
Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, and landing tests - apsec112
https://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-completes-autonomous-taxi-take-off-and-landing-tests-2020-7
======
PinguTS
A friend of mine, a military helicopter pilot told me years ago, that Airbus
can basicaly fly by itself, except for taxiing. It was about 15 years ago.

But then the airline prohibited to use the automated systems during take-off
and landing, because the pilots don't get practise. But pilots need those
practise if they should take over in emergency situations.

The same is true for automated driving. I always say, we will see automated
railways and automated airplanes before we see automated cars.

PS: Because of some comments, Nuremberg had the first railways system to allow
mixed traffic of automated and manual railways. Yeah, I know some of the guys
doing the saftey certifcations for this.

~~~
ekianjo
There are already automated trains in Paris (one metro line), and I can think
of several places in Japan with automated train lines as well (not the main
ones). It's already proven technology.

~~~
amelius
> It's already proven technology.

Automated trains are just like elevators, except they move horizontally.

There used to be an operator on every elevator, but they have been replaced by
electronics since a very long time ago.

~~~
sandworm101
>> Automated trains are just like elevators, except they move horizontally.

Really? I haven't heard of any elevators killing dozens of people lately. I
haven't seen many elevators crash, burst into flames and effectively remove
entire city blocks from the map. I haven't heard of people studying elevator
operators for PTSD.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Lac_mega...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Lac_megantic_burning.jpg)

"Traumatic exposure and posttraumatic symptoms for train drivers involved in
railway incidents"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462444/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462444/)

>>Because of involuntary exposure to PUT [Person Under Train] incidents, the
likelihood of train drivers to witness the violent death of a person is much
higher than that of the general population, and that puts the train driver at
risk of psychological trauma.

>>Of the 193 train drivers, 152 (78.75%) reported at least one PUT incident.
Respondents reported as much as 14 PUT incidents/person, with a mean of 4 (SD
= 2.83) incidents/train driver.

In all honesty, a train driver is more likely to see someone die violently in
front of them in a given year than the average soldier.

~~~
dwd
All the more reason to take train drivers out of the picture.

~~~
kiba
Doesn't solve the problem of people using trains to commit suicide, which
isn't certainly going to be solved by any amount of automation.

~~~
clusterfish
So? Nobody said that it would, just that drivers won't suffer the associated
ptsd.

------
edmundhuber
Link to Airbus's press release: [https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-
releases/en/2020/06/ai...](https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-
releases/en/2020/06/airbus-concludes-attol-with-fully-autonomous-flight-
tests.html) More info here: [https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-
aerial-mobi...](https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/autonomy-aerial-
mobility.html)

Airbus has an "innovation" (R&D) department and they're looking into more ways
to have computers do the routine parts of flight.

Airbus's materials (linked) do mention "self-piloting", but I can't imagine
that they are thinking of the scale as BusinessInsider is when they write
"self-flying". No one's proposing getting rid of pilots, having a computer fly
a plane completely would be insanity.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
Would it be more insane than a self-driving car? Because to me, who knows
nearly nothing about planes, it seems like it would be significantly easier to
make a self-flying plane than a self-driving car. But obviously if something
goes wrong the plane crash would be much worse than the car crash.

~~~
edmundhuber
Depends on what you mean by self-flying, which is why I pointed out that BI
probably has different ideas than Airbus.

To most people (and BI?) it will mean "taxi, takeoff, navigating/obstacle
avoidance, landing". To the extent that driving a car isn't "what you see is
what you get", flight is much worse.

In the simplest case of flight, you are in cruise (neither takeoff nor
landing), and depending on what kind of airspace you're in you may need to: *
listen to ATC for commands, and advise them of what you're doing, * avoid
weather, * look out for traffic, * watch your gauges, * stay on a heading,
altitude, and generally fly the plane. (This part is routinely done with
autopilot.)

In short, if it seems easier, it's because pilots make it look so casual.

A thing they teach pilots is: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate". This is the
basic priorities for your attention. If you're pointed at terrain your
priority is to fix that first. The point of autopilot today is to free you (to
some extent) of that first responsibility, especially during routine parts of
flight, so that you can do the other things. Airbus is looking for more things
to automate to let pilots do more strategic thinking in general.

Contrast this with a car, which is probably more in line with what BI is
thinking. The kinetic energies are much lower, there's no need to communicate,
the rules for driving are pretty straightforward (get to where you want to be,
without hitting other people, while respecting traffic lights and speed
limits), and to top it all off, if the AI feels that it's in over its head
than the car can just stop whenever and everyone can climb out of the vehicle.

