First, auto-takeoff is not possible. Its not possible due to technical constraints (e.g. concerns regarding LOC capture on the ground). It is also not possible due to safety constraints (e.g. the requirement to be able to deal with an aborted takeoff in a timely manner).
Second, automated landing IS used, but it is only used in limited situations. Why ?
- Because not all runways are equipped for CAT III autoland (i.e. the aircraft is not capable of landing itself without a shit-ton of calibrated equipment on the ground being there first, also good luck finding a CATIII autoland somewhere mountainous or with an otherwise tricky approach).
- Because not all aircraft are equipped for CATIII autoland (see above, more kit, more money).
- Because the autoland system itself has DH (Decision Height) and RVR (Runway Visual Range) requirements. The exception to this is CAT IIIC autoland, but AFAIK the vast majority of CATIII certified runways are only to CAT IIIB because that's expensive enough to certify, even for major airports.
- Because of general weather requirements. For example, I don't know about you, but I'd rather NEVER see an aircraft attempting autoland in a Captain's crosswind (i.e. crosswind so strong that the airline prohibits the First Officer from flying it).
- Becuase autoland operations at airports involve ATC increasing traffic separation. Increase separation leads to what ? Yes, that's right... decreased flow rate and increased possibility of delays and cancellations.
I think if you get must of the major airports covered that's still good enough. But, if I understood this article correctly, what Airbus is trying now is to make it happen without those ground requirements. And I'm sure they do not expect to cover every airport and runway to begin with.
Will it do the same on a grass strip, which some pilot did without engines in the Houston area?
Can it do a perfect belly landing like a Polish pilot did some years ago?
Can it land in the Hudson?
All of those pilots had massive experience beyond button pushing auto-piloted aircraft.
I think (hope) this is just a typical marketing program which is not actually going to happen.
Moreover, it is easy to find at least 30 successful landings under the above conditions, while the situation you are referring to has about 4 cases, 2 of them contested.
Also, locking the cockpit doors on airliners is stupid in my opinion.
Aviation industry follows safety in redundancy principles. So on top of all the redundancy they are going to add in a system like this, I assume pilot will be part of the redundancy too.
Perhaps they can remove co-pilot soon. But, it will take a few years to go without any pilot. Even then perhaps they start with cargo airlines. I assume they can use a ground station as an emergency pilot like how military drones work.
https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/01/ai...
However, since you ask, I would say two things : (a) The very Press Release you link to does take care to manage expectations (e.g. "Airbus’ mission is not to move ahead with autonomy as a target in itself").
(b) Your automatic take-off in 100% of situations is never going to happen. Sure, on a perfect dry day with nil-winds you can conjure up a great sounding Press Release. But throw in some "real world" and you can forget it. Cross winds, monsoon flooded runways, engine failures, bird strikes, failures of electronic systems (yes, it happens, even with triplicate redundancy) ... the highly trained humans at the front are not going anywhere, nor is their training regime going to be cut back.
But this won't last (hopefully), thanks to our brilliant co-humans doing cutting-edge research on that subject. And when a neural network is able to differentiate and anticipate possibles actions of winds, engines, birds and onboard electronics, then you have an autonomous take-off on par with humans pilots, enhanced with an instant feedback loop with built-in checklists and avionics.
It's a big stretch of course. But never say never, they say.
Of course we are talking only about situations when its is available and some airline then still insists that you don't use it.
You didn't understand what he said. What you wrote is not an insight. The actual insight is, in air travel, you use automated stuff only when the automated stuff is available everywhere around you. Because your plane might have to divert due to an emergency and land at another airport/field that doesn't have any automation in place.
So was auto-driving; engineering visionaries don't stop at what is currently possible.
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.
Ahem. No.
There is no collision hazard in elevators (essentially each elevator is on its own dedicated track). In railway, collision hazards are everywhere because you can change track and there are multiple trains on the same track, possibly (yikes) in head to head movements.
If you want to see the specs of a real Automatic Train Protection, the European one is public [1]. And that is only the protection part. There is no automatic pilot in there.
[1] https://www.era.europa.eu/content/set-specifications-3-etcs-...
A very large number of accidents are due to the operator failing to follow these very basic signals.
>incredibly varied operating environment
How many variables do you see here?
The absolute safest scenario is likely automated trains with a driver with a red button to stop the train, in case of emergency. After years go by without even having to use the button, even those operators could be removed. We're living in a world where automated driving is starting to overtake automated trains, something that literally exists on rail, and switching is controlled electronically on almost every passenger rail in the western world.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2020/07/07/red...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordorf_train_collision
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordorf_train_collision
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_passed_at_danger#Accide...
Unless we are talking metro, where I live it is not that uncommon to have some animal wonder on the tracks, people trying to commit suicide on the track, people throwing things at the train from bridges, ...
