This is going to be an unpopular take but as someone who went to school to fix jets and now deals with primarily UAV tech this is going to happen whether you like it or not. I'm not going to say it would be safer with our current tech but it is going to be safer. I totally understand why people are hesitant but we aren't as far away from this as most people think.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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My hot take is that we get full automated commercial plane before single pilot.
Single pilot means that there is no way to avoid an air Berlin like mass murder (and being locked alone in a cockpit doesn't sounds great for mental health). No pilot means less risk to have such a scenario
Sure we need risk analysis (accident caused by humans versus humans preventing accident) and most likely newer ATC protocols, and some upgrade in equipments, but I doubt there it a major obstacle.
HELL NO
Ha, fuck no. Airlines already treat pilots like shit and overwork the younger less experienced pilots that fly most of our regional smaller flights. Given their maintenance issues lately, how do you think this pans out? No way in hell am I going to let a machine have 100% control. It would never be able to handle the quick thinking, problem solving, and gut decisions that pilots leverage to bring things in safely when there are problems. Planes already are largely automated, but I'm not sure a regulatory agency would ever be comfortable removing pilots from the cockpit. The day they do is the end of my flying days.
Yeah sure. Right after I take an ice pick to my nuts.
no
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the quality of some planes are very sus, i.e., budget designs like those dreamliner/ max series, parts falling out either due to bad maint or they just built super cheapo
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freedom land has shown that liberating air traffic controllers from their jobs got so much air things bumping into each other. "like crewless, zero crew" would also mean zero land crew. i guess this also means tend to your own baggage
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there's those dramas where people get sick on board and someone asks if there's a doctor. now those dramas would just have a bunch of onlookers maybe posting on sns, praying, or just plain shouting for help. this scenario can be adjusted for the need of an air marshal as well
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i doubt all 300 people would orderly get the food they ordered and/or sit on the seat they were assigned. and/or not smoke. and/or not place their feet somewhere the body parts (maybe feet) shouldn't be on
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on the personal side, some ai voice telling me to calm down when the plane hits some turbulence feels like it won't work. for an extra free, you can choose your ai captain's voice! for more friendly lines, get the warm ai voice pack dlc
No. Because in a fully automated flight like that, now you have to worry about the other passengers.
Bring duct tape and a few friends.
Article 31 of the UN Declaration of human rights says: If any aircraft passenser should become a Karen, it is the right and duty of other passengers to duct tape them to their seats.
(Okay that doesn't exist, but should be)
As a pilot, not anytime soon, and not just because I'm worried about my job. Like cars, you can automate 95% of flying pretty easily and for the most part, we already do. But also like cars, that last 5% is several orders of magnitude more difficult.
But cars have a big advantage over planes in automation, if the computer gets totally confused, it can pull over, stop and let the driver figure things out. A plane can't stop flying without hitting the ground so the computer can't give up in an edge case. There's also a different standard for safety. A few dozen teslas slam into walls and not many people care outside of immediate families. 70 people die in a plane crash and it's international news for months.
I figure it'll happen, but not anytime soon. And zero pilots is way more feasible than one pilot. And no way in hell can a robo flight attendant manage a cabin in normal operations let alone an emergency, I don't think that part will ever happen unless we go full synth.
A plane can't stop flying without hitting the ground
Totally unrelated to the thread, but this reminded me of Special To Hollywood, a really interesting short radio play from the 40s, about a plane that mysteriously becomes suspended in the air while the passengers and crew freak out trying to comprehend what's happening. It's a sort of surrealist horror story that I think was actually pretty ahead of its time.
Somehow, as a kid I ended up with a collection of cassette tapes of these Lights Out radio shows. They were all pretty basic, Twilight Zone-y stories, but this one always stood out to me. You made me remember that, so I just wanted to share this weird little story.
Exactly, and accident in aviation are never because of one factor but rather multiple of them, and Murphy's law.
Handling an engine flame out is ok. But in reality it might be an engine flame out + icing conditions + OVC008 + non precision approach + windshear on short final.
AI pilot would have quit the seat a long time ago, leaving the self loading flesh bags at the rear alone.
ATC here and the only time we consider an aircraft safe is when it's at the airport. That's why slots exists. As annoying as they can be, better have the aircraft on ground at DEP rather than holding to wait for the thunderstorm to pass.
