As a pilot myself I can tell you that in EP there are really only a handful of criteria you look for when determining a place to land:

1. Minimize risk of ground personnel 2. Minimize obstructions between air and ground (ie. poles, trees and wires are bad) 3. Maximize straight and flat ground 4. Maximize featureless ground etc...

Given where Newark is, and Sully's flight condition, there was really only one place that would show maximum differentiation in human density and allow for landing: Hudson. The trick is knowing how to land on water with *a passenger jet - something remarkably simple to compute given environmental parameters (CG, load, wind, etc...) and a few simulations.

As was rightly pointed out, the key to success here was calm - something Sully learned starting at the USAF Academy (I'm a fellow grad as well, shout out where you can take it!) and was what let him do computer level calculations so quickly.

Well it did. One of the (probably lifesaving) actions that Sullenberger did was to deploy the RAT which meant electrical power was maintained. This was not a checklist item, merely something he though useful. This meant the computers were still firmly in control when the aircraft ditched and the stall protection they gave certainly helped the ditching.

Interestingly after the accident the NTSB and Airbus made a number of ditching simulations and it showed just how hard it was for pilots to achieve the correct entry mandated by the ditching certification (minimum speed, -1 degree approach). However one pilot, an Airbus test pilot, managed to do much better than this by levelling out at high speed and very low using the radar altimeter. He the allowed the speed to decay until the aircraft touched the 'water'. This unusual proceedure probably couldn't be done by many pilots but it could be done by a computer.

For TransAsia, the point is that a computer wouldn't have needed to land. It still had engine power and could have moved the plane to a stable situation.

The problem is that the TransAsia-type pilots and situations far outnumber the Sullenberger's.

One thing that most people don't realize is that if Capt. Sully had lost one engine, and turned hard into the dead engine to return to LaGuardia, chances are he would have crashed. He made the right call to confirm (dual) engine failure.

Its also well known that a controlled crash landing is better than trying to stretch the glidepath, and loosing control.

I suspect that "automated" airliners will be programmed with crash landing areas for the 0.00001% its actually needed. There was a mishap when a F/A-18D crashed on final, both engines out, and its theorized that if the pilot had flown the pattern higher the jet would crashed away from the houses. A lot of factors lead to the crash, and 4 people in the houses died.

Of course, flying dead-stick instrument approach with low clouds is almost unheard of.

> The problem is that the TransAsia-type pilots and situations far outnumber the Sullenberger's. That is a huge problem. A lot of training programs are very scripted, regimented, and do not encourage pilots to make decisions like intentionally putting a jet into the water.

NASA trained the shuttle crews for unrecoverable situations (that don't result in an emergency landing) so the crew would still keep functioning and hopefully bailout.

I don't see why this is an argument for full automation.

The same way a human does: by assessing all the options, running little simulations to see which is the best one, and then picking that one. When you're over a densely populated area and lose all power, landing on water is kind of a no-brainer actually because all other possibilities lead to certain disaster.

So your powerless computer is going to land the plane?

And just to be clear, if you somehow lose all electrical power on a modern airliner you are completely screwed no matter what or who is flying it, because the controls won't work anymore. The pilot, whatever its nature, immediately becomes a passenger.

http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/compendium/inde...

No. I've watched too many episodes of air crash disasters to support this.

Note that bad engines do not always stop. Often times they are just on fire, or are vibrating, or losing pieces ...

If the computer piloting the plane was designed by the same criteria -- economics -- as the plane was, it'd have pretty much the same crash rate per passenger * mile. It has everything to do with managing costs and acceptable risks, and not some inherent insafety of flight. An airplane can be made just about as reliable and reliable against pilot errors as you want. The technology is there, has been for decades, it's only matter of costs and performance.

The crashed plane was a two-engine model, designed so in case of one engine failure it could still fly safely. However, the margin of safety was small enough that once the wrong engine was throttled back, the plane became uncontrollable before the engine regained enough power. Spinning up engines takes certain, well-known, time. It'd be entirely possible to design and build a plane that would handle such accidental throttling gracefully. All you need is one more engine, or larger wings giving more lift at slow speed and thus allowing it to remain in the air long enough to recover.

The crux is the airlines choose not to go for either option simply to cut costs, accepting lower safety margin.

Now consider fully automatic plane flown by computer -- designing and debugging a robust hardware/software solution is very costly. Especially when it comes to handling tricky, rarely-occuring cases, like unexpected failures. Throw in both cost of handling of multiple versions of planes -- different engines, different avionics, and handling of flightworthiness reduced by wear and tear. Also attach the risk of mismatched configuration, with no experienced pilot inside to spot the problem.

In the end, the amount of money spent on development, and the level of redundancy of software/hardware autopilot would be dicated by cost-cutting and going for what the airline deems acceptable risks.

The computer pilot would be just as (un-)safe as human pilot, for the reasons of economics. Safety is calculated and kept per passenger * mile, not dictated by current technology.

This is pure absurdity. How can you insist that economics of software development equate to the economics of human labor?

Economics drives everything but one of the main points of software development is the economic advantage it brings in terms of skill and cost.

All things considered, software is cheaper to be skilled, and economically speaking, will always outperform equivalent modern-cost human labor at these tasks. Dollar for dollar at scale, at least.

Software isn't perfect but if it wasn't economically superior to human labor none of us would have a job right now.

However, there is absolutely no reason to assume that different approaches will arrive at the same trade offs. Of course a software pilot has cost/benefit trade offs, but they could potentially be more favorable trade offs than you get using a human pilot. The entire point of improving technology is that the balance of trade offs gets more favorable.

Actually it is the passengers that want to cut costs. Us in other words.

This is a training issue more than any definitive "proof".

Good luck finding pilots. And how do those pilots get that 20,000 hours?

Humans are bad at some tasks. This is an example of one of them.

There was a similar issue in November of last year on flight to Barcelona, luckily, the pilots managed to restart the systems just before 150 people would have died.

Sure, but there's the same problem with computer pilots: how do they establish a tremendous track record of safety such that people won't freak out? I don't mean "rationally decide that a computer flying is better than a person" but instead, emotionally accept it's a better idea?

The odds in traditional aviation are pretty good these days; better than driving. But nobody wants to be the first person to be killed by a computer pilot. Acceptance is going to be a tough road.

Like autonomous cars, autonomous airliners have been steadily sneaking up on us for a while, and the first fatalities have already happened. It's a smooth function, not a pure on/off.

We've had tremendously advanced autopilots for a long time, but there have always been people up at the front, supposedly in charge.

It's the difference between getting on a bus with a guy in the drivers seat who has auto-braking so he doesn't accidentally rear-end someone and getting on a bus with no driver at all. People are OK with the first, but less likely to be OK with the second.

I'm not saying it's rationally correct for people to behave this way, but they do behave this way.

For one thing, I think it means the transition will be easier than most people fear. As we get more and more automated, we'll start making entire flights from gate to gate without human intervention. At some point, somebody will say, "It's been three years since the last time a human airline pilot actually did anything, so clearly you're all comfortable with being flown around by a computer, let's take that final step" in a convincing manner.

Personally, I don't want to be the last person killed by a human pilot. :)

Agreed, though, that safety in aviation is generally quite good.