Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets UpNext, Airbus's future technology-focused subsidiary, reported on Thursday that it has entered the final three months of testing tech it hopes will automate the process of getting a plane from the air to the gate. The system, called DragonFly, tackles automated operations like diversions, landings, and taxi procedures through …
I think that airbus is aiming at allowing its new planes to be certified to be operated with just one pilot onboard. If the plane advanced autopilot allows the pilot to do the checklist by himself and in case of an emergency takes over the plane safely, it will allow the pilot to concentrate in solving the emergency (engine fire or malfunction) or if the sole pilot is disabled it’s able to safely land the airplane in the nearest airport, it will allow the airplane to be safely flown with one just pilot reducing the crew cost of operating the plane.
How well does this computerized thing work when birdshit covers one or more of the sensors? Or when one or more birds strike the nose of the plane, where many of the sensors are?
Having multiple pilots in the cockpit isn't just about reducing workload. It's about having in-air insurance in case things go wrong, and having multiple knowledgable, trained human minds working on the problem, in case one of them freezes, or has a brain-fart. You know, "redundant systems."
Just as you don't "need" automobile insurance until you've had an auto-crash, you don't "need" multiple pilots until things go pear-shaped.
I don't trust a bunch of random programmers -- no matter how many of them are Ph.ds -- to think of every possible in-air problem scenario and to construct the correct response to each of them.
Yeah but I'd 100% rather have someone up front who's trained and has got skin in the game when it comes to taking a punt at resolving unpredicted scenarios, rather than a bunch of people in a warm office on the ground standing around a whiteboard, or some half-arsed attempt at AI. I'd be happy to pay more to fly knowing there are two people up there and no dodgy AI, than one person and an AI that might decide it knows better.
And I know there have been pilot murder-suicides - but I suspect someone really determined would find a way to turn off or overpower the AI, or do something the AI won't be able to recover from. For example, if you fire all the fire extinguisher bottles into all of your engines, you're not restarting them, and nor's the AI; do it far enough away from a suitable airport and no AI's going to save you...
They're reasonable questions if someone is asking to gain knowledge and understanding.
They're unreasonable if the one asking assumes that they're much smarter than the people who developed the system.
On the Internet, it can be hard to tell which situation exists.
...and if in doubt about the motivation behind a question (as opposed to its actual content), we give a downvote, just to be on the safe side?
As the old pre-Internet ditty has it:
If the reasons of this clown
do not please or are not known,
let's just simply vote him down.
:-)
Ohh - a hard one. maybe get satellites to send out precise time signals so that you can do some clever maths and work out a real-time location and velocity vector in 3 dimensions, and then compare that to some sort of system to measure airflow?
Having seen what crosswinds can do I fully agree with the question - there are some truly scary landings out there which demonstrate just what an experienced pilot can manage. I expect the first releases of this to probably declare cross and shear winds as an out of bounds situation for the software.
Let's just hope it doesn't do a Tesla FSD and hands back the plane half a second before it gets into trouble..
Most modern fighters are inherently unstable and can only be flown thanks to fly-by-wire. Machines have reactions and response times no human can match. I am pretty sure that suitable automation could handle crosswinds and wind shear way better than any human pilot could, if equipped with the right sensors and programming.
Airbus has been using Autoland for decades.. However this does need an ILS approach, three buttons and the Airbus will brake to a stop on the center-line of the runway.
Bigger issue is ground taxi, as with AutoDriving Beta's too many random items moving around between rampies, service vehicles and other aircraft.
Me, I want redundancy on the flight deck Autoland or not, last thing we need is to see a ground taxi goes across a runway and is hit by an Aircraft on a takeoff roll.
Or has life become so cheap, we are happy to consign 150-300+ people to death or injury to save a few bucks on an airline ticket?
BvB
In my day this kind of trickery was being tested with Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) for GPS. This is a ground based system that increases the usable accuracy of GPS. Autoland can only operate where the ground systems are in place and this is at major facilities that can justify it.