~~~
joshribakoff
A car can't just stop in the middle of an intersection. Turn signals and
traffic lights are similar to air traffic control. The risk of collision is
much higher in a car than a plane, this is why you see many more traffic
accidents than plane crashes. In both cases the rules are get where you want
to be without colliding with anything or making passengers uncomfortable.

------
qppo
Maybe one day we'll have pilots reserved for emergencies, but only on the
ground like drone operators. Hotswapping between flights that need corrections
as problems occur.

Obviously not going to happen tomorrow and needs more robust communications
infrastructure over the deadzones of the planet but it's fun to imagine. I
trust machines more than people, unless they're made by Boeing.

~~~
pak9rabid
I would imagine something like Starlink could help with the deadzone issue?

~~~
koatuok
Can Starlink work with a vehicle that is in motion? And at 500 mph? I had
assumed that it only worked with a stationary transceiver.

~~~
elcritch
Perhaps not initially, but IIRC, they use "digital" antenna so it should be
upgradable to track in real-time. Perhaps even by an OTA update.

~~~
Skunkleton
There is nothing stopping the use of a traditional auto tracking antenna
either.

~~~
elcritch
Except for accuracy, mechanical wear, price, and size.

~~~
Skunkleton
Price is in five figures, and the others are not real problems. How do you
think datalinks on military aircraft work?

------
Joeri
I wouldn’t trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if
they’ve barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need
practice to become and remain skilled. I’m worried about the effect of such
systems on pilot skill.

~~~
Simulacra
"Russian jet crashed 'because captain couldn't land without autopilot"

[https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-
captain-c...](https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-
couldnt-land-without-autopilot-9569770/)

~~~
lightgreen
The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not have an feature to
drop fuel and landed over max landing weight and there are other reasons.

Metro is not the most reliable source of information.

------
dreamcompiler
Old pilot joke: "The airplanes of the future will have a pilot and a dog in
the cockpit. The pilot's job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite
the pilot if he touches anything."

------
darren0
I'm all for this for the shipping industry and completely unmanned, but I'm
not about to fly on this myself.

~~~
asynchronous13
If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot,
and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human
pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the
human backup moves to a ground station.

~~~
fossuser
The Boeing 737 max 8 software couldn't keep a plane in the sky with an army of
pilots fighting to save their own lives.

I wouldn't get in one of these until there are better controls on this kind of
software, it's not the same as autopilot.

~~~
asynchronous13
There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there
a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused
accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will
keep happening as long as experience is valuable.

    
    
        Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
        Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
        Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
        Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead
    

and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused
aviation accidents.

~~~
fossuser
I'm not a luddite, if the software is ready and safer than people then I'd be
okay with it.

There's a history of software _not_ being ready while people pretend it is and
then it kills people (Therac-25).

I'm just skeptical that we'll know when it's actually safe.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Therac-25 wasn’t a “it’s not ready yet!”-type issue. It wasn’t an expected or
anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study
after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.

~~~
fossuser
They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was
“impossible” that it could be failing in that way.

Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being
tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the
lesson.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the "malfunctioning" was the
system working as-directed by the user, but the UX was horrible for informing
the user what they were doing.

~~~
fossuser
It was a lot worse than that:
[http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)

That paper is long, but does a great job of giving the context and going deep
on the details.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Thank you!

------
Upvoter33
I thought most of plane take off, flight, and landing were automated long
ago... ?

[sorry, should have done more googling: [https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-
a-plane-land-automatica...](https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-
automatically) seems to say auto-land is there (but used very little) and no
auto-takeoff]

~~~
nexuist
There are other people talking about autoland, but it's actually meant to line
the aircraft up with the runway and gently glide it down, and then the pilot
deactivates it around 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to
perform the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't flare by
itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it will cause a ton of
stress on the landing gear that adds up to more frequent downtime for repairs.

~~~
vultour
Now that's just completely wrong. Airliners had full automatic landing
capability for a long time, it's very often used when there's zero visibility
at the destination airport.

------
Merrill
Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first?

Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?

~~~
kamel3d
or Amazon with their prime fleet, I see then more willing to test this
technology since they love cutting cost

------
PopeDotNinja
I would not be surprised to see self-flying planes take off (pun intended)
before self-driving cars.

