Great News for Commuter Airliners!

[MIflyer]

They can now get rid of the pilots and replace them with beautiful stewardesses! Example seen below.

From AOPA:

"Another tech startup has emerged from "stealth" mode with plans to automate aviation. Merlin Labs, founded in 2018, announced in late May that it has logged "hundreds of autonomous missions on multiple aircraft types, including complex twin turboprop aircraft"—specifically, Beechcraft King Airs."

"Many of the details remain under wraps. The press release announcing that Merlin Labs exists, and has been logging twin turboprop hours flown by an aircraft-agnostic system made to replace all humans on the flight deck, omits a few important details, such as how these aircraft avoid midair collisions. A story posted online the same day by The Verge suggested that the system relies heavily on radar and ADS-B surveillance."

"'The reason that that autonomy up in the air is so much easier is that you have complete vision, at least in the United States, of everything that's up in the sky, with ground based radar,' Merlin Labs founder Matt George told the technology publication. That overstates the coverage and capability of both radar and ADS-B airspace surveillance, which are each unavailable, due to terrain and absence of ground-based infrastructure, in many locations across the country."

"TechCrunch noted in its coverage of the announcement that Merlin's system also has natural language processing capability, allowing air traffic controllers to "talk" to these robotic King Airs as they would if a human were aboard. George told TechCrunch that the system will be able to respond in kind, with a 'high degree of cognition.'"


OOPS! I just found out that is not a girl in the picture but a man in a girlsuit. Well, that way the pilots can stay employed.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Yeah, but can they teach this AI the pilot's drawl?

 

[MIflyer]

You mean the one that goes, "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true...."

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'uh, folks, it might get a little choppy' . . . Who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, 'They had to pipe in daylight.' In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the [Pilot] Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

 

[SaparotRob]

Great book.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Great book.

Wolfe was a fantastic writer.

 

[MIflyer]

When The Right Stuff movie came out I was launching 1958 vintage Atlas space boosters at Vandenberg AFB. Needless to say, we all loved that movie.

 

[Gnomey]

I don't about anyone else but I still would like at least one pilot there…

 

[MIflyer]

I don't about anyone else but I still would like at least one pilot there…

Perhaps substantial fare discounts for licensed pilots, regardless of rating?

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't about anyone else but I still would like at least one pilot there

I remember the first time a pilot announced that we'd be landing by computer, on approach to LAX in 1991 in a 767. I won't lie, I got a little nervous; I'd already experienced BSODs on home computers.

 

[nuuumannn]

I don't about anyone else but I still would like at least one pilot there…

Yeah, it's a long way off totally autonomous air travel yet; too many concerns about computers not understanding threats. Human beings will always try and do anything to survive a precarious situation, whereas computers wont always react in the best interests of the self-loading cargo if things don't go the way they should.

These days so many functions are automated in airliners anyway, in the ATR and Q400 the pilot has a dial, which he dials in Take Off, Climb and Cruise at the appropriate time (after the power and condition levers are set appropriately) and the computers do the rest, managing the fuel flow, the governors managing prop pitch, even managing climb and descent angle from the AoA vanes. The crew just monitor everything in flight although finals, especially below decision height is nominally flown hands-on.

 

[MIflyer]

The crew just monitor everything in flight although finals,

Except when they decide that they are stalling and thus need to PULL UP, to cite more than one mishap.

 

[nuuumannn]

Except when they decide that they are stalling and thus need to PULL UP, to cite more than one mishap.

Obviously. Its the only time they earn their keep. Having worked line maintenance for several years, I've seen more than a few cock-ups by air and ground crew. Most of our pilots are young thrusters that want bigger and better things and are wet behind the ears, but their training sets in when stuff goes wrong, as it should, thankfully. Panic sets in afterwards. Had an incident recently when I was marshalling a Dash in, the nosewheel steering failed mid turn. When I went onboard to talk to the pilot he looked like he'd seen a ghost.

 

[MIflyer]

Some years ago I had an on-line discussion with some woman who said that you HAD to pull back if you got close to the ground. I pointed out that if you were stall/spin you HAD to push forward, no matter how close the ground was. Even absolute worst case, it is the difference between hitting the ground straight ahead, in a controlled condition, rather that hitting the ground sideways as merely a passenger.

We had a tragic mishap several years back. A young lady from Scotland had got her private license and was working on her instrument and commercial ratings when she took her brother up in a Cessna 150. She stalled and spun it at a fairly low altitude in a wilderness area and both were killed. Probably it was the old , "Hey, look at that pretty lake down there! Are those alligators on the shore?" No more rookie mistake has ever been made, but it keeps being made. Go look at Dan Gryder's stuff on Youtube some time.