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Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




Solkanar

It's harder to get the marine licenses than to get the aviation ones. It's also harder to keep them, where pilots need hours, mariners need days. I have one and I know people with both types of license. I'm also the last person you want to lecture on regulation being bought with blood. I can talk at length on specific instances of that particular subject.

I'm also not talking about throwing anything out. I'm talking about the processes where nations send representatives to discuss these issues and issue new rules, guidelines, and recommendations under treaties that then filter down into national laws. That process lags technology, often by decades, but it always eventually catches up. Eventually things like full bridge automation or remote operation (when they exist) will be addressed in the same ways unattended engine rooms have been addressed.

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SnowblindFatal
Jan 7, 2011
Note that modern computing is becoming more and more humanlike. It isn't some greasy nerd writing a bunch of if/elses, it's a greasy nerd giving an algorithm a bunch of data (like all flights ever flown in history) and then crunching the optimal solution for every situation. A computer pilot would be better than any human could ever be. See what happened with the boardgame go and how people thought computers are still faaaar away from beating humans. We are becoming obsolete.

SnowblindFatal
Jan 7, 2011
As a dabbling computer scientist, I would be surprised if computers didn't write interesting and high quality books within 30 years.

Freakazoid_
Jul 5, 2013


Buglord

Blockade posted:

There will still be jobs in the future, I haven't seen anyone automate being a blood boy yet.

Consider this a step in that direction:

His Divine Shadow posted:

Looks like automation will soon reduce the amount of nurse jobs by automating this bit, it frees up nurses todo other things, which means less nurses wll be needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7mgmbhcJQ

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


Solkanar512 posted:

You don't get to call it a minor quibble when you haven't come back to the thread an answered what it takes to apply for, earn and maintain a type rating.

Here's an idea, instead of asking people to prove they know all the rules and regulations before any discussion can be had maybe you should just tell everyone what's required and why it wouldn't be possible. If you don't want to do that please just shut up, you can't say "you can't do that because reasons... and I'm not going to tell you because you're a dummy who doesn't already know all the secrets of the industry I don't want to talk about"

Solkanar512 posted:

I'm not trying to argue that it's never ever going to be possible

Seems like you are, nothing you've said seems insurmountable but you're acting like "hand-waiving" is happening when it's just regulatory changes that everyone understands will need to be updated/changed.

Solkanar512 posted:

Look, let me throw you a loving bone here - you mentioned one time pads for secure remote connections and yeah, I'll grant you that. I'll even drop the fact that you need a secure way to distribute those pads to all the scheduled and alternative airports those planes can fly to.

I think he was being sarcastic, explaining with great exaggeration that secure communication is possible in many ways.

Solkanar512 posted:

It's not an issue of "it's just a law that needs to be changed"

It sure seems like your central argument is that laws and regulations make this imposible.

Solkanar512 posted:

, it's an issue that it takes a huge amount of experience to even get to the point of training to fly a single aisle jet (B737/A320), and even more so to get to your larger medium and large twin aisle. There's so much that is needed that pilots generally only hold a current type rating for a single family of planes at a time. You need flight hours on a consistent basis, you need initial and recertificaiton training or those ratings expire. Furthermore, the physics and requirements of flying different sized aircraft change dramatically from plane to plane. That's even before we get into the major differences in how automated systems work in Boeing vs. Airbus planes.

There are plenty of examples of open standards and abstraction that can resolve all the issues you're talking about. Whether or not it's worth the time and money to do it is another matter entirely. Personally, I think it'll continue to be cheap enough and safe enough to have human pilots in the cockpit for quite some time. It's not like there are millions of commercial pilots taking down planes and costing companies billions to make it an obvious area for automation.

Solkanar512 posted:

There's also the fact that frankly, every FAA rule is written in blood. All the things you see as a passenger, the way procedures are made, pilot training is organized is for the most part because not doing it that way was a partial cause in a serious incident. You wear a seatbelt because tons of injuries are caused by being thrown out of your seat, pilot checklists are designed a certain way to ensure that interruptions don't cause important items to be missed and so on. You can't just throw all that out without examining why those rules are there in the first place. The training and certification of pilots is regulated in the same way.