Bigger issue is ground taxi, as with AutoDriving Beta's too many random items moving around between rampies, service vehicles and other aircraft.
This is not a big problem with single pilot operations. Nobody is suggesting pilotless yet.
but if you did, then I presume the aircraft would be towed out to the runway hold point. There are already some trials going on towing the aircraft out to the hold in order to save the taxi fuel.
Huh, crosswind and shear are easy things to manage. Detectable, weather quality is reported, corrected with flight control input reactions, all things already going on with such a system.
The article talks of the system managing the flight controls so the pilot can manage the critical incident with the aircraft.
But surely that incident has a high chance of causing the system to disconnect itself because it is not operating within the allowed envelope that has a better than 1 in 1 billion flying hours of failure, which I understand to be a benchmark all good aircraft manufacturers demonstrate they achieve for certification.
Crosswinds I can see your point. FMCs already have METAR data and that can be used as the basis for what to expect. Windsheer though by definition is an unexpected and unpredicted sudden change in wind direction. Its possible that in the future autopilot will be able to deal with it, but this project is not trying to do so.
Airbus though are not claiming this will remove the need for pilots, they are saying that it can be used in good weather conditions to help pilots when they are task loaded with other issues (such as a bird strike) or a medical emergency in the cockpit.
As long as pilots don't rely on the system its another useful tool. And as pilots we love flying and are not about to put the autopilot on and rest our feet for the rest of our career just because the plane has more capabilities than before.
As a pilot, I feel windshear as an increase in sink rate, a reduction in G which I presume my inner ear detects, then I add more throttle, a hand stays on the throttle the whole time in readiness. I would say that a sensor could also do that. Some places I approach and there is never any windshear, it is geographic conditions that produce it. For instance, approaching Luton from the west where there is a kind of cliff edge before the runway. I alway expect windshear and I'm ready for it.
Crosswinds. Well, pilots have their limits and so do the aircraft have a max demonstrated crosswind component. If I am going to be outside this on my approach then I just have to divert to a more into wind runway somewhere else. Same if I can't land due to visibility minima.
Maybe airports need more tarmac so one runway is always into wind.
I find there are few things more satisfying than a greaser on the centre line after an approach with loads of crab or slip.
How do you tell the autopilot that there's a crosswind ?
And how does it manage windshear ?
How does a pilot learn how to do crosswind and windshear landings? Doing them a thousand times in a simulator?
How many times do you think a deep learning system is able to go through simulations and how long before it can handle them absolutely flawlessly? If it takes a million, it will do them, and I doubt they'll be worse at it than humans.
The one thing I'm not sure about is how a single pilot will cope with a major systems fault. It is easy enough to cope with a "simple" failure (such as the loss of a single engine), but it is very easy to get in a "human factors" mess if something unexpected happens (such as a failure that is considered so unlikely it is not taught in a simulator) - and that is where having a second pair of eyes, hands, ... is very useful.
It would not be fun having to run checklists at the same time as having to manually fly a wounded aircraft, especially when near to the ground.
I've been binge watching Mentour Pilot on Youtube, and what is VERY apparent is that, under high workloads, pilots panic and do the craziest things, including shutting down the wrong engines. Pretty much nearly every crash is due to operator error rather than equipment.
HOWEVER: There's an astoundingly big caveat to that: Some of the situations are because there's no president: The Air France flight from Brazil, for example: To Have all three speed readings wrong was unheard of, and the pilots had only trained for stalls at low level, not at 35,000 feet.
There's an awesome blog called "Fear of landing: the art of not hitting the ground too hard" https://fearoflanding.com/ where she tackles air incidents from the perspective of a pilot.
It's really good. No connection other than being a mesmerized reader.
"Mentour Pilot rocks!"
Well I do agree but I must admit I find it painful to listen to his great effort to speak educated English in Swedish.
Also I think he is a Boeing pilot only.
