AircraftNews.Com

The mumbling about replacing pilots is getting louder and any moment soon one suspects there will be cries to replace the fallible humans with the infallible (?!!?) computers which we have come to trust with so much of our lives. This has not been an unalloyed success as the Global finanacial Crisis and episodic web meltdowns have shown but there seems little likelyhood of going back
In the next months the University of Queensland will be conducting trials with unmanned aircraft to explore the blending of unmanned with manned traffic in normal airspace and researchers at Boeing, Airbus and numerous academic groups are progressively defining traffic management algorithms for UAVs.
There will be the predictable knee jerk from pilots with much muttering about how Apollo was saved by humans and dark mouthings off about Airbus computers but obviously the time is coming when the issues should be debated and options examined.
The inescapable trend in RPT is that human error is increasingly implicated in serious accidents and many carriers are now requiring Autopilot operations for much of normal flight operations. It is clear that for most circumstances the Flight management systems can do a better job than the humans. It is also clear that there remain many circumstances where on board decision taking and hand flying can lead to a better result.
What is called for is an informed debate as the technologies mature so that the introduction of these advanced systems with the resultant enhancement of safety and efficiency of air travel can be seamless and trouble free.
Some would argue that the jump to fly by wire (and now Fly by Light) was not conducted with enough general debate and that some of the consequences of setting up control laws as they commonly are were not thought thru.
It is already possible technically to support pilots from the ground in real time and control aircraft from the ground.
As technology progresses potential advantages emerge that would require the integration of the technology into operations. Pilots will not be able to say no to this and the task is to establish the best balance whereby the pilots can do what they do best while the machines do what they do best. Humans are not good with boring vigilance tasks. Machines are very good. If the human is not in the loop they go to sleep.This is why many charter pilots like to do their nav using heading mode on the autopilot. it keeps them in the loop.
Humans are good at multi processing and the sophisticated risk analysis of novel situations.
What we should aim for is a flight deck where the pilot is supported by a computerised expert assistant and is fed real time data while the operation is progressively monitored by ground agencies.