By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

Recently, Peter Duniho posted:

"Neil Gould" wrote:
In the same vein, piloted airliners are "good enough". The number of
catastrophic losses are quite small in comparison to the number of
flights. There is no evidence that aircraft piloted by computer
would fare any better, much less signficantly better.

What would you consider "evidence"?

I meant "evidence" in a loose way, not as legally valid terminology. ;-)
So, any vehicle capable of operating autonomously over long distances and
time could provide some "evidence", one way or the other.

There's no question automation would avoid certain kinds of losses;
the valid question (without an answer for the moment) is whether
human pilots balance that out with actions that a computerized pilot
could not take.

I am sure the pilots' unions will invest great resources in showing
that human pilots are better. But I'd just as soon see an
independent source for that analysis.

I see it a little differently. The contest is not between humans and
computer control a computer can fly an airplane autonomously from point A
to B. That's a ways off, considering the current state of AI.

As far as "good enough" goes, that's a social issue. For the time
being, I'd agree things are "good enough", especially the distrust
that the public would have with an fully automated airliner.

I also don't see this as an issue of public trust, because the mindset
that we have about such things today is not relevant. By the time AI has
achieved the required sophistication to pull this off, I'd expect that
autonomous machines would be quite the norm and everyone would be able to
accept the introduction of autonomous airlines as the next logical step,
pun intended. ;-)

But
long-term, airlines are looking at two things, at least:

* Overall loss rate
* Cost of operations

I am skeptical that the overall loss rate would change much, for the
reasons I stated in my last post.

As for cost of operations, it seems to me that support for autonomous
aircraft would require an even larger and more costly infrastructure than
the airlines have now. Who is going to service and pre-flight these
systems? Considering the number of service stations capable of dealing
with the problems identified by the computers in our cars and the expense
of repair, I don't think the airlines can expect to save much (if
anything) by eliminating pilots.

Regards,

Neil