This video, well made by him, is a good example of how two pilots make more silly mistakes than any automatic landing system would do, most likely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-IuOnDBoGA
HOW could they let it GO THIS FAR?!
A very experienced pilot on both Boeing and Airbus is Juan Browne on www.youtube.com/@blancolirio
As that flawless landing on the Hudson now is in the books, I am pretty sure Airbus took it into consideration for Dragonfly. After all, Airbus was smart enough to re-order the sequence of steps in the checklist (first action of Sully was to activate the APU in the tail, while that was on the bottom of the checklist, giving him power to control the plane).
Ahh, but there you are wrong, the major failure will not happen as everything is double or triple redundancy, cross checked and so on.
All the things that smart people believe are failsafe until the event they did not think of occurs.
To be fair, physical reliability has improved hugely however the outcome now is that the event is either minor or catastrophic with very little in between. The scary part is that system reliability had generally got worse as complexity and complacency have increased.
The first step is most likely to cut down to two pilots from three or four on long flights.
Which is one pilot at the helm and one resting flying, while leaving and arriving is with both pilots in the cockpit.
I cannot see a huge problem there.
Also one has to remember that a sane company cannot afford not to work towards those possibilities.
Texting or updating social media on their phone
Drivers appear to believe it is more important than being in control of their car all the time.
To be fair to the pilots one would hope that it is very unlikely they would be using a personal device "at work".
The Cirrus SF50 has an emergency landing system for the event of pilot incapacitation.
https://cirrusaircraft.com/story/cirrus-aircraft-earns-easa-approval-for-vision-jets-safe-return-emergency-autoland-system/
Unfortunately my crappy IT salary doesn’t put me in the market for a personal jet.
All that said, even if heavies are approved to fly with one/no pilot I’m not so sure the market (ie paying passengers) will go for an airline who has robots driving the thing.
I got worried when they dropped the rule that only four-engined aircraft could be used for transoceanic flights, that was after they had booted out the navigator and flight engineer. I'm staying home if they introduce a Tesla type system, especially if it is as short-lived as Dragonflies are, as they only fly in the summer and spend most of their lives at the bottom of a muddy pond.
"I got worried when they dropped the rule that only four-engined aircraft could be used for transoceanic flights, that was after they had booted out the navigator and flight engineer."
A reasonable attitude to take at the time perhaps, but have those decisions proved to be wrong? I'm not aware of any issue that arose because a transatlantic flight was by a twin not a four-engine.
Not that I'll be rushing to board any self-drive passenger 'planes anytime soon, mind.
I suspect that for most people the only thing the care about is the cost to get to their latest cheap holiday destination. How they get there and who is doing the driving/piloting is a total irrelevance.
On the other hand I know some people who are friends of a friend who never put both children on the same plane as both parents. The parents are always split, one with the children. one on a separate flight.
The lunacy of this becomes even better when they will quite happily all get into the same vehicle to drive 100 miles to get to the airport.
"The video does not, however, explain how the aircraft communicates with air traffic control for clearance into controlled airspace if the pilot is incapacitated, as that task is completed through human verbal interaction."
I would have thought that as soon as this system is required due to the pilot being incapacitated that ATC would drop everything and clear flights out of the way to allow this aircraft to land as a priority. I don't think ATC are going to be telling the aircraft to go into a holding pattern before entering their airspace.
And the accident reports are full of case where anybody reading would go "why didn't they just declare an emergency and get the damn thing down?"
On the tombstones you could write "they didn't want to deal with the paperwork". (stole that from Rod Machado)
I vaguely remember a couple of years ago ryanair had a great, great idea to 'optimise' how much fuel their aircraft hold, both to 'optimise' the cost of each flight, and to avoid (vicious rumour, no doubt) having to wait their turn on approach. I think they did get away with it more than once, declaring an emergency on account of low fuel, but then the story disappeared from media, my gut feeling is that 'somebody' had a _very_ quiet discussion with ryanair behind _very_ tightly closed door about what you can do about improving your bottom line, and about what you won't. But hey, if you don't try, you don't get...