I don't claim to know anything about the airline industry but I have worked heavily in the car industry and there are similar regulations and restrictions relating to safety etc. These rules change all the time and when new technologies arise the biggest barrier is definitely the red tape, but it still happens, because it's worth it even if it costs millions (or even billions) to do it.

Solkanar512 posted:

The ongoing experience is why I made a big deal about OOCC's quip about a pilot sitting around and playing games all day - the best pilots are those that have thousands of hours of flying their current plane and that those hours are recent and ongoing. Those are the pilots that save planes in emergencies. Having someone who's rusty and "certified" on dozens of different types (if that's even possible) is likely to screw up if they've recently only been practicing on an Airbus and need to remotely fly a Boeing or some random Learjet.


The differences in how commercial aircraft are designed go much, much deeper than just how the consoles are laid out. There are completely different philosophies between Airbus and Boeing with regards to how much direct control you can allow the pilot to have and in what circumstances. Not that one has been shown to be better than the other, but like I've said several times, you need to appreciate how much more complicated this is than you're making it out to be.

All problems that can be solved through abstraction and open standards, companies do it all the time and it's all doable.

ElCondemn fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Aug 11, 2017

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

Solkanar512 posted:

You don't get to call it a minor quibble when you haven't come back to the thread an answered what it takes to apply for, earn and maintain a type rating. If you had, it would become self evident as to why it's much more complicated than you make it out to appear. I'm not trying to be a jackass here, I want you to stop handwaving this stuff as it's it's a trivial matter when it's not. I'm not trying to argue that it's never ever going to be possible, but you need to have an appreciation for how loving complicated this stuff actually is, how good the safety record already is and how you're going to transition from one to the other

Look, let me throw you a loving bone here - you mentioned one time pads for secure remote connections and yeah, I'll grant you that. I'll even drop the fact that you need a secure way to distribute those pads to all the scheduled and alternative airports those planes can fly to.


It's not an issue of "it's just a law that needs to be changed", it's an issue that it takes a huge amount of experience to even get to the point of training to fly a single aisle jet (B737/A320), and even more so to get to your larger medium and large twin aisle. There's so much that is needed that pilots generally only hold a current type rating for a single family of planes at a time. You need flight hours on a consistent basis, you need initial and recertificaiton training or those ratings expire. Furthermore, the physics and requirements of flying different sized aircraft change dramatically from plane to plane. That's even before we get into the major differences in how automated systems work in Boeing vs. Airbus planes.

There's also the fact that frankly, every FAA rule is written in blood. All the things you see as a passenger, the way procedures are made, pilot training is organized is for the most part because not doing it that way was a partial cause in a serious incident. You wear a seatbelt because tons of injuries are caused by being thrown out of your seat, pilot checklists are designed a certain way to ensure that interruptions don't cause important items to be missed and so on. You can't just throw all that out without examining why those rules are there in the first place. The training and certification of pilots is regulated in the same way.

The ongoing experience is why I made a big deal about OOCC's quip about a pilot sitting around and playing games all day - the best pilots are those that have thousands of hours of flying their current plane and that those hours are recent and ongoing. Those are the pilots that save planes in emergencies. Having someone who's rusty and "certified" on dozens of different types (if that's even possible) is likely to screw up if they've recently only been practicing on an Airbus and need to remotely fly a Boeing or some random Learjet.


The differences in how commercial aircraft are designed go much, much deeper than just how the consoles are laid out. There are completely different philosophies between Airbus and Boeing with regards to how much direct control you can allow the pilot to have and in what circumstances. Not that one has been shown to be better than the other, but like I've said several times, you need to appreciate how much more complicated this is than you're making it out to be.

