwise, show some proof that it works in any kind of vehicle, anywhere.
The difference between autopilots and autonomous airline operations is
pretty significant.

Regards,


I notice that this thread is cross posted to different newsgroups. Perhaps
you are contributing from alt.rec.metaphysics or something :-)

You are hung up on the idea of autonomous operation, when that wasn't the
point at all. Flying airliners without pilots does not imply that they have
to fly themselves without human intervention. To most of us, it means they
are controlled from the ground, with a level of human supervision and
intervention scaled to the complexity of the task. This means, as you say,
the pilot is not physically in the airplane. It also means that one 'pilot'
(human or otherwise) can manage several airliners, and moreover manage
conflict between them better than any one pilot in any one airplane could
do.

To you, if I understand you correctly, this doesn't pass muster, because it
is not true autonomous operation. the planes are not making any decisions
by themselves, or very few. This, however, was not the point of the initial
thread, which was only concerned with removing costly, error-prone pilots
from airliners.

Perhaps you are not involved in aviation, or not aware of how the system is
organized. By the time a plane takes off, under an IFR flight plan, its
route has been scheduled, and the airspace is progressively cleared of all
conflicts. The FMS in the plane is programmed for the entire route, and it
is rare to have to deviate from this program. During the approach phase
though, significant decision making and clearance modifications are often
necessary - but the are buffers (holding patterns) built in, which machines
fly better than people anyway. If the air traffic control system (human or
machine) had the authority to write directly into the aircraft's FMS, then
the entire flight could be managed without a pilot, and would be less error
prone than the current system. We don't do so today for reasons of
responsibility - socially, legally and administratively it is not
acceptable today to remove this responsibility from the pilots.
Technically, it would not be a big step, and it does not involve artificial
intelligence.

My argument is that socially, this is not something we would accept today,
and I believe there are significant hurdles that argue against the initial
premise, which is that within 25 years we will all be flying in planes
without pilots.

G Faris