~~~
kbenson
It's a much easier problem, which is why planes have been mostly automated for
a while now.

The equivalent for cars would be if we only allowed them on almost entirely
empty freeways and highways, and on designated, fairly uniform and well marked
parking lots directly off those freeways. Self driving cars can already do all
that fairly well. It's all the fiddly bits that planes don't have to deal with
(pedestrians, city roads, weird/bad roads and signage, lots of other cars,
etc) that make self driving cars hard.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Don't forget planes all file flight plans ahead of time so not only is there
more space, but it is relatively easy to check for potential conflicts before
flights leave the ground.

~~~
asdfadsfgfdda
Flight plans are filed in advance, but a flight plan is just a plan. It's an
impossible task to predict where an airplane will fly in advance, there are so
many variables involved.

Just some of the many reasons a flight will vary from flight plan:

-Avoiding convective build up (thunderstorm)

-Avoiding turbulence for passenger comfort (changing altitude)

-Unexpectedly high headwinds (changing altitude)

-A cold front causes winds to shift, so the runways in use change

-Low clouds limits arrival/departure rate, so holding is needed

-Snow removal from runways/taxiways

------
gpmcadam
Part of me wonders, in the future, how we'll view the attempts to automate
pilots and drivers.

It feels like a natural step now in the technology but perhaps it'll be viewed
like trying to make a robot ride a horse instead of looking to invent the car.

I wonder what the next order-of-magnitude leap for transport will be. Cheap,
fast, safe. Hyperloop maybe?

Will we look back at holding on to air and road travel as a bit of a reckless
endeavour?

~~~
hencoappel
If you took humans off the road and made the roads suitable for only automated
cars it would be so much easier to automate, its only hard because we have to
make it drive with the signals/lines and such that humans require rather than
just broadcasting things like the traffic signal in an easy way for cars to
understand.

------
cachvico
And when there's zero visibility?

ILS presumably -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system)

So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent
way?

~~~
outworlder
> So would it not make sense to tie the two systems together in an intelligent
> way?

There's no need to do so since ILS autoland has been a thing for decades and
can be used by many aircraft today (from both Boeing and Airbus)

All the 'self-flying plane' has to do is engage the Cat III approach if it is
available and let the old and boring autopilot do its thing.

Alternatively, if Cat III approach is unavailable, it can do what pilots
already do: divert to an alternate airport.

[https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-
automatica...](https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/can-a-plane-land-
automatically)

~~~
nabla9
In Cat 3 autoland the plane does the approach and landing manoeuvres but the
pilot is still in control. Complete zero visibility landing is not allowed.
Pilot needs to see something like 50 feet to see the center line and make sure
that the plane is in touchdown area. There are also wind limits, almost no
turbulence is not allowed and so on.

~~~
charlesdenault
That's not entirely true. Cat IIIc is "zero zero" autoland capable with no
decision height required.

------
supernova87a
Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be
monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a
situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that
point, why not keep them in the plane?

If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that
pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are
there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc.
Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale.

That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is
a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers.

I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You’d still have a
cabin-crew, too.

~~~
benhurmarcel
You save the cost of the pilots, and the cockpit (which would reduce the
aircraft price and weight significantly, and increase capacity).

------
fataliss
Mildly terrifying when we know how software is done at massive corporations
like Boeing and Airbus : /

~~~
boramalper
> Boeing and Airbus

I wouldn’t even put Airbus in the same sentence with Boeing; they are using
formal methods since 2001[0], whereas Boeing has outsourced its software to
$9-an-hour engineers[1].

[0]:
[https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf](https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf)

[1]:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-
software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)

------
msla
How bad does it have to get before the automated systems refuse to deal and a
human has to land the plane? An engine gone? Two engines gone? Multiple
engines gone and a really stiff crosswind? How good is it at landing in a
blizzard on an icy runway? I know it never happens. Planes never land on the
Hudson River, either. There's obvious value in making the happy path as safe
as possible, and I'm certain full automation is the way to do that, but what
are the current limits of automation?

~~~
phire
Today's autopilots are designed to be as simple as possible.

The intention is that a pilot should be able to fully understand the complete
autopilot algorithm and understand exactly how it should act in any situation.

Today's autopilot can't handle any emergencies at all, they are designed to
disconnect when they detect something weird. They don't even understand
aerodynamics.