Hell, I there was even an hot air balloon that crashed on the train track a few years back in my city, blocking trains for the whole day.
And I got some bad news if you think 140 car freight trains stop for a deer on the tracks.
>people throwing things at the train from bridges,
I'm not too sure what you think an operator does today, besides maybe calling their dispatch/911.
This is an ergonomics nightmare scenario. The operator needs to pay attention to keep situational awareness all the time while just observing the train doing its thing. Then, all of a sudden, the train starts doing something that it shouldn't be doing (due to a failed signal, another train doing something stupid, an obstruction, a malfunction...) and they need to quickly react and do a safe abort (slamming the brakes may actually be a bad idea sometimes)
This is an issue in aircraft with heavy automation - everything seems normal until it isn't and then the pilots need to quickly figure out exactly what happened, how they got where they are and how to get out.
This isn't flying though, and you can stop a train by slamming the breaks, and this is perfectly fine in 99% of scenarios (and which is exactly why each train car has an emergency break cord/button).
I can't really imagine a situation where a possible derailment is better than stopping the train. If your on a narrow bridge, surely stopping is better than the possibility of being unable to stop when the bridge is out.
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...
"Traumatic exposure and posttraumatic symptoms for train drivers involved in railway incidents"
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.
The vehicle you're probably thinking of is a golf cart.
A Golf Car is a popular model of motor vehicle from Vauxhall.
The system no longer runs in ATO (automatic train operation) because of ongoing issues around maintaining contact with the mainframe when it snowed.
Line 14 was conceived as driver less. In 2012 line 1[1] was converted to fully automated. Others, to the best of my knowledge, are planned.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_1_du_m%C3%A9tro_de_Paris (In French)
That's not to say that entirely driverless services can't be done. There are a bunch of metro services globally that are grade-4 fully-autonomous and totally unattended, and some of them have been in operation for over 30 years. But like all large-scale systems, there are lots of complicating factors, system-specific conditions, and various tradeoffs to be made – a lazy Daily Mail "damn unions" argument isn't really fair.
IIRC there is something like a 6 year waiting list to become a tube driver because they do a 36 hour week for £55k a year (up to £100+k for some) with over 40 days paid holiday, and can retire on a full pension at 50 years old (1)
It seems like a ludicrously cushy job and I 100% put it down to those "damn unions" essentially blackmailing TFL by always threatening to strike at the busiest times. I don't blame them,but I don't think that the "damn unions" argument is unjustified when it comes to Tube drivers and there near-constant threats to go on strike for the most rediculous things that any reasonable person would agree were legitimate reasons (such as when a driver was sacked for repeatedly failing drink-driving tests (2), or another for a driver who repeatedly drove through red signals (3)). These are potential disaster near-misses, yet the tube driver's unions use them as more leverage to threaten a strike and squeak out a bit more pay and a bit more holiday. And when they are not doing that, they're frankly taking the piss and threatening to strike over not being able to make a cup of tea (4)
1 - https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/tube-driver-salary-holida...
2 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transp...
3 - https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/13/tube-workers-striking-protest...
4 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1337609/Unions-threa...
An ok-ish middle class salary. Not outrageous in its own right and i suspect if you compared it to the lifestyle of train drivers 50 years ago it might allow them to live the same sort of lifestyle?
It's no secret that our expectations and the job market have changed dramatically but it is telling that jobs with hard fought inflation adjusted wages have wait lists for those jobs. We're like a frog slowly being boiled and we need posts like the above that cause us to think "Hang on didn't train drivers of yesteryear support a wife and three kids? Could you do that on £55k?".
As tech workers we all likely earn so much that we could live the middle class lifestyle of yesteryear (paying off the mortgage before retirement, supporting a partner and kids, taking regular family vacations, etc.). I mean we like to think we're all super rich but really we're only where we should be. Perhaps we shouldn't be directing hate downwards here? The wealth gap above us has increased, whilst the wealth controlled by the bottom 50% is lower than ever.
The only way the disparity here can be corrected is to accept those below us in salary will fight for more. It's pretty understandable really.
Twice to four times the median salary in the UK (and three to six times the salary of a bus driver who is usually far more skilled), for a low-skilled job that requires neither education nor physical exertion. There is a reason why there are massive waiting lists.
Note that staff appear to have been sent out unwillingly and were not allowed to wear masks.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/12/uk-rail-work...
However, busier services are very much dependent on human operators. Both on-board (2) and platform-side (half a dozen).
The future is now: there are automated rail lines in a numbers of cities around the world. Some are relatively old, too.
The JFK AirTrain is one such example.
Don't try to compare closed tracks to open tracks. A closed track is more like an elevator.
For an open system, you have to be able to respond to arbitrary visual input. For a closed system, there shouldn't be random stuff on the right of way.
