FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Quartz: Your plane could fly itself by 2025…if you’re cool with that
Old Oct 18, 2017, 2:02 pm
  #15  
jaysona
 
Join Date: Aug 2010
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Originally Posted by Boggie Dog
Can a computer do what Sully did?
What do you think the computers on the A320 did? The computers flew the aircraft. For Airbus aircraft, the human just puts in inputs, the computers decide what to do with those inputs.

The only thing a human did that the current generation of flight computers can not do is press the ditch switch.

As for having fully automated no pilot-in-the-loop airplanes, I am not convinced that the industry will be ready for that by 2025, 2050 or later perhaps.

There are too many things that continually go wrong with air data systems that require human intervention. I am not yet convinced that computers will be able to adequately recover/fly a plane with a impaired/defective air data system.

Although AF447 clearly showed us that some humans are incapable of flying when the air data system is impaired as well........


Originally Posted by EarthHair
.....

2. Automating the flight of a plane is a lot easier than a car. It's a no brainer. Stuck being Luddites!
Not quite. I think you have grossly underestimated the complexity of the systems involved and the complexity of programming for DAL-A

Also, DO-178C isn't robust enough and we'd probably end up with DO-178E for automated pilot transport category aircraft.


Originally Posted by KDS777
And all the systems and software in the Airbus that was AF447 didn't seem to help either. Neither did the pilots.

You'll need both to get me on board and keep me on board. And the humans better low know to hand fly the aircraft.
AF447 was primarily pilot error. The air data system was impaired, the pilot flying did not know how to handle an aircraft with an impaired air data system and when some of the flight envelope protections we removed.

Last edited by jaysona; Oct 18, 2017 at 2:13 pm
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