By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

Peter Duniho wrote:
"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:mle_e.11361$L15.4226@trndny01...
I agree that a computer can do a great job when everything goes more or
less according to plan, but what about when it doesn't?

Actually, a computer can do a great job of anything you can think of. It
has a problem if something comes up that nobody thought of

The real question is whether pilots on average are able to come up with
inspired solutions to problems more often than they create problems with
perfectly good airplanes.

Looking at major air accidents in the US over the past 5 years I'd say
humans are doing awfully well. Aside from the AA airbus right after
9/11 (which has lots of question marks) it's not at all clear to me
that well trained pilots in modern airliners don't save more than they
cause. A fairly large chunk of Part 121 accidents involve maintenance
or systemic causes that a computer pilot would not presumably make any
difference with.

OTOH, fully-automated aircraft would probably make a huge difference
for GA safety, where pilot failure is the primary cause of accidents.

This is the same reason that autopilot cars are a good idea, no matter how
offensive they may seem to some people. Yes, there will be failures of the
equipment. But that will happen MUCH less often than the failures of the
humans, and will improve the reliability and efficiency of our
transportation infrastructure at the same time.

Look at this for an idea of the state-of-the-art in robot cars. It's
pretty pathetic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_DARPA_Grand_Challenge

OTOH, ABS and stability control, etc. have unquestionabaly made driving
much safer. Some high-end cars use forward-looking radar to sound an
alarm if you start closing in on the car ahead of you very quickly and
even cruise control which maintains a following distance rather than
fixed speed. Presumably this trend will continue much as an Airbus
today is a largely automated plane but with big decisions still made by
pilots.

-cwk.