I suspect Ryanair figured out multiple "Ryanair flight had to declare emergency for nearly running out of fuel on routine flight" news articles in short succession probably hurt it's bottom line and reputation more than the marginal gains in efficiency from carrying a few hundred pounds less fuel. People already know Ryanair is shit is most ways, but at least they seem to have an OK-ish safety record. How much of that is because they actually want to or because they're dragged kicking and screaming by the aviation authorities is anyone's guess.
probably hurt it's [...] reputation more than the marginal gains in efficiency
I didn't think low cost carrier cared about their reputation. They treat their customers like s**t, the customers know they're going to be treated like s**t but nobody cares as they think they're paying £1 a flight*.
* Exlcuding all the optional fees that are required to be paid for you to board the aircraft.
I think coming in low on fuel breaks actually a couple of safety rules. There's a reason they are required to fly with a safety margin.
Also, I suspect that declaring a mayday does come with a metric boatload of paperwork afterwards (certainly for commercial flying which risks many more souls* in one go), and as it concerns air safety it also involves a review which again could lead to consequences for what is clearly abuse of safety measures. You can get away with that once, the second time you'll face questions and the third time you may end up with a flight ban pending investigation.
* You can deduct bankers and lawyers from that total, they don't have one.
But how would ATC know? If the pilot has time to squawk an emergency code (7700) then maybe, but otherwise Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. ATC will the last to know there is an emergency and if the pilot is knocked out before he can communicate they wouldn't know unless the plane itself has ways of ensuring that. I'd be leery of any system that could auto-squawk an emergency code though.
As a first guess I'd say Dragonfly will communicate to the cockpit it will take over in <appropriate, short duration> unless countermanded. Once it takes over, it is sure within its rights (and responsibilities) to squawk an emergency code and even more so if it waits a little bit more after taking over.
The other thing would be cabin crew. They can't enter the cabin, but if they feel something is off*, they can knock on the door, no reply means they press the red button in the Kitchen, the alarm goes off in the cockpit, along with a countdown to the computer taking over. Easily cancelled if the pilots are responsive, no response and Otto takes over, calling in a mayday at the same time. And if an annoying terrorist or passenger keeps pushing the button, then since 9/11 he's going to be very quickly on the receiving end of some summary social justice meted out by greater number of other passengers.
*Cabin crew familiar with routes know when a descent, turn, delay is out of the norm.
"then since 9/11 he's going to be very quickly on the receiving end of some summary social justice meted out by greater number of other passengers."
That is the only silver lining to that whole mess. Hijackings are a thing of the past, and attempted hijackers don't have to wait on a mere trial and sentencing to receive their penalty. They'll be beat to death on the spot and 400 passengers will swear up and down that they saw the hijackers beat themselves to death.
The Cirrus SF50 system referenced by another commentator handles declaring an emergency on appropriate frequencies. I don't know all the details, but sounds like it essentially says "I'm going to runway xx at airport yy due to an emergency, please get out of my way!"
There is already an automated emergency landing system available for light aircraft - Garmin Autoland. When this system is activated (by a guarded switch on the console) it takes full control of the aircraft - notifies ATC - selects the best available airport and lands the aircraft and stops on the runway with no further human input required. This system is intended to cover the pilot becoming incapacitated on an aircraft with a single pilot.
The current high end Autoland (CAT 111c) systems available for big jets require the pilot to select the runway but can safely land the aircraft even in zero visibility.
The first automatic landing of a commercial jet with passengers aboard was on 10 June 1965 - see the Autoland article on Wikipedia for more details.
I remember a 1980s BA shuttle flight operated by the new 757, where the landing was more than a little firm (not dangerously so, just unexpected). As we taxied the pilot came on the intercom and apologised for the hard touchdown, saying "sorry about the bump, it's the first time we've flown one of these and we thought we'd see how it managed on its own."