Like literally this seems to be an argument that you couldn't literally hired one guy on earth to manage every single plane and that he shouldn't actually literally sit around playing nintendo switch all day. If the boeing guy just simply physically can not be taught to fly an airbus then we will need two people in the command center I guess. Now add that you might have two planes at once crashing so you need double that and then keep working out the number and it probably won't be a round number like 1000 and it probably won't be 1 pilot per each plane that exists and they can use that number but we have no way to perform that calculation sitting here on the internet. It's not incalculable.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

I can't wait to be gunned down by Securobot 2000 because it calculates that my income is less than $5 million per month

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Lightning Lord posted:

I can't wait to be gunned down by Securobot 2000 because it calculates that my income is less than $5 million per month

Half-wit
Aug 31, 2005

Half a wit more than baby Asahel, or half a wit less? You decide.
I just want to point out: Planes are already designed with lightning protection in mind.

Here's a decent basic summary: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-when-lightni/

Malcolm XML
Aug 8, 2009

I always knew it would end like this.
Fwiw I am surprised that even planes with human pilots don't have a on the ground real time monitor and command center. We already have wifi so it can't be that hard to get real time audio and data of the cockpit

I think pilots complained of privacy issues or something

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Malcolm XML posted:

Fwiw I am surprised that even planes with human pilots don't have a on the ground real time monitor and command center. We already have wifi so it can't be that hard to get real time audio and data of the cockpit

I think pilots complained of privacy issues or something

Planes are certainly sending data back to central offices of the airlines via satellite.

GEMorris
Aug 28, 2002

Glory To the Order!
I love how Solkanar512 is regularly owning the lot of you, (especially cream cheese) but you've all bought into the gleaming techno-future so hard that you've forgotten about the basic cognitive human limitations of your "master pilot" backup plan.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


GEMorris posted:

I love how Solkanar512 is regularly owning the lot of you, (especially cream cheese) but you've all bought into the gleaming techno-future so hard that you've forgotten about the basic cognitive human limitations of your "master pilot" backup plan.

Maybe those of us who actually work in tech just have a better understanding of it than you do.

GEMorris
Aug 28, 2002

Glory To the Order!

ElCondemn posted:

Maybe those of us who actually work in tech just have a better understanding of it than you do.

I actually work in tech, and one thing I definitely understand is the level of hubris exhibited by those in purely technical roles within the industry.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


GEMorris posted:

I actually work in tech, and one thing I definitely understand is the level of hubris exhibited by those in purely technical roles within the industry.

I guess we must have very different work experience then, at the level I work at there are a ton of smart people who are really good at designing and implementing systems like the ones we're talking about. Not sure how hubris has anything to do with that. Maybe in your field people are constantly over-promising and under-delivering, but in mine you go out of business pretty quick if you do that consistently.

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

ElCondemn posted:

Maybe those of us who actually work in tech just have a better understanding of it than you do.

Maybe those of us that work in commercial aviation have a better understanding of it than you do.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

Solkanar512 posted:

Maybe those of us that work in commercial aviation have a better understanding of it than you do.

Or a vested interest in automation not happening.

You haven't really given any reason it'd be impossible other than saying remote pilots couldn't be one guy because there is a lot of types of planes and flying is extremely hard for humans to learn.

Doctor Malaver
May 23, 2007

Ce qui s'est passé t'a rendu plus fort
Cars are chess and planes are go. It might look to us that flying an airplane is so much more complicated than driving, but for AI it will be just several more years of development. It's just numbers - yaw is X, pitch is Y, height is Z, engine temperature is W, etc. The whole "But Certification!!" line of argument actually works against you since it reminds us how much education of pilots costs and that it isn't universal.

And even if pilots don't cost so much relative to the cost of the trip compared to what drivers cost, they can go on strikes. That alone is a good incentive for airlines to want to replace them. But first they'll wait for the public to get accustomed to driverless cars.

Note that I'm not welcoming this future, I'm just trying to objectively predict it.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

Doctor Malaver posted:

Cars are chess and planes are go. It might look to us that flying an airplane is so much more complicated than driving, but for AI it will be just several more years of development. It's just numbers - yaw is X, pitch is Y, height is Z, engine temperature is W, etc. The whole "But Certification!!" line of argument actually works against you since it reminds us how much education of pilots costs and that it isn't universal.

