We already have advanced autopilots that can fly commercial airliners. We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots. I would trust the autopilot more than freaking Claude. We already do, every day.
I don't think anyone is suggesting we should do that...but it's still a fun project to play around with?
Agreed. I think thats a really fun way to test out Claude's ability to perform an abstract task it's probably not trained on, was nice to read
I think we can trust them to not have human pilots. It is just that having human in loop is very useful in not that rare scenarios. Say airfield has too much wind or fog or another plane has crashed on all runways... Someone needs to make decision what to do next. Or when there is some system failure not thought about.
And well if they are there they might as well fly for practise.
And no. I would not allow LLM in to the loop of making any decision involving actual flying part.
There's also the issue that when something goes wrong, many people will never trust an autopilot again. Just look at how people have reacted to a Waymo running over a cat in a scenario where most humans would have made the same error. There's now many people calling for self-driving cars to never be allowed on roads and citing that one incident.
Which makes sense: a robot can’t be responsible for anything, a human can be.
> We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots.
Much of the value of a human crew is as an implicit dogfooding warranty for the passengers. If it wasn't safe to fly, the pilots wouldn't risk it day after day.
To think of it, it'd be nice if they posted anonymized third-party psych evaluations of the cockpit crew on the wall by the restrooms. The cabin crew would probably appreciate that too.
There are soooo many pilot decisions that AI is nowhere near making. Managing a flight is more than flying. It is about making safety decisions during crisis, from deciding when to abort an approach to deciding when to eject a passenger. Sure, someone on the ground could make many of those decisions, but i prefer such things be decided by someone with literal skin in the game, not a beancounter or lawyer in an office
I doesn't sound ethical to eject passengers while aborting an approach, regardless of precise timing.
I sincerely doubt that pilots decide "when to eject a passenger". Mostly it would be the cabin crew: the flight attendants are 100% in charge of flight safety, and they would be managing relationships with passengers, and they would be the ones to make the call. It would ultimately be them calling some kind of law enforcement. If an Air Marshal is onboard already, obviously they would be on the front line as well.
Furthermore, the concept of "ejecting a passenger" from a flight would mostly not be something you do while in the air, unless you're nuts. Ejecting a passenger is either done before takeoff, or your crew decides to divert the flight, or continue to the destination and have law enforcement waiting on the tarmac.
Naturally, pilots get involved when it's a question of where to fly the plane and when to divert, but ultimately the cabin crew is also involved in those decisions about problem passengers.
The Pilot in Command has ultimate legal responsibility over the operation of the flight, ICAO conventions explicitly state this. Whilst in practice the cabin crew will be the ones dealing with the passenger(s) and supplying information to the PIC , it won’t be them making the final decision.
No. Cabin crew recommend. Pilots actually decide.
Do the pilots also decide whether to issue a parachute to the ejected passenger?
Pretty sure ejection here is meant as shorthand for "Transfer the passenger to an entity on the ground to proceed from there" whether that entity is emergency medical services or law enforcement is secondary.
It would be interesting to see if Claude can land and take off. Don't think the autopilot can do that yet.
> Don't think the autopilot can do that yet.
It absolutely can; it's called autoland[1]. In really bad visibility, pilots simply can't see the runway until too late, and most aerodromes which expect these conditions have some sort of autoland system installed. The most advanced ones will control every aspect of the plane from top-of-descent (TOD), flaps and throttle configuration, long and short final, gear down, flare, reverse thrust, and roll-out, all the way to a full stop on the runway. Zero pilot input needed.
And most of this was already available in the late 1970s. We have absolutely no need for LLM-based AI in aviation; traditional automation techniques have proven extremely powerful given how restricted the human domain of aviation already is.
Autopilots can. Both on airliners and small planes, although only landing on the latter as far as I know and it's only meant for emergencies. Airbus ATTOL is probably the most interesting of these in that it's visual rather than ILS (note that no commercial airliners are using this).
> We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots
never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok
>never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok
Because humans are the fallback for all the scenarios that the tech cannot reliably cover. And my intuition says that the tech around planes is so heavily audited that only things that work with 99.999...% accuracy work will be left to tech.
Still those technological issues do happen, and in those situations it's good to have a human pilot in control. See for example Qantas Flight 72 - the autopilot thought aircraft was stalling, and sent the plane into a dive. It could have ended up very badly without human supervision.
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