...why is there still manned control when the plane already auto lands when the pilots can't anymore...
How about when the plane can't autoland anymore? I don't know about the newest 787, but here are the crosswind landing limits for a B777F:
Landing: 38kts
Autoland: 25 knots
Cat I/II Autoland: 15 knots
Autoland headwind: 25 knots
Above 25 knots of cross- or headwind, it's a manual landing. Period. Can they design it for more. I'm sure, but at what cost?
...we're an expensive PITA especially when when they already pay for the automation anyway. One year of industry pilot wages pays for the conversion. Humans have a bad record in the cockpit, that's a fact, automation has the statistical advantage.
Are you kidding me? We are extremely CHEAP compared to what they'll have to do to replace us.
Look at all the accidents over the last 2 decades, human factor crashes to human factor saves (that could be replicated with automation, no worries) are 10:1 or greater.
Really? I thought you were smarter than that. You have no "fully automated crashes/saves" data to compare this to. Garbage argument.
You are projecting your opinion as a pilot on the consumer public, and it is not so, people think flying is oh so difficult
No. It's not. We all know that. Decision making and cockpit management during abnormal operations is what's difficult.
I have trouble seeing why pilots think they are so special their job can't be automated? ... We already run military drone programs under directed autonomy. Military pilots jobs are already being supplanted by autonomy. Wake up pilots, your cushy career may be about to come to an end.
If you're hanging your hat on the military RPA program, you had better find another argument.
I'm so mad that you made me actually get up, bust out my laptop to reply to this.
I've only been on this board a short time, but I'm starting to figure out some of the "personalities" here. I get you, Henning.
You talk about autoland. If you've ever been on the flight deck of an airliner that's shooting a Cat III, it's a quiet, tense environment. We're not doing anything but monitoring, but knowing that if the AFDS reverts to LAND2 or NO AUTOLAND at 100 feet, we're going to be busy. And it happens... trust me.
I have friends that are RPA pilots in the military. Their safety record is abysmal. They crash drones at an outstanding rate. And we're not talking combat losses. We're talking comm losses. Datalink goes down, spikes in comms, sunspots... whatever. They crash, a lot. Add to that that the infrastructure to launch and recover these RPAs is about twice that of a manned flying squadron. The comm equipment alone would be an astronomical cost to upgrade.
With the F-35, we have seen the last of the manned fighters. About 1/3 of the weight of a fighter is there just to support the fuzzy, pink body sitting in it. Pressurization system, seat, avionics... all that gets eliminated when you take the pilot out. For a passenger airplane, all that needs to be there. You need to pressurize it for the passengers, you need toilets, water, seats. The pilots are just an add-on which amounts to a rounding error.
Next, you'll have to build a whole new fleet of aircraft. From 737 size to 747 size. I don't think retrofitting the current fleets is going to work. Flying a ETOPS flight, there is so much that goes into it as far as redundancy in the systems. Hydraulic systems... redundant. Electrical systems... redundant. But we pilots are still there when the redundancy fails. Generator failed. Dispatch it with an MEL. Okay, now we're down to one. If we lose the other one, the pilots are still there that can hand fly it down. No pilots, you better figure out a couple more redundancies.
QRH says to pull and reset a circuit breaker. Okay, I'll reach up there and pull and reset it. What if I'm not there. We'll have a servo built in to do it. But make sure each circuit breaker has three servos. One to dispatch on an MEL, and one redundant one in case the second one fails. We pilots are cheap redundancy.
Also, plan on the expense of upgrading datalink communications world-wide. There are lots of places we fly that we can't get datalink service... heck, we can barely get HF communication. You better be prepared to pay to upgrade/build world-wide triple-redundant, hack proof data-link communication that covers 90% of the globe from Nigeria to Mongolia. And you better find the satellite band-width to do it.
Add to that the cost of getting Cat III ILSs to every commercial airport that would be served by a RPA. As you know, there are different quality of ILS signals. Only certain ILSs are certified for full-up Cat III autolandings. Make sure you have the funds to upgrade every ILS out there to the Cat III standard.
The other reason that the military can run their RPA program is that they launch, what? 150-ish RPA sorties a day? How about an airline like American that are launching 3,000 flights in a day over 350 destinations worldwide. Good luck with that.
I know my job is replaceable. I know that technology might be able to replace me, but, in my mind, there are such huge barriers to accomplish this, I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime.
A pilot goes nuts, locks the captain out and crashed an airplane. Now we have cries of "get the pilots out of there!" What happens when a fully automated airliner crashes (and it would happen), and then we'll hear cries of "a pilot would have been able to save that! Put pilots back in!"
All these "skynet is self-aware" guys need to ask themselves why we don't have self-driving locomotives carrying all our passengers and freight?
Henning, you're a boat guy... Why aren't there unmanned cruise ships sailing to the Bahamas?
Those are much simpler machines, operating in much more predictable environments. The logic that computers are gonna take over all passenger transportation-just because computers are getting "smart" is flawed. If that were the case, locomotives would definitely have become fully automated at least 50 years ago.
The type of intelligence required to operate airliners in complex environments is something computers fall far short of. They just can't handle approximations, novel situations, and analogy well at all. Not even on the level of a small child.
I am not worried at all about that threat to our careers. There are many much bigger fish to fry.