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[-] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 52 points 3 months ago

Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.

From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It's not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it's that they have to always behave in a predictable way.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 46 points 3 months ago

Pilot here.
There's already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says 'Tessie take me to school!' and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It's not great but it's not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can't see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won't necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren't going anywhere.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago

Wait what. I have done all the shit of flying a plane, memorized the checklists on the damn Cessna we were using and all that, and because my eyes suck too much I never really pursued it. I never landed a plane myself. Now I wouldn't have to unless someone spilled a coffee? Fuck this timeline.

[-] bruhbeans@lemmy.ml 22 points 3 months ago

I think truck driving is probably the next thing. There's laws (at least in the US) about how long a driver can run without rest, long haul routes are generally not very crowded with traffic nor complicated. If you can get twice as many hours out of a robot than a human, you can recoup the investment pretty quickly. I could see a hub-and-spoke model where robots handle the long spots with humans taking the busier spokes.

[-] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

I'm surprised it's not already in place for rail freight. Pre-defined, well known routes, automatic right-of-way. You'd need some exception detection - spot things on the line or if any part of the train is behaving abnormally, but like cars you can "fail safe" - do an emergency stop if the computer or a remote operator decides that something has gone sufficiently wrong which you can't do in a plane

[-] gnu@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 months ago

It already is for some specific rail freight, iron ore haulage in Western Australia being one example. Rio Tinto has been running them in WA since 2019.

The Sydney Metro is also driverless, albeit a passenger only line rather than freight.

Not exactly easy to stop a train, but yeah.

Granted, that's also an issue with human conductors, though.

[-] jrs100000@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Im going to guess its a proportional cost issue. Drivers take up a much larger percentage of the cost of shipping a ton of cargo by truck that the cost a human engineer on a train.

[-] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 21 points 3 months ago

By tradition, the automobile industry is allowed to build machines that kill people.

The airplane industry isn't.

[-] const_void@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

Yep. The size of new vehicles these days proves this.

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 12 points 3 months ago

less variables on a runway. its a very strictly controlled environment unlike most roads

[-] hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

Airplanes, though I suspect they will never be truly without someone to assist in case of emergency.

Cars have to contend with a number of random obstacles and unique challenges. Planes have defined runways and taxiways and, via autopilot and GPS, their flight paths are relatively easily defined and controlled.

The sky over one city is pretty much like any other. Main Street not so much.

[-] Thavron@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago

Am I crazy? There are already self-driving cars, aren't there?

[-] Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago

No, there really aren't yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all "monitored" remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can't handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.

And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.

The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And "pretty good" is not acceptable when failures kill people.

[-] BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Airplanes will never be pilotless, there will always be a human in the loop for redundancy. A failure in a self driving car could kill a few people at most, a failure in a pilotless plane could kill thousands.

[-] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

a human in the loop for redundancy.

No, but for taking the blame.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

A waymo coming to a neighborhood near you

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
35 points (90.7% liked)

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