They fly space ships to saturn remotely and with computers.

Doctor Malaver
May 23, 2007

Ce qui s'est passé t'a rendu plus fort

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

They fly space ships to saturn remotely and with computers.

Indeed they do but I'm not sure how that addresses my post.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


Solkanar512 posted:

Maybe those of us that work in commercial aviation have a better understanding of it than you do.

I must have missed the explanation for why it's technically not possible, maybe the aviation experts commenting in this thread don't know better.

Rastor
Jun 2, 2001

As humans we all want to think we would be better at driving a car or flying a plane but the fact is an AI can process more inputs simultaneously and respond faster than any human while having 100% perfect alertness at all times and eventually those jobs are all going to be automated

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




We are as good as the models in our brains are.

A computer is as good as the model we give it.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


BrandorKP posted:

We are as good as the models in our brains are.

A computer is as good as the model we give it.

That's not true, there's lots of machine learning methods that could be used to dynamically fly a plane that are way more robust than a manually programmed instruction set. In fact it's a very fast moving highly studied field right now. Recently google created an AI that learned to walk on it's own. There's no reason they couldn't do that for flight, and I'm certain it could surpass normal human pilots. It would be able to react to unforeseen situations much more quickly and could find solutions to problems a human mind may not be able to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn4nRCC9TwQ

Speaking of google and machine learning, they also recently won several times against the world Go champion. They specifically noted that the computer came up with strategies and made moves that human players have never seen before.

The point is that a computer can be designed to be smarter, faster and react more appropriately to unforeseen situations than a human. Maybe if the physics of flight suddenly were to change it would be a problem, but I imagine a normal human pilot would probably have trouble with that too.

ElCondemn fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Aug 13, 2017

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




We still came up with the machine learning strategies.

Edit: for now at least.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


BrandorKP posted:

We still came up with the machine learning strategies.

Edit: for now at least.

What are you implying?

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




ElCondemn posted:

What are you implying?

I remember being a undergrad learning about GE using evolutionary algorithms to design turbine blades. I also remember learning about evolutionary algorithms being used to design whole systems, systems that we didn't know how or why they functioned more efficiently.

Right now this "Recently google created an AI that learned to walk on it's own." is still the case. At some point in the future it might not be. But for now or biases, our assumptions are still in the creation of these things even if we don't have an understanding of what they spit out.

asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Doctor Malaver posted:

Cars are chess and planes are go. It might look to us that flying an airplane is so much more complicated than driving, but for AI it will be just several more years of development. It's just numbers - yaw is X, pitch is Y, height is Z, engine temperature is W, etc. The whole "But Certification!!" line of argument actually works against you since it reminds us how much education of pilots costs and that it isn't universal.

And even if pilots don't cost so much relative to the cost of the trip compared to what drivers cost, they can go on strikes. That alone is a good incentive for airlines to want to replace them. But first they'll wait for the public to get accustomed to driverless cars.

Note that I'm not welcoming this future, I'm just trying to objectively predict it.

Did you get your analogy wrong (chess is easier for AI than GO)? Planes are indeed easier to automate - the challenge automating a plane is the complexity of a plane but they fly in open and heavily regulated space and only touch down in special locations which are loaded with instruments and infrastructure. A plane flying at 30,000 ft has huge margins of error.

Cars are simpler but their environment is far more complex which is a harder problem to solve and at highway speed the margin of error is a fraction of a second between an AI mistake and passenger (or pedestrian) death.


The economics are reversed though so there is more incentive to automate cars than planes where pilots aren't a terribly significant cost. Personally I think we'll see the role of the pilot continue to evolve but it seems unlikely they'll go away even after its relatively clear that we're just as safe (or safer) without them.

SnowblindFatal
Jan 7, 2011
A few months ago I was talking about robotisation with a friend in a bus and some young man came to us to proudly explain how a computer could never replace his job. Which was making sure that the correct items were loaded onto a truck at a warehouse. He didn't believe us when we said that it's already been done.