I don't know where Airbus' new system lies, but if we actually designed a
fully autonomous plane using modern traditional AI techniques (so no machine
learning or neural networks; Just decision trees, adaptive aerodynamic models
and predictions) then it could handle a wide range of emergencies.

It should be able to handle bad weather and engine out emergencies just fine,
and should even be able to land in the Hudson River or anywhere else it has
detailed maps.

These are all documented flight emergencies that any programmer of a fully
autonomous plane would know about and test their software against in
simulations.

The main areas where such fully autonomous planes would have issues are
avionics failures, misleading sensors, emergency landings in areas with
substandard mapping and unexpected aerodynamic failures (beyond what their
adaptive aerodynamic model can handle)

------
ggm
Whats the publicly available data on the crash rate of autonomous drones in
the military, unrelated to targeted attacks. It is the best indication, noting
that they fly in adverse weather and uncertain routes with possibly less
visibility to fall-back systems, and on long-delay operators.

I would expect domestic autonomous flying to incur at least comparable rates
of failure to the military for routine operations with root causes in weather,
or systems problems, given the likely sharing of weather, and IT systems
behind autonomous vehicles.

It would be interesting to see take off, cruise and landing distinctly to
understand their risk profiles.

There is also the public perception problem: We tolerate a level of crashes in
air transport, predicated on a belief the system is self-correcting. the 737
MAX was withdrawn from service. The lithium battery problem in the 787 was
identified. The square windows in the Comet were identified as a root cause.

Will we tolerate a 0.0000001% effective crash risk rate, from autonomous
vehicles with 400+ passengers?

------
kilo_bravo_3
What's the error rate of pilots compared to computers?

If we, today, completely eliminated all human pilots for all flights on all
aircraft and replaced them with the best automated systems available in one
fell swoop would deaths increase or decrease?

I'm sure there would be incidents where "A simple software bug killed 200
people today".

I'm also sure that bug can be fixed, and there are also "dumb human error
killed 200 people today".

I don't know if any amount of human skill, trained for an entire human
lifetime, using the best pedagogical methods, with infinite resources devoted
to training, can beat a computer in the long run.

Navy jets have auto-takeoff, tons of passenger planes have auto landing
(which, apparently isn't as smooth as human landing), and planes spend most of
their time on autopilot already. I think some military UAVs can do all or most
of this stuff already. What are their accident rates compared to commercial
airlines?

------
vemv
This is just a deathly accident waiting to happen.

We don't have the technology to make airplanes or cars respond to truly
unexpected conditions. We have instead a series of (very) sophisticated one-
trick ponies, which isn't nearly the same thing than an intelligent system.

Whoever dubbed ML "AI" was a marketing genius.

~~~
manfredo
It's not incorrect to say that automated technologies aren't always better
than human operators. But that's not the measure we need to use. The question
is does the _net failure rate_ increase or decrease? Say the automated
technology fails 2x as much in unexpected failure cases, but halves typical
failure rates?

Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but
1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any
real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might
increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to
expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes.
Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good
outcome.

Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things
like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly
disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a
lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an
automated flight crashing.

Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the
article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine
learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned
with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer
controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.

~~~
Avicebron
>Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things
like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly
disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a
lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an
automated flight crashing.

In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will
take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver
that the accident rate is neglible.

~~~
manfredo
I'm not sure about that. Even if the accident rate is half, that's still an
immense gain - over 10,000 lives saved each year in the US. Even if it's equal
(or slightly greater than equal), the productivity boost would be substantial.
Do we really think that people with hour+ long commutes would reject a self
driving car with half the accident rate of a human driver?

~~~
Avicebron
I don't know, probably not, but to your point about people's fear being
irrational, I can see people strongly rejecting the idea of dying to a
software glitch they don't understand.

------
mehrdadn
Dumb question but what is the benefit? I imagine pilots will still need to be
there to take over during an emergency, so it won't save on pilot costs,
right? And they can already lay back and relax during most of the flight so it
won't really help with fatigue. Is the idea that autopilot can somehow take
off with less risk than a human pilot? Can a human pilot take over
sufficiently quickly if something goes wrong? Is pilot error during phases
where such autopilot could've been running a source of accidents in practice?

~~~
Robotbeat
I think the idea is you might be able to reduce the required number of pilots
from 2 to 1 for some flights.

