Schmidt says "No licensed air carrier (commercial or private) will be able to use it without at least one pilot supervising the whole process in the pilot seat, even though the technology to take off, cruise and land automatically already exists.". This is, in fact, the case with Google's autonomous cars.
Amusing - but a car with 2 passengers going at a conservative 30MPH is very different to a plane flying 9KM over the ground at 567MPH.
I'm just hoping that in 80 years I won't be alive to see my comment becoming horribly wrong, with people laughing at it while a processor flies them across the world.
Amusing - but a car with 2 passengers going at a conservative 30MPH is very different to a plane flying 9KM over the ground at 567MPH.
You're right: building an automatic car is much harder. It's counterintuitive, but speed or altitude are irrelevant if the problem space is sufficiently simple. Additionally, risk doesn't scale linearly. If a plane crashes at 800km/h, all people on board will die; if a car crashes at 130km/h, you'll see a very similar result.
That's true for the occupants of the vehicle but the dangers of those outside are greatly different. I'm not saying that planes will never be flown autonomously however there are a lot of hurdles including convincing the public.
If a car when parking is out by 1% it's maybe sticking out of the space and causes other people to have to park badly too, if a plane rounds incorrectly or a sensor plays up and is 1degree out (so even less than 1%) it lands onto of a terminal filled with tourists.
Even as a professional programmer I tend to trust unknown programmers less and less, bugs get uncovered too late, shortcuts taken... online e-commerce fine, cars and busses - maybe but scaling up the trust and risk involved is difficult.
Planes were capable of being flown autonomously in the 1980s. In particular, the Soviet's space shuttle, Buran, performed unmanned orbital maneuvers and landing during its 1988 test flight.
So, the technology to do these kinds of things has already been done before (though unfortunately neglected!). I think the main challenge is just convincing people that it's safe enough that they will be willing to buy tickets.
I guess the biggest problems will be the legal framework and the power of unions. Technically flying a plane should be easier for a computer than driving a car.
Where a computer fails is when judgment is required. For example, you have an in-air emergency, and are going to have to crash land. What do you pick to crash land on to?
Consider Captain Sully's recent decisions in just such an emergency.
Being a private pilot with a lapsed license, I can't possibly see that emergency landing area selection is a problem worse than navigating a street vehicle in an urban environment. Taking all the GIS databases around, I can't imagine emergency landing site selection would be a huge roadblock.