I was glad he waited until after the landing to tell us that.
Better than an average commercial pilot, certainly. The existing autopilot and autoland is better at keeping the aircraft on the chosen flightpath, wings level, flare at the right moment than most pilots.
It would not be able to choose to do so, though. It'd panic and hand over to the pilot the moment it determined it could not reach a designated runway.
Fortunately it should reach that conclusion within a few seconds of the failure, perhaps giving the pilot more time to make a choice about what to attempt.
Fortunately it should reach that conclusion within a few seconds of the failure, perhaps giving the pilot more time to make a choice about what to attempt.
You're in Tesla FSD territory here - would a pilot really be able to maintain enough situational awareness if he/she had not been flying themselves up to that point to take over? Handing off when it gets too complicated may help to avoid liability for the auto landing system manufacturer, but it does not exactly strike me as an ideal point for the pilot to retake control.
I'd say the system should be at least smart enough to detect that things could get hairy and give the pilot a heads up that manual control may be required - that way it won't come as a complete surprise. Surprises are *bad*, planning ahead is good.
Ironically, a fully automated system maybe wouldn't have had to, because it could have made the decision to divert to LaGuardia instantly, and flight simulators suggested it would have got there. By the time Sullenberger and Skiles had figured out WTF just happened, carried out all the manual steps to recover control, and then looked at what survivable options they had left, there wasn't another survivable option.
The biggest problem in any automated disaster recovery setup, not just with aircraft, is that reliably determining WTF has happened is very difficult. Humans still tend to be better (but not necessarily faster) at it than machines, which are limited by the scenarios they've been programmed to expect.
I don't think so. Simulator tests only supported that theory until it was pointed out that pilots in the simulation already knew upfront what was going to happen.
In addition, we barely trust automatic pilots to do anything more than adjusting altitude and waypoints - if things get really ugly there are presently too many variables involved. Sure, AI may eventually be able to handle this but sourcing sufficiently detailed test data is going to be somewhat of a challenge as we tend to avoid problem situations, for very good reasons.
Not remotely useful.
If the pilots are all incapacitated, something which basically doesn't happen unless you have a camera crew in the cockpit or are flying alone, the plane could land itself and if the simple act of taxiing is too much for the computer (it isn't) they can send a fleshbag over to do it.
Once it's on the ground, one way or another all the hard problems are solved.
Assuming there's nothing wrong with the aircraft and it's only the pilots who've been incapacitated - which is fairly fundamental to this discussion given that this is exactly the sort of scenario that Dragonfly is being developed to assist with - then the window of opportunity for incapacitation of the entire flight crew to occur at a time when the aircraft was physically incapable of reaching any suitable runway is tiny, absolutely microscopic, in comparison to the window of opportunity for incapacitation of the entire flight crew to occur at any one of the myriad of other times during the flight when the aircraft WOULD be able to land safely if only it had some way of doing so itself in the absence of any inputs from the flight deck...
So yes, it is possible to concoct some nightmare scenario from which Dragonfly wouldn't be able to save the day, but it's possible to concoct far more, and far more likely, scenarios in which it very much would.
If they're smart, and that remains to be seen, the Drangonfly system won't be fully automomous, and if it doesn't see a way out it should ask for guidance from whatever ATC it notified an emergency to. That ATC should be able to provide guidance to the Dragonfly system, and the Dragonfly should be able to carry out those commands even if it doesn't see a solution. An ATC might direct the plane to a water landing that it doesn't want to do.
Now, that being said, the telemetry had better be encoded and hackproof, because the next generation hijacker will hack into Dragonfly and declare the pilots are incapacitated, then will direct the plane to its intended destination or target. It also needs to be built so the pilots can disable it with a physical switch, not software, without disabling the plane's controls. Needs to be a big red light that comes on making it very plain that Dragonfly was activated remotely.