At this point I assume that anyone who claims his job cannot be automated says that because of denial, or selfish business reasons. Big corporations have a motive to make politicians believe that "there will always be new jobs" to prevent them from installing leftist policies that would hurt the bottom line (even though this will lead to bloody civil wars further down the line).

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


BrandorKP posted:

I remember being a undergrad learning about GE using evolutionary algorithms to design turbine blades. I also remember learning about evolutionary algorithms being used to design whole systems, systems that we didn't know how or why they functioned more efficiently.

Right now this "Recently google created an AI that learned to walk on it's own." is still the case. At some point in the future it might not be. But for now or biases, our assumptions are still in the creation of these things even if we don't have an understanding of what they spit out.

Maybe I didn't get your initial point. What you're essentially saying is because we built the computer it has limitations inherent to us. But you also just admitted that we can make computers that respond in ways we didn't program them to.

Even though computers can produce solutions we didn't think of you have a problem with the "model"? I'm not really sure what you are trying to say, it seems like you think computers are inferior to humans because we created them?

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

ElCondemn posted:

Even though computers can produce solutions we didn't think of you have a problem with the "model"? I'm not really sure what you are trying to say, it seems like you think computers are inferior to humans because we created them?
Man can't create an ensouled being, only God.

Malcolm XML
Aug 8, 2009

I always knew it would end like this.

Solkanar512 posted:

Planes are certainly sending data back to central offices of the airlines via satellite.

Clearly not enough if entire airliners can vanish in the south seas

E: actually yeah real time black boxes still aren't a thing. It's insane that you can get wifi in TATL flights but if the drat plane crashes they have to fish out the recorder

And it turns out the ALPA is in fact against real time cockpit recording.

Malcolm XML fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Aug 13, 2017

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Or a vested interest in automation not happening.

You haven't really given any reason it'd be impossible other than saying remote pilots couldn't be one guy because there is a lot of types of planes and flying is extremely hard for humans to learn.

You proposed the "one guy" solution, so quit moving the goal posts when it becomes clear you said something stupid.

I've given a poo poo ton of reasons why but you're too loving lazy to learn anything about commercial aviation. You're too lazy to understand that the safety of the current aviation system is built upon multiple different layers that all interact with each other. You think it's some trivial matter to completely remove the pilot without any of the understanding or testing or study that would require. You just jerk off to your technology and claim you know more than everyone else while demonstrating the exact opposite.

And yeah, I have a vested interest. When folks like you jump into my industry without a proper respect for the lengths we go to for safety you're going to end up killing people. You guys think it's no big deal when something crashes, since that's an every day occurrence. In my industry, when our products crash it's on the front page of every news paper in the world. What's that bullshit I always hear? "Fail early! Fail often! DISRUPT!!!" The sort of ignorance you display will get people killed. We have an incredibly good safety record and and you aren't just jerking off to technology you'll know that you need to understand aviation before you can improve it.

ElCondemn posted:

I must have missed the explanation for why it's technically not possible, maybe the aviation experts commenting in this thread don't know better.

You're not interested in actually learning about the industry, and the last time you and I discussed my job you expected me to lead a revolution against an employer that has armed guards. Do you still wonder why I have a hard time taking you seriously?

Kerning Chameleon
Apr 8, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Solkanar512 posted:

And yeah, I have a vested interest. When folks like you jump into my industry without a proper respect for the lengths we go to for safety you're going to end up killing people. You guys think it's no big deal when something crashes, since that's an every day occurrence. In my industry, when our products crash it's on the front page of every news paper in the world. What's that bullshit I always hear? "Fail early! Fail often! DISRUPT!!!" The sort of ignorance you display will get people killed. We have an incredibly good safety record and and you aren't just jerking off to technology you'll know that you need to understand aviation before you can improve it.

Sounds to me like the Aviation Industry is due for some ~*~*disruption*~*~. :smug:

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Malcolm XML posted:

Clearly not enough if entire airliners can vanish in the south seas

E: actually yeah real time black boxes still aren't a thing. It's insane that you can get wifi in TATL flights but if the drat plane crashes they have to fish out the recorder

And it turns out the ALPA is in fact against real time cockpit recording.