~~~
numpad0
Germanwings Flight 9525

~~~
benhurmarcel
had 2 pilots

~~~
numpad0
Happened when pilot was alone

------
jb775
The hard sell here will be convincing passengers it's safe enough. Not sure if
I'd be willing to fly on a pilot-less flight even if the airline passed the
cost savings onto me.

~~~
parsimo2010
> convincing passengers it's safe enough

This is a pretty tough problem, different than self-driving cars because
people see driving as something easy, but flying is seen as hard (just look at
the difference in training and salary between a bus driver and a commercial
pilot). Trained pilots/meat-computers will soon be worse than an automated
system 99.99% of the time, but in those strange 0.01% corner cases the meat-
computer really shines. There are several cases like Flight 214
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214))
that computers would have helped, but there's still a few "Miracle on the
Hudson" that any computer short of a general AI would have botched
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549)).
It will take a lot of work to get to where people will accept an automated
flight without a safety pilot on board, and if you have to pay a safety pilot
to ride along, you aren't saving as much money.

> even if the airline passed the cost savings onto me

HA! Like that will happen. The only time that airlines "pass on cost savings"
to the customer is when a low cost carrier starts offering service for the
same route.

------
nabla9
Just certified to fly without co-pilot would save money.

Maybe freighter drone at first. Might be easier to get certification to fly in
drone mode between remote airfields at first.

A350 freighter seems to be under consideration.
[https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-
of-a350-freighter...](https://cargofacts.com/airbus-nears-launch-
of-a350-freighter-program/)

------
irrational
How many people will want to become pilots once flying (jets, fighters, etc.)
is fully automated? Will it be difficult to find people to "take over" from
the AI pilot in case of an emergency? I suppose you wouldn't need that many
since it's unlikely there will be multiple emergencies concurrently.

------
jb775
I feel like this could backfire from a marketing perspective.

Imagine an airline integrating pilot-less flights, then a competitor starts
using the slogan "We use real pilots, because we care more about your safety
than increasing profits".

------
Avicebron
I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are
essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could
open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.

------
kirykl
>"perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own"

It's the non-normal exception cases where pilot expertise is really critical

------
jedisct1
But can it serve Tomato juice?

------
mhh__
Would you get on a plane with no pilot?

~~~
lightgreen
Would you choose a plane with a pilot or without a pilot if a plane without a
pilot is 5% cheaper? 20% cheaper? 50% cheaper?

~~~
vkou
Would you choose it if it were 0.5% cheaper?

Keep in mind that when you have a human pilot on board, they ultimately make
all decisions about safety. And they have skin in the game. They are the ones
who push back if they do not feel confident in weather conditions, or in the
mechanical state of the aircraft to fly it. Would you prefer that those
decisions be made by beancounters in a corporate office, who are more
concerned about not having to refund people's tickets, than getting the plane
safely from one destination to the other?

Compare the safety-obsession culture of commercial flight, versus, say
surgeons - who, as a profession, aggressively push back on even trivial safety
improvements - like checklists.

If the surgeon were killed every time they made a serious surgical mistake,
you'd probably see a much better safety culture in that profession.

------
galaxyLogic
What about the air-hostesses?

------
ngngngng
> The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous
> Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft
> successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply
> watched.

Talk about training your replacement.

My little brother is starting pilots school soon, maybe I should talk him out
of it.

~~~
bdamm
You should because it's a terrible career, although really I think most pilots
end up bailing out of the pilot career into good industries so in the end, no
big deal. Let 'er rip and enjoy the view when you get it

~~~
Ancalagon
Why is it considered a terrible career?

~~~
chrisseaton
Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance, doing the same
thing a million times, dead-man’s shoes, having to work against a schedule,
living out of corporate hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules,
shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to like about it?

Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union game talk about
achieving the same pay an undergraduate intern gets in a tech company.

~~~
jfk13
While there's doubtless something to what you say, I don't believe there are
_that_ many undergrad interns getting the pay of a senior pilot. You're
thinking of an extremely select subset of tech companies.

~~~
chrisseaton
Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet against the average
working pilot earning less than the average tech intern either.

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lnsru
Poor pilots sitting and watching inside the plane the moment they got
obsolete. Cameras now, lidar and radar later for night and bad weather
flights.

~~~
alacombe
Do you mean the same systems driving Tesla cars to immobile objects on the
road ?

