"Hey Dad, what did you guys do before we all had self driving cars?"
"Well we just drove them ourselves"
"Wow, and no one died that way?"
"Haha oh no, millions of people died son"

Makes me think of the guy who fell asleep in his Tesla. The car kept on driving safely. No Darwin award this time I guess!

Thats pretty funny, I think they've hit some other drivers too though. Self driving cars are 10 years out at most, planes & construction equipment will soon follow.

@csum17 are planes not already pretty much self driving? As far as I know the pilots are only necessary during landing, takeoff and emergencies.

@Xevion Basically, take off & landing will be automated soon though. It prevents hijackings & things like the GermanWings incident. Usually emergencies are handled by a flight engineer, I would guess that would still be the case. I have seen such rapid progress with embedded computing & depth sensing cameras In the past few years, this Is all but inevitable.

LIDAR has seen some major improvements too. Cheaper cameras/sensors and embedded computing systems like Nvidias TX1 are propelling drones towards conplete autonomous flight incredibly fast. I wouldn't be surprised If they hit the market before autonomous cars, simply due to the extensive regulation motor vehicle tech entails.

@csum17 autonomous drones already exist. Watched a TED talk about it where they demonstrated like 30 drones flying by themselves in a swarm over the audience in a pitch dark room.

Object avoidance Is still rather poor, which Is very important for things like search and rescue, navigating through tight spaces, etc. Adam Bry & Skydio are doing some incredible stuff In that regard though along with GRASP Labs at UPenn. I'm guessing they'll be consumer ready In a year or so, maybe less.

@Xevion Not really. There are planes that are automated, even for take off and landings. But only a minority, really, and it calls for rather expensive equipment at the airport. Also the pilot will need to be there for the foreseeable future, to be able to handle emergencies. As the AF 447 accident shows, computers still have difficulties handling many situations; especially of course when there are problems with the sensors. Good luck handling those situations from the ground...

@obeq Theres tons of automation built into the big Boeing/Airbus planes. My son flies an Airbus 330 and would attest to just that, I also have my pilots license and a Cesna 172 that I love to fly over the Bay. This Is definitely a problem that can be solved, It might require more infrastructure but it's quite possible. Also the AF 447 flight crashed due to pilot error, one of the pilots raised the nose when he was instructed to lower It via the automate stall protocol. I think comparing computers on modern planes to a massive cluster Is very disengenous.

@obeq

They were literally sleeping, and could have probably saved the plane If Bonin wasn't such an idiot.

http://dailymail.co.uk/news/...

What happened with the AF was that the computer disengaged due to contracting data from the sensors. Which sort of is the point. The copilot reacted poorly, sure, but this was after the computers gave up entirely.

The difference between ground traffic and air traffic is that if you encounter an unpredictable situation on the ground you can stop, pause and reassess the situation. If you do that in the air, people tend to become all mushy. And that tends to upset people.

So you need to improvise, and it's still easier to train human pilots to do that than computers. This will probably change, but we are a few years off to say the least.

Please don't call anyone an idiot. He was in a really difficult situation in which neither you nor I can know how we would have reacted. I think it's appropriate to show a bit more respect for the dead.

@obeq You're still comparing a plane with hardware built before 1992 to the amount of computing power available today. Thats not an apt comparison, especially with the rapid & recent proliferation of GPGPU.

There's a multitude of problems to be solved but that doesn't mean they can't be. Sensors being obscured by weather Is pretty much a non-problem, the main glaring issue Is ATC and ground to flight communications.

I've spent thousands of hours In the air, do you have your pilots license? I'd say I could pretty accurately say how I'd respond In an emergency considering I've been forced to land In a small pond, damaging my plane In the process. This happened because I began to stall, just like AF 447. Big difference between a Cesna 172 and and a huge Airbus but he still made a rookie mistake. That man conducted himself like an idiot after his partner napped through the whole flight. Maybe he wasn't an idiot overall, but what he did was certainly idiotic and It cost hundreds of lives

@obeq Planes should NEVER crash due to pilot incompetence. I'm sure you'd feel differently If your mother or child sat on that plane hurtling toward the ground, every bit aware of their impending death. All because one pilot was taking a nap and the other made an idiot mistake, he had been explicitly directed not to ascend to reverse the stall but he continued to do so as a blaring stall alarm sounded.

Read this popular mechanics article, it's pretty evident that he idiocy led to the deaths of over 200 people.

http://popularmechanics.com/flight/...

Well people will still die... For example:
Pedestrian running out on the one way road, not far away to be able to stop in time, sidewalk with people to the right followed by wall, wall on the left. Will the car:
a) brake and drive over the pedestrian in front of the car, killing the pedestrian.
b) brake and turn right and kill one or more pedestrians and the driver.
c) brake and turn left and kill the driver.

I still think security is the main issue here. There are many situations you have to predict and handle appropriately. Of course sensors are still a problem, why else would the AF447 have troubles? We have been making pitot tubes for a bit, and still it froze. What makes you think that was the last time?

But of course ATC I a major issue as well. It's easy to say that we will just replace ATC with something distributed and elegant, but considering that we still use voice commands over analog radio to transfer instructions from ground I'm not holding my breath for a quick solution.

Honestly, I reacted the same way as you when I read the aircraft investigation. To pull down when you stall is among the first thing you learn when flying. But I have never been in a thunderstorm at night in the ITZC, so how can I judge him? A stall is easy to detect in a Cessna, but in an Airbus? I don't know, so I don't judge. Especially not the dead.

Your accident must have been scary though! Would you mind telling me what happened? My worst incident was resolved by turning on the fuel flow and smacking the FI on his head...

@swantzter This question has an easy answer. Do you want consumers to buy your product? If you do, the drivers life comes first In nearly all situations.

@obeq It really isnt, you can position sensor arrays inside the cockpit to increase redundancy and run a de-icer to a LiPo & a moisture sensor. We've had great luck with this approach even In storm tests. There Is a ton of hardware on modern planes In desperate need of an update.

I won't delve Into the specifics behind our ideas for automating nearly 2/3rds of ATC (could write pages on It) but they've proven more fruitful than we first anticipated. Totally automation Is likely a decade or two off though In that regard.

What convinced me he was an idiot or just awful at his job Is that the Blackbox revealed he was aware of the stall and still ascended. It says so right In the logs In that popular mechanics article.

Flock of Seagulls caught me by surprise, I went to maneuver around them and put myself In a stall. Ended up crashing Into the edge of a small pond and skidding off into a wooded overgrown area. Left me with sinuses packed full of leaves and dust, not a fun experience.

And I could read pages about it, this is interesting stuff. ATC is one of my weird obsessions.

I was near stall myself, surprised by birds. As I was starting and only at a few hundred feet things could have ended badly for me as well.