If you're going to make this complaint, would you at the very least show us all what sort of data you want, how much bandwidth it would take to transmit it, what would be needed to receive and store such data and around how many flights/day there are that would need to have such systems available worldwide?

Then you might understand that there are still some practical limitations to this complaint, especially in cases where someone likely committed an act of sabotage in a single flight out of tens of millions that year. I'm not saying this is impossible, but it's only fair to point out that it's really hard to do everywhere.

ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


Solkanar512 posted:

You proposed the "one guy" solution, so quit moving the goal posts when it becomes clear you said something stupid.

You think his proposed solution actually involved one guy playing Nintendo waiting for planes to crash? Maybe the problem here is that you're just looking for reasons to maintain the status quo, no matter what's proposed if it doesn't answer every problem before it's even considered it's worthless.

Solkanar512 posted:

I've given a poo poo ton of reasons why but you're too loving lazy to learn anything about commercial aviation. You're too lazy to understand that the safety of the current aviation system is built upon multiple different layers that all interact with each other. You think it's some trivial matter to completely remove the pilot without any of the understanding or testing or study that would require. You just jerk off to your technology and claim you know more than everyone else while demonstrating the exact opposite.

And yeah, I have a vested interest. When folks like you jump into my industry without a proper respect for the lengths we go to for safety you're going to end up killing people. You guys think it's no big deal when something crashes, since that's an every day occurrence. In my industry, when our products crash it's on the front page of every news paper in the world. What's that bullshit I always hear? "Fail early! Fail often! DISRUPT!!!" The sort of ignorance you display will get people killed. We have an incredibly good safety record and and you aren't just jerking off to technology you'll know that you need to understand aviation before you can improve it.

Can you link to the article or report that shows us the tech bros infesting your industry and taking down planes because of it?

Solkanar512 posted:

You're not interested in actually learning about the industry, and the last time you and I discussed my job you expected me to lead a revolution against an employer that has armed guards. Do you still wonder why I have a hard time taking you seriously?

I've been reading everything you posted in this thread and I've googled a bit on the subject, I am definitely interested in learning. I never told you to lead a revolution against your armed employer, that's just what you heard. You're just unwilling to consider changes of any kind because it's too hard and will lead to death and destruction so why even try, right?

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

Solkanar512 posted:

You proposed the "one guy" solution, so quit moving the goal posts when it becomes clear you said something stupid.


okay, you got me, it can't be literally one guy that never eats or sleeps or pees.

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

ElCondemn posted:

You think his proposed solution actually involved one guy playing Nintendo waiting for planes to crash? Maybe the problem here is that you're just looking for reasons to maintain the status quo, no matter what's proposed if it doesn't answer every problem before it's even considered it's worthless.

Safety is so tight and so good right now that any sort of change is going to have to meet an incredibly high standard. Otherwise, by changing the system you will end up hurting more people than you save. This isn't low hanging fruit you're reaching for.

quote:

Can you link to the article or report that shows us the tech bros infesting your industry and taking down planes because of it?

I never made this claim, so why are you asking for this? We don't believe in the "fail early, fail often" model in the aviation world. As far as "jumping in", I'm referring to the legions of techbros that act like they know the answer to every problem without having the decency to learn about it first.

quote:

I've been reading everything you posted in this thread and I've googled a bit on the subject, I am definitely interested in learning. I never told you to lead a revolution against your armed employer, that's just what you heard. You're just unwilling to consider changes of any kind because it's too hard and will lead to death and destruction so why even try, right?

I have no problem considering changes, I have a problem with folks like you and OOCC who are completely unwilling to address the difficulties and risks of getting from the status quo to your automated future.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

Solkanar512 posted:

how much bandwidth it would take to transmit it,

http://visualjournalism.com/wp-content/uploads/Flight_Data_Recorder_%28SSFDR%29.pdf

Is a black box flight data recorder. If you turn it up to the maximum recording state it'll write 12 bits of data 256 times a second and record 178 different flight instrument states once each second.