Apples and Orangutans... Dragonfly is being proposed as a backup in the event of *pilot* incapacitation, whilst the Hudson was an example of *aircraft* incapacitation, where reaching an actual runway via a sensible emergency flightpath wasn't an option. For Dragonfly to need to participate in the latter type scenario you'd already be in the former type scenario, at which point you really are in a spot of bother...
And if that had occurred that day in NY, then it's pretty much a certainty the outcome would have been VERY different not only for all onboard, but likely for some on the ground as well. In such a nightmare scenario, the presence of Dragonfly/A.N.Other automated system isn't going to make matters any worse than it already is, and it would at least offer a slim chance of a more positive outcome if it remained operational following the impact.
The same sort of weird "oh well, if it can't handle extreme scenario X then what's the point of having it at all" argument could be made for pretty much any type of safety system - e.g. airbags in cars. If someone drives their car off a cliff into the raging ocean, there's little or no chance of the airbags being useful in that scenario, but using that as justification for not fitting them to cars would be rather odd given the myriad of other more likely scenarios where they do give vehicle occupants a chance of walking away. Dragonfly is being aimed at giving pilots assistance in some aspects of flight, it's not being promoted (despite the slightly misleading way the article title is worded...) as fully automating every aspect of getting an airliner safely from A to B regardless of what the gods of mischief and mayhem might decide to throw at it along the way.
The same sort of weird "oh well, if it can't handle extreme scenario X then what's the point of having it at all" argument could be made for pretty much any type of safety system...
My concern isn't that they are adding a safety system: it's that they will use the installation of that safety system as an excuse to remove a safety system -- a pilot-trained human.
If the captain had the fish, for example.
There's also the case of pilots fighting each others in the cockpit.
The FAA thinks pilots are spending too much time relying on automation, reducing their manual skill and familiarity with their aircraft and increasing the possibility of unchallenged controlled flight into terrain because they trusted the automation. The EASA has taken the reverse position, calling for more automation and less manual control, in order to reduce the possibility of pilot error. Interesting clash up ahead.
As a hobby pilot (gliders) I think the FAA is closer to the truth than EASA unfortunately. EASA seems to follow the Airbus line of thought that pilots should only ever operate within the limits of the flight envelope limits set by the flight control system. Accident rates and accident investigations for both Boeing and Airbus aircraft shows that both systems have their drawbacks. Boeing aircraft have done things that they shouldn't have because the pilots were obvious doing something stupid that the computer should have prevented, Airbus aircraft have done things they shouldn't because the computer decided the pilot input was invalid when the pilots wanted it to do something (mostly over confusion of how Airbus autopilot and flight control law modes work and how the system can go from one state to the other)
I've got an article that conveniently contains links to both proposals right here.
I should have linked it before. It's friday. :)
to increase airlines' profitability
...
Now, if only there was a way to make passangers bring their own fuel... and seats, and mandatory (bring two, get 5 p off your next flight). And, I dunno, set up crowdfunding before each flight to organize an engine or two? Sharing is caring!
I wonder what happens when it takes a Canada goose to the cameras (and both engines)?
Oops...there goes your vision. What are you going to do now?
To make it complete, some of these geese will also have to crash through the cockpit windows and incapacitate both pilots. If that doesn't happen, just follow established protocol for landing on the Hudson.
I mean, sure, a predator and such birds are 'not exactly' a passanger jet, but in the long term...
(hey, anybody free to take over that 767, it's going down... anybody? Oh I don't know, I guess Dave could give it a go, check the canteen... Anyway, gotta go, see you Monday!)
Back in the late 80's I was flying to Gatwick from Edinburgh and had the opportunity to visit the flight deck and talk to the captain (different times!)
It was a foggy evening and he told me that the aircraft we were on (BAE 146) was equipped with "Full Auto Land" which could be used to safely land the aircraft no matter how poor the visibility - however due to the cost of testing required to ensure that the system was working correctly it could not be used. The airline had calculated that time lost due to bad weather was less than the recertification.