At-grade ("Level") crossings should be closed (and thus grade separated). Where that's impractical there are numerous options for ensuring the crossing is not open to railway traffic until it is clear:
In some areas it can be practical to employ a person whose duties include verifying that this crossing is clear and then authorising its use. Because CCTV is cheap now we can fit cameras and lighting and have them do this remotely for a large portion of the network.
Or we can use radar to protect crossings. The barriers drop, and then radar is activated (the small hazard introduced by using radar is mitigated because the crossing is closed, nobody should be in the area being illuminated by the radar anyway), if somehow there is a large object on the crossing even though the barriers are down, this means something went wrong. The outward flow barriers re-open to potentially allow a trapped driver or animal to leave and the system tries again, if this doesn't help the crossing is considered failed and humans go to investigate, they will find your broken down semi-truck.
The freight car should preferably be harmlessly derailed by trap points. If this is impossible (and the layout cannot be rectified) the presence of the freight car should trip sensors, either axle counters or track circuits, and close the section to traffic. Again humans will likely have to come investigate how that occurred when it cannot be explained and won't go away.
At the crossing are boards indicating that this is a railway crossing, two sets of lights for each direction of traffic (two amber, one red in each set) and barriers, typically long motorised boom arms from which a flimsier but more visible structure hangs, plus a tall post with CCTV cameras mounted on it. The CCTV feed goes with all the other signal data to either a "signal box" not so far away, or a larger centre where many signallers work together. A signaller who wishes to move a train through the crossing views the CCTV feed, and initiates a sequence in which the lights show alternating amber ("caution, stop if possible"), then red ("stop"), the barriers close road lanes entering the crossing, then barriers close the road lanes which exit the crossing. The signaller verifies everything is as intended (e.g. no vehicle stranded on the crossing, no idiot pedestrians clambering over the barrier and standing on the railway) and then authorises trains to pass. Once as many trains as necessary have passed, the signaller closes the crossing to trains, and tells the crossing to re-open to road traffic, it raises the barriers and then switches off the red "stop" lights and road users can now use it as normal.
I'd take Amtrak to my hometown, and the engine would blow past the platform at 20+mph and still stop the passenger cars right on the platform. Riding on the train and it seemed like they'd miss it.
I think the weight of a car itself wouldn't change the theoretically possible stopping distance, since the momentum is proportional to the mass, but so is the friction between wheel and track, so mass cancels out.
Purpose-built automated lines often use smaller cars with more powerful motors sometimes concrete tracks. I suppose those help computers in flattening acceleration/deceleration curves and eliminating needs to compensate for weather or passenger counts.
There are GoA 4 systems in use in the world. The difference is that every DLR train has a trained operator onboard whereas in a GoA 4 system the nearest employees are in some distant operations centre, watching only via a CCTV connection. GoA 4 trains are entirely autonomous, if one were one day to somehow break down so badly as to be inoperable a separate team would need to go rescue it and meanwhile other trains would simply stop at a station and allow their passengers to disembark.
Usually there is no operator onboard. But is still GoA 3 because emergency situations are handled by operators from a control room.
Look around, you will see there is a person wearing a uniform who is perhaps helping tourists figure out where they need to change trains, or assisting a woman struggling with shopping and a push chair. These are TfL employees trained to drive the train, even though it's autonomous.
Before the train leaves, even under normal autonomous operation, this person in the uniform activates a "close doors" control and this is the only reason a DLR train will close its doors. When the doors are closed and the way ahead is clear the train will drive itself to the next station, and open the doors, the cycle repeats.
The person wearing the uniform is trained to safely operate a train. Any time they're on first shift they actually sit at the front (usually occupied by excited children) and unlock the onboard controls to literally drive the train for route verification purposes. Autonomous trains aren't looking, and tools or equipment may be left on the track by work gangs (despite a "count it out, count it in" procedure) so the first trip of the day is always done manually.
You can't drive a DLR train from the control room.
The original intent of the Black Mesa & Lake Powell (hauling coal to a power plant) was for it to be fully automated, but I don't know if it ever ran without a human in the cab.
I didn't know about that, but is it a "freight line" or a "freight train"? If it is the former, a dedicated line used only by the automated train, then it isn't all that removed from disneyworld: a single-use train on a dedicated line. And Australia is notoriously flat.
I'm from the west coast, where driving a heavy train through the mountains is serious business, but disasters can happen anywhere. The latest epic disaster in Canada was caused by a train that was unmanned at the time. It was parked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
Maybe the gnarliest scenario I know of out there is: There's a major brush fire on Cajon. Like, 20-foot-high wall of flame. Is it far enough away for you to try to get the train past it? (With maybe 4000 gallons of diesel fuel under each locomotive, and maybe liquefied petroleum gas tank cars in the consist?) Or do you park the train, and hope the fire doesn't come to you? I mean, I guess an AI can make that decision without being influenced by concern for its own survival. But I suspect that most train-driving AIs don't have a really good set of training data for this scenario...