So.... 0.000384 megabytes of data per second of bandwidth? Is needed to transmit flight data? At the level of a flight data recorder.

I guess you can say some of those flight states might be better for flying live if broadcast more than 1 time per second and that in live flight you'd need to return some button presses that would be like 1 bit or a couple bits of data each, so like maybe .0005 megabytes per second total? round it up to .001MB/Sec just to be safe?

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ElCondemn
Aug 7, 2005


Malcolm XML posted:

Clearly not enough if entire airliners can vanish in the south seas

E: actually yeah real time black boxes still aren't a thing. It's insane that you can get wifi in TATL flights but if the drat plane crashes they have to fish out the recorder

And it turns out the ALPA is in fact against real time cockpit recording.

Just so that you understand why these things work the way they do I'll explain a little bit about how the technology works. Wifi technology like all radio technology is limited by a few factors, line of sight, broadcast strength (at both ends) and frequency (which affects penetration but also how it interacts with our ionosphere).

Short wave radio transmissions (in the 100s of megahertz) can transmit pretty far with relatively low power requirements because the signals bounce off the ionosphere, but because of the low frequency and broadcast power available bandwidth is quite low. As you increase power and frequency you can fit more bits into the pipe but it results in shorter distances. There are formulas that explain all of this and actually quite a few encoding strategies that make this more efficient but I wont go into that.

Essentially the problem is that planes don't have line of sight to a ground station so it's not really possible to send high frequency/high bandwidth transmissions reliably, especially with intercontinental flights. There are definitely solutions like Solkanar said, sending your signal to a satellite as a relay, but if you're using normal short/medium-wave transmissions you're limited in bandwidth (though I'm not sure how much bandwidth would be necessary really). There are solutions to that as well, for instance there are a handful of companies working on satellite communication networks using microsats to create a mesh network, that way they can relay/route between any number of nodes and then beam it back to ground stations via microwave. But all of this is pretty pointless to discuss because we have solutions but the problem may not be large enough to warrant the expense of building a microsat network just so that we have close to real time data from planes.

Solkanar512 posted:

Safety is so tight and so good right now that any sort of change is going to have to meet an incredibly high standard. Otherwise, by changing the system you will end up hurting more people than you save. This isn't low hanging fruit you're reaching for.

So what? The Boeing's and Airbus's of the world constantly design and implement new technologies, they haven't been sitting around doing things the same way for ages, the industry is more automated and computerized than ever. I think they understand what needs to be done to approve changes, especially if it would save them money.

Solkanar512 posted:

I never made this claim, so why are you asking for this? We don't believe in the "fail early, fail often" model in the aviation world. As far as "jumping in", I'm referring to the legions of techbros that act like they know the answer to every problem without having the decency to learn about it first.

Well you said "When folks like you jump into my industry without a proper respect for the lengths we go to for safety you're going to end up killing people" as though folks are jumping in and killing people. You're just scaremongering because that isn't how it works, by your own admission.

You also don't understand the "fail early fail often" idea if your complaining that it's going to lead to deaths. The methodology, which isn't what anyone is even proposing in this thread, just has to do with creating minimum viable products. If you're designing a plane with the fail fast model in mind you would iterate a lot, make small changes very rapidly so that you minimize the number of variables during each test. It also ensures you don't put all your eggs in one basket. When you make a big plan and stick to it for months (or even years) on end you might end up going down a path that isn't fruitful. By making small incremental changes and testing them early you can see if you're heading in the right direction a lot quicker.

Solkanar512 posted:

I have no problem considering changes, I have a problem with folks like you and OOCC who are completely unwilling to address the difficulties and risks of getting from the status quo to your automated future.

I've addressed the issues you've brought up, what is it that isn't being addressed that you keep complaining people are hand waiving? We're talking about your issues right now, why do you keep saying we're ignoring them?

ElCondemn fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Aug 13, 2017

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