In the case of this proposal I wonder how the cost of maintaining the system versus cost of a pilot compare - always assuming that they can find people willing to fly with only one pilot.
Your plane may well have been landed by Autoland - the pilot would be able to override if needed but automatic landings are now so common that no one notices them. (If the weather conditions are too bad for an automatic landing then the pilots are probably thinking of a go around or even a diversion.)
1997 I was holidaying in Tenerife. When about to start his descent the captain started his "we'll be landing shortly" monologue that ended with "we have some bad weather over the airport right now, so we'll let the plane take the strain and perform an auto landing". The panic rippled from the front to the rear of the plane like a mexican wave. People were clearly and vocally uneasy about this, but it's the most calm landing I've ever experienced. We didn't even know we'd landed until the brakes came on. I was told later by an aviation buddy it's because the autopilot can make changes on the controls much quicker than a human, and at a much greater frequency, meaning it compensates before the pilots sitting shotgun are even aware of it.
You have probably experienced an auto landing many times, because it's almost a commodity feature nowadays, and, because of the panic that used to occur, they no longer announce it.
Autoland systems have been available on commercial airliners, from Airbus and others, for a long time. But they rely on suitable equipment being installed at the airport.
This system is just an incremental advance on those, offering less reliance on ground-based systems and hence the opportunity for greater operational flexibility.
It is very much NOT a substitute for a pilot, nor does it reach into AI territory. Airbus are not stupid.
Nor is it as yet production-ready, this is just the first flight prototype being put through its paces.
Quite, and reading through several of the other comments so far it feels like this is a rather pertinent point that's being missed/ignored.
It's also worth remembering that Airbus have had a long history of inserting automation/computing elements inbetween the pilot and the control surfaces thanks to their early adoption of fly by wire, so their design ethos is already grounded in such ideas - as you say, Airbus aren't stupid, and between them or Boeing I know which one of the two I'd consider most likely to make a system like this work...
You thinking of the V3, where the pilot had a parachute and got told that when he had it had on target, to pull the Big Red Lever and he'd be ejected to safety. The teacher was a Judas goat that told them he was an Ace for doing 5 V3s on London.
The Big Red Lever did not eject the pilot. It locked the controls in place, and told the pilot his military life insurance plan was cancelled. The last thing the pilot got was a personal thanks on tape for his sacrifice to zer Fazerlund from old Nutstache.
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Once on the ground, it may be a good idea. In the air? Not so much. I flew with my brother once in his Bonanza. Would this system be able to take evasive action as whn some idiot kept flying straight at us
even after my brother flashed his landing lights several times and called out on the radio? Would the system work in areas with multiple bodies of water under the flight path as occurs in Florida, Minnesota and other areas? What about the turbulence caused by one plane ahead of another on take-off and landing? If this were such a great idea, I'm sure the air forces of the world would be falling over themselves to get it.
Just like with cars, the trouble is that the more you take everyday control away from the human, the less capable the human becomes in taking over when the automated systems can't cope.
Granted, with pilots then they can put in the hours on the simulator to keep sharp on handling an emergency, but even so. Plus, you just know that some airlines are bound to scrimp on simulator time.
Wow, that’s amazing … ahh … hang about. No, cancel that, not amazing after all. The Cirrus Vision SF50 single engine personal jet “has that, does that”. In trouble? …, medical or unable to cope with the present situation and conditions? Just push the “I give up” button and the Cirrus will review nearest suitable airports, the suitability of their weather at the expected time of arrival, take you to the most suitable and auto-land you there. There are no “smart electronics for BIG aircraft” … just “smart electronics for aircraft”. And if “that” goes “pear shaped“, the Cirrus Vision SF50 (and their smaller piston engined aircraft) have an aircraft parachute system which will lower you, your passengers and your not inexpensive personal aircraft, gently to the ground. Try that with an A380.
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