I get that the biggest airports have grown organically, but I’m surprised a city building a new terminal or airport (Berlin anyone?) can’t order a standard proven design like they’re building a McDonald’s or Holiday Inn.
Airports are standardized to the degree they can be standardized. There are entire sections of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Design Handbook devoted to airport terminals and other large transportation spaces. But these spaces have to be designed to fit the place that they are constructed in.
If the city was competent about the project, they would have actually hired people who knew what they were doing. While new terminals and airports are not as standard as Holiday Inn, there are plenty of constraints in most cities [1], that do not allow a lot of room for radical change, and design usually come out not widely different.
I don't think it's just that take off is easier, but that it's also more dangerous than landing. If something happens during take-off and the computer needs help, it needs the pilot to step in quickly so you don't have time to do a computer -> person hand-off.
I don't think it would affect this proposal (no passengers on board, and package-only airports can be located far away from things to hit) but worth noting.
The same happens at landing, but the airplane is moving faster.
Over simplifying, there are a lot of situations during take-off and landing where stopping isn't an option. During landing, the extra speed helps you take-off and try again (go around) with minimal risk. A computer can pretty easily handle "something's weird, TOGO and have the pilot take over." Take-off doesn't have that safety margin.
It exists:
"Airbus demonstrates first fully automatic vision-based take-off"
https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2020/01/ai...
This is not the most common way to detect a fire in an aircraft (unless GA). The most common way is "FIRE" being indicated in the annunciator panel.
> Pilots have to learn the schematics of electrical wiring behind the dashboards.
No they are definitely do not. They will only know the wiring if they are also mechanics.
They need to know which fuses control what, but that's a much higher level.
> They are expected to do problem-solving in case of malfunction
Also no. The first thing to be done is triggering the memory items. Those are memorized. Zero thought here. Pilots have to (and generally will) fall back to what they have been instructed to do.
Next there's the checklists. They will execute the checklists line item by line item. No thinking happens here either, nor it is supposed to.
If all those fail... usually you'll read the resolution in some NTSB report.
> The first time asymetric thrust was used to pilot a plane (ailerons and elevators didn’t work), it was done without being in the books
Not sure if that was the first time, maybe first time in an _airliner_. Also in that particular incident, they had an experience commander, first officer and an instructor for that specific model of aircraft working together (the instructor was handling the thrust levers).
That was also a very extraordinary incident.
> flight crew performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations
> I wonder how this can work with computers
During the Columbia incident, the computers didn't know the wing was melting. But they detected a deviation from the flight path, which they tried to correct with control surfaces. When that failed, they added RCS thrusters too. The 'wing melting condition' wasn't programmed, but still they managed to use all available resources.
For more on how we could allow craft to 'intelligently' respond to failures, take a look at the Remote Agent, from NASA's DS-1 mission.
Also, the take-off being easier, it's not conceivable that a machine couldn't do it. The reason there is no such machine today is exactly because it's easier, so pilots never need any help.
Instead, the hard part isn't flying. it's all the things an airplane does while landed. It's taxing, interacting with other planes, interacting with other vehicles (there are a lot of them in an airport), parking, etc. If the airport is entirely built for automation, I imagine that will become much easier.