Does Technology Make Airline Pilots Obsolete?

The answer to the question raised in the headline is possibly. Advances in electronics and artificial intelligence could soon make airliners that can fly themselves a reality, which is giving rise to a debate on the need for pilots.

The age of self-flying airliners is almost here. The New York Times reported that the crew of a Boeing 777 spends just seven minutes actually piloting the plane during a flight. During most of the journey, the autopilot does everything necessary to keep the plane in the sky.

The pilots on a European-made Airbus airliner spend just three minutes flying the plane. What’s more interesting is that the “flying” pilots do could be unnecessary.

Are Airliners Drones?

“Those three minutes Airbus pilots fly isn’t because they have to fly it, it’s just procedures,” former military pilot Missy Cumming said. Those claims come from a study by Cummings, a Duke University and MIT researcher who interviewed 11 commercial pilots, Motherboard reported. “It’s just during takeoff.”

Cummings thinks that modern airliners are little more than drones that could be flown by remote control or automated systems without the help of pilots. Cummings wants the airline industry to switch to a system where a plane has two pilots: a human in the cockpit and an automated system or a group of people on the ground that would fly the plane by remote control.

Tragedy Raises Questions about Need for Pilots

Systems that allow people on the ground to fly airliners by remote control are already available. The U.S. military uses such technology to control the drones it uses for attacks on terrorists.

Motherboard writer Jason Koebler believes that such remote control could have prevented a March 2015 crash that killed 150 people. During that tragedy, a mentally ill pilot on a Germanwings jet reportedly turned off the autopilot on an Airbus A320 and crashed it into a mountain in France. Koebler pointed out that using the latest technology, a controller on the ground could have turned the autopilot back on or taken control of the plane and flown it in for a safe landing.

Boeing has already created an uninterruptable autopilot system that could take over a plane from the ground. That technology has actually been around since 2006, and it is actually used in the U.S. military’s F-16 fighter planes, The New York Times reported.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA—the think tank that devises new technologies for the Pentagon—is going even further. The New York Times reported that DARPA will test a real life version of R2D2, the Star Wars droid that can help fly planes, this summer. DARPA’s robot will even be able to take the controls and fly the plane in an emergency.

Critics like Koebler believe such technology could have prevented both the Germanwings tragedy and the September 11 terrorist atrocity. He believes that if uninterruptable autopilot had been available in 2001, the hijacked planes could have simply been flown in for a safe landing at a military base instead of crashing into buildings.

So Are Pilots Obsolete?

Naturally, many people will wonder if these technologies will make airline pilots as obsolete as elevator operators. After all, pilots are very expensive; the average salary for an airline pilot in the U.S. is $98,410 a year, and some American Airlines pilots are paid up to $241 an hour.

Rigging modern airliners to fly without pilots would not be that hard. Cummings thinks it could be done right now with existing technology.

“That Airbus could, with some very simple changes, be remote controlled,” Cummings said. “They’re operated with a system known as digital fly-by-wire, where the pilots are, through ones and zeroes, telling the plane what to do. Those commands don’t have to be right there, they could come from a ground control station.”

Airline Pilots Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon

So it would be possible for airlines to replace all their pilots with fly by wire, but they will not. Cummings thinks it will not be done, because passengers would not accept a totally pilotless plane.

She noted that somebody has to be in charge of the plane and to take control in emergencies. Some experts have suggested that in the future, the pilot will be a flight attendant that can fly the plane in case of systems failure or hacking.

A more likely scenario is that there will be only one person in the cockpit, who will spend most of his or her time doing something else, like reading a book or watching TV, instead of a full flight crew, Cummings said. That will allow airlines to automate without eliminating the human factor.

Large pilotless planes will appear in our skies in the near future. Cummings predicted that unamend cargo planes will become a reality within a few years.

Even though the scenario of pilotless planes is a scary one, there is a silver lining. Using a NASA solution called Terminal Sequencing and Spacing and self-flying planes, the amount of air traffic in North American skies could be increased by 20%. That means pilotless flights could lead to more planes in the sky, more flights, cheaper tickets and more seats for air travelers.

Souce: pointspassport.co