Greg Farris writes:

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.

Okay, let's accept that this system is built. What happens when
communication is interrupted? Radio failure is not an unheard of
event, is it?

In the case of communication failure, it would appear that you have
two choices. You could have the planes automatically go into a
holding pattern of some sort, or you could have the planes act
autonomously. If you went into a holding pattern, the planes would
have to be able to break out of the holding pattern and land
autonomously if they ran low on fuel or detected incoming weather.

Having a pilot on the ground remotely controlling the plane does not
remove the need for autonomous operation -- it just means that the
autonomous operation is only used during unusual situations. I
believe that handling these unusual situations are exactly parts of
the autonomous controller which will be the most difficult to design
correctly.

So, you are left with two choices: 1. Try to design a communication
system which is so robust that communication failure is virtually
impossible; or 2. Include some sort of autonomous system as a backup
for when communication fails.

Do I think this is impossible? No. Do I think it is quite hard to
get right? Yes. It certainly will take quite some time to get this
right enough to win the trust of the average passenger.

Chris
--
Chris Colohan Email: PGP: finger
Web: www.colohan.com Phone: (412)268-4751