I suspect most human drivers don't either. The AI might not make a particularly good decision, but is there any reason to believe that a human would make a better one?
https://www.railjournal.com/freight/rio-tinto-completes-auto...
"Australia is notoriously flat"
Citation needed.
"Australia is the lowest, FLATTEST, and oldest continental landmass on Earth[4] and it has had a relatively stable geological history. Geological forces such as tectonic uplift of mountain ranges and clashes between tectonic plates occurred mainly in Australia's early prehistory, when it was still a part of Gondwana. Its highest peak is Mount Kosciuszko at 2,228 metres (7,310 ft), which is relatively low in comparison to the highest mountains on other continents."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Australia
Russia is big. Switzerland is small. And Africa has gets less snow than Canada. (Citations needed)
The basic route of this train (Newman to Port Headland) is a gentle slope to the coast. +175 and -700m over a 400km journey. (Google maps) Compare that to a route in western canada: Canmore Albert to Salmon Arm BC, the same distance but +2500m and -3500m.
It still snows in Africa, and if you tried to climb Jebel Toubkal without a jacket I don't think knowing that Canada is snowier would provide you much comfort.
Also, Line 14 on the Paris metro (heavy use) has been automated since the 90s.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42421417
From the wikipedia article on Positive Train Control (PTC):
>In December 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that Amtrak and the major Class I railroads have taken steps to install PTC systems under the law, but commuter rail operators were not on track for the 2015 deadline.[14] As of June 2015, only seven commuter systems (29 percent of those represented by APTA) were expecting to make the deadline. Several factors have delayed implementation, including the need to obtain funding (which was not provided by Congress); the time it has taken to design, test, make interoperable, and manufacture the technology; and the need to obtain radio spectrum along the entire rail network, which involves FCC permission and in some cases negotiating with an existing owner for purchase or lease.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
So needless to say... the technology likely exists today, but implementing anything significant to existing infrastructure in the US is a monumental feat.
The above example is just a safety system, but once you start removing employees you also start running up against labor unions... which is yet another layer holding things back.
However, the nationwide freight network is interconnected by many different companies, in various states of repair, with various states of mechanization. I live near a bunch of grain processors and when they are taking deliveries it is a lot of manual switching and back and forth to get each plant's cars to the right lines.
Could it be automated? Yes, the technology is available, you 'just' have to implement it. Will it be? Probably not anytime soon.
they've had the capability.
They've had autoland for a while. Maybe in this context it means the nearest ILS runway, or nearest externally directed ILS runway. (just not landing in the side of a skyscraper)
Besides, there can be a back-link and information updates for the landing box to manage situations with two or more planes in emergency mode.
If you worry about the signal not being received and the inability of air traffic control to spot the irregularity, then only initiate safety landing when the plane receives an answer-signal. Otherwise, let the plane fly however it wants and let it crash somewhere randomly because most places are better equipped to handle a random plane landing than a regular airport.
Basically a "pilot is incapacitated" button, it will pick the nearest airport and attempt to land there, and will even communicate with ATC. I believe the idea is that if you're a general aviation pilot flying with your family and you keel over, they can press this button to get down safely.
Austin Meyer (of x-plane fame) actually build an ipad app that can be hooked up to the autopilot (he actually did this at some point but never shipped the integrated product probably for certification reasons) to do exactly this. It's called xavion: http://xavion.com/. Basically the app calculates the safest glidepath to the best airport for you and guides you to that. The feature is designed for engine out scenarios where pilots don't have a lot of time for making good decisions. It basically continously updates its plan as you are flying based on glide ratio, altitude, runway length and a few other factors.
The autopilot integration is probably not all that hard to do. It's just tricky from a legal point of view.
AI can definitely talk to ATC, in fact it could disrupt ATC who could send declarative commands to planes to remove chance of miscommunication.
Even my Telsa makes decisions about changing weather conditions (eg. disables automated lane changes in heavy rain & such, AI controls the wipers)
"SkyTrain is the oldest and longest, fully-automated, driverless, rapid-transit system in the world."
They then switched from one track to the other. This involved moving down past the station to this stub of track that just ends in midair, with absolutely nothing except the control system to keep you from going too far and crashing down 15 or 20 feet to the ground below. That was... a bit nerve-wracking. It all worked, and they don't regularly fall off and crash, but... I don't think I'd do that again.
But yes, they're automated, and it works, and works reliably.
Love the part about not getting off the monorail. I'm tempted to try that myself someday!
The failure mode of automated driving is less severe. You're already on a road, gravity holds you down and unless the brakes don't work (although in an electric car or bus, when not accelerating you're braking) the likelihood of accidents is smaller.
Unless they changed it in recent years, I believe it's control systems currently run on OS/2.
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.