Wanna dogpile onto this comment to add that we can't even automate robots to mow lawns by themselves. The ones you can buy that do any part of the job well at all require GPS, and also require manual intervention or remote piloting for even getting the bot back to its charging station. I work for a corporation that automates machinery like this and sells it to the US government, which advertises its products as automated or crewless, but actually requires somebody at the helm of a software suite to manually adjust and operate the bots at any given moment during their operations. How the hell are people expecting cars and planes to automatically get you to your destination? Imagine your "crewless" vehicle being piloted by some dude in an office somewhere in your country instead of someone actually being at the wheel. Does that make any kind of sense? Would you trust the delay in instructions? What happens when your vehicle can't receive any outside connections?
Some level of complex "Autonomous" everything, from now until the foreseeable future, will always have a human in the pilot seat. 100% automation is impossible for us right now with our current level of technology.
The reason is more than just that the last few % points of automating is the most difficult hurdle, though I really agree with that part. It's that automation can't account for improvising, adapting, innovating. Automation can't do on-demand problem solving. Space probes on the Moon and Mars can't unflip themselves when they get stuck. Programmed machines can only do what they're programmed to do. We're beyond anything somewhat complex getting 100% automated any time soon.
Accounting? Helpdesk support? Labor that is repetitive and doesn't require much ingenuity will get automated fast.
Heavy machinery? Art? Transportation? Medical care? We're 100+ years a way from completely unmanned complex tasks. People eat up the sci-fi marketing garbage without really interacting with or testing the claims being made.
Why is zero more feasible than one?
A single pilot would need the ability to control the plane and override automation and that's a very dangerous thing.
A single task saturated human in a stressful situation is more of a liability than a benefit. A single pilot can fixate on problems and try to solve them, even if they've totally misidentified the situation. Add another set of eyes and you naturally slow things down and handle situations better. The Air France crash in ’09 is a decent example of how one person can totally misinterpret a problem and then the remedy caused a crash, the other crew members were able to figure out what was happening, but it was too late to recover. More crew are an additional chance of success.
Then there's the whole one pilot is a single point of failure problem. An incapacitated pilot is a fairly straightforward problem, but what about a '15 Germanwings type of situation where the pilot tries to intentionally crash?
Ty for the write up! Makes sense when you put it like that. I'd still trust one human, warts and all, over some ai cooked up by some tech bro. But two humans definitely seems best.
When the service is mature enough to have decent stats on miles flown / crashes and that ratio is better than manned planes then sure, why not?
Remember, kids, aircraft are still the safest way to fly!
aircraft are still the sfest way to fly
So there are non-aircrafts that can fly? 🤔
The actual saying is the safest form of travel. Which is true, mostly because there's enough room in the sky that planes and pilots don't have to deal with other unpredictable people.
Transatlantic flights by Montgolfier ballon - travel in style for the next six weeks.
Balloons are aircraft
Damn. Must have misread that as fixed-wing. Or even powered.
That was the joke dot jay peg.
Nope.
Crew know a lot of override and emergency stuff for when systems go wrong and are always the reason planes don't go down when they otherwise would've
Is it built by Tesla, Meta, Boeing, or some other American corp?
Nope, nope, nope.
Dude, I don't even want to fly on a fully-manned flight with the way these planes are dropping out of the sky these days.
You can't get me in to a crewed plane right now. Ain't trusting no Tesla plane!
Maybe in like... two centuries.
Have you criticized a Boeing Executive recently? 👀
No, for fear mostly of fellow passengers more than distrust of the technology.
Private flight though? Maybe, I'll consider that
No, self driving will not be safe within my lifetime
I'd definitely fly zero crew aside from the pilot, if it was cheaper.
It'd be cheaper alright, but not for the passengers.
Not in the first few years of the tech, too risky for my taste.
In a perfect world where stuff never breaks?
Yep.
But we clearly don't live in that world, so no.
Nope.
Why not? I hear dying in a plane crash is a fairly quick way to go.
No
I've no fundamental objection to doing so. I don't think that existing aircraft are considered ready for that, though.
On flights between major airports, with no inclement weather, and ignoring direct human control like taxiing and communications, many commercial flights are already effectively there. Automatic takeoff, autopilot in the air, and auto land systems handle nearly everything else automatically.