Pilot has heart attack in middle of flight!

[TheReal_Broke_88m3_13]

Most planes are on auto-pilot nowadays.
Only reason why they have a person in there is to make you feel comfortable.

Believe me most modern airlines can fly to and from destination with no pilot

 

[Kritic]

we'll no one's really said anything yet and i asked my homie google and he says otherwise...


you niccas is funny...

i hate to ask google when we have the experts here.

 

[aliG]

Most planes are on auto-pilot nowadays.
Only reason why they have a person in there is to make you feel comfortable.

Believe me most modern airlines can fly to and from destination with no pilot

Planes are on auto-pilot in between taking off and landing.

passenger planes do not take off or do full landings on autopilot. those are the most important moments of a flight and the most important reason pilots are necessary.

saying pilots are mostly not needed is highly shortsighted and only accurate when the plane is already in flight.

Majority of crashes happen during take-off and landing I believe. Pilots are definitely needed. Plus, what happens when auto-pilot bugs out? You need pilots to manually steer the plane itself.

 

[Chris.B]

Planes are on auto-pilot in between taking off and landing.


Majority of crashes happen during take-off and landing I believe. Pilots are definitely needed. Plus, what happens when auto-pilot bugs out? You need pilots to manually steer the plane itself.

Nope not with modern air-crafts....everything can be pre-programmed based on runway length on take off and landing.

Believe me my cousin's husband is a cargo plane pilot. He always rants about how his job will be non-existent in 10 years.



Only time when you need a pilot with modern aircraft is when you are landing in a fukked up runway somewhere in a 3rd world country.

 

[babylon1]

Nope not with modern air-crafts....everything can be pre-programmed based on runway length on take off and landing.

Believe me my cousin's husband is a cargo plane pilot. He always rants about how his job will be non-existent in 10 years.



Only time when you need a pilot with modern aircraft is when you are landing in a fukked up runway somewhere in a 3rd world country.

you fukking idiot. nobody is going to fly in a plane where a computer controls the take off and landing.

 

[Kritic]

you fukking idiot. nobody is going to fly in a plane where a computer controls the take off and landing.

where a computer controls the take off and landing.... there will be no body.

discuss: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/81570/#menu27

 

[Chris.B]

you fukking idiot. nobody is going to fly in a plane where a computer controls the take off and landing.

higher learning

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

you fukking idiot. nobody is going to fly in a plane where a computer controls the take off and landing.

You're about to be when Google drops that automated car and everyone switches

 

[babylon1]

You're about to be when Google drops that automated car and everyone switches

quite different from landing and taking off in an airplane

 

[bsmooth]

In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot, whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two? Many aviation experts think not. "A pilotless airliner is going to come; it's just a question of when," said James Albaugh, the president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airlines, in a talk he gave in August at the AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference, in Portland, Ore. "You'll see it in freighters first, over water probably, landing very close to the shore.

And for nearly two decades, automatic landing systems have been able to drop and stop a jet on the fog-shrouded deck of an aircraft carrier that's barely twice as wide and three times as long as the jet's wingspan—and the ship is moving. Meanwhile, the pilot sits in the cockpit, hands folded.

"Look, there's no harder job for a pilot than landing on an aircraft carrier," says Missy Cummings, a former jet jockey for the U.S. Navy and now an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "It's what Navy pilots have over those in the Air Force. And when I saw an F-18 land itself on an aircraft carrier, I knew my job was soon going to be over." That was in 1994. Automation has gotten rather better since then.

Given such advances, pilotless commercial flight is overdue, argues Cummings. Civilian UAVs could easily and profitably be deployed to survey infrastructure and carry cargo, she points out. And there's no reason why software, alone or perhaps in conjunction with a quickly mobilized ground controller, couldn't take over a piloted plane should something happen to both the pilot and the copilot. Already, she notes, an airliner's software typically takes over flight seconds after takeoff, handles the landing—and most of what happens in between. The pilot just "babysits," she says.

Of course, software that can meet only "most" of aviation's challenges would hardly satisfy the afraid-of-flying landlubber. That's why the pilot is still there, babysitting, until all the remaining kinks have been worked out. None of the problems are so bad as to prevent civilian pilotless planes from ever happening, but they are real, and they will have to be solved.

As significant as the technical hurdles are, however, by far the biggest impediment to pilotless flight lies in the mind. People who otherwise retain a friendly outlook toward futuristic technologies are quick to declare that they'd never board a plane run by software, which they know as the kludgy mess that makes their laptops freeze. But minds can be changed.

Each semester, Cummings asks her students at MIT whether they'd fly in a pilotless plane from Boston to Los Angeles. Two or three hands go up. Then she asks them how they'd feel if the fare was just 50 bucks. More than half the hands go up. Cummings's little experiment suggests that people's reservations about robo-flight aren't set in stone.

One factor that's often cited for keeping a pilot in charge is what's known as "shared fate." That's the reassurance passengers get from knowing that the human in the cockpit wants to live just as much as they do. But shared fate is not the only way, or even the normal way, to ensure safe service. After all, restaurants don't employ food tasters to reassure diners, nor do losing defense lawyers join their clients in jail. It's usually enough for a professional to demonstrate sheer competence—the "right stuff" of aviator lore. And it's clear that automatic pilots—like those that land F-18s—now have a goodly amount of it.

Even Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who deftly ditched his Airbus 320 airliner in New York City's Hudson River after its jet engines swallowed some geese, owed much to his onboard software—among other things, it managed the plane's angle of descent so as to avoid a stall.

Today, small government-run UAVs are plying ocean routes, looking for pirates and lost sailors; next, companies will send the craft into the back country, along routes cleared for their passage by civilian regulators, to check on the state of pipelines and power lines. After that, UAVs will ferry valuable medical samples and packages. A doctor might, for example, put a vial of blood into a UAV and send it to the nearest teaching hospital for analysis; a courier service such as FedEx might fly important packages from Japan to California, using dedicated airfields on each country's shoreline, thus avoiding civilian air traffic altogether. Once they're demonstrated on the battlefield, robotic medevacs will graduate to civilian duty, rescuing people stranded by flood or fire. Maybe then, after seeing such rescues on television, the flying public will finally start to warm to the cold machine.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/when-will-we-have-unmanned-commercial-airliners

Basically there are some minor technical things that need to be worked out but the most significant hurdle is human confidence in relying on software to keep them safe

Keep in mind, this article is from 2011 so I'm sure there have been advances since then