The Future of Autonomous Vehicles Needs to be Flight

Would you fly in a self driving plane?

When I read the studies of current autonomous vehicles on the road, the vast majority, I mean in the 90th percentile of accidents occurred because the human was at fault. A large part of being a good driver is behaving in a way other drivers expect. If you’re an overly cautious driver and the person behind you is an overly aggressive driver, chances are, over an infinite distance, that person is going to rear-end you. Basically, self driving cars are too careful and therefore human drivers tend to rear-end them.

We’ve got autonomous cars, we’re working on autonomous trucks. What if we extended that to the rest of transportation; land, sea, and air. What if instead of a car, the vehicle is a plane and instead of a constrictive road, you’ve got the open skies? Would you trust it?

Let’s take a look at planes.

I don’t know much about flying a plane (yet), and I’ll probably get butchered for this but I’m going to give it my best shot.

There are 5 stages to any flight. (Parameters)

1. Taxiing from the gate to the runway

2. Take off

3. Flight

4. Landing

5. Taxiing from runway to the gate

An autonomous plane would need to navigate all of these areas plus all the number of events that could happen in between. (Turbulence, lightening, birds) — These are what we’ll call Variables.

Understandably there are complexities to managing incoming and departing planes, but with today’s computing power, I imagine it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to plug in data like position, distance, altitude, velocity, to obtain a very accurate algorithm to manage flight patterns.

The Variables are where the challenges really lie. There will be numerous arguments for the indispensability of pilots for their roles in dealing with unforeseen challenges. What happens when an engine fails? What happens when there’s a bird strike? Lightning storm? And on and on…

… But can’t we program an autonomous plane with all possible scenarios from a simulator? Ok, let’s assume we can.

So let’s imagine a world where autonomous planes are actually a thing now and I’m going to try and articulate a story of what your journey would be like.

You’re greeted at the gate by a lovely woman from Lufthansa. “The plane is now boarding Section 1,” she says politely.

As you board the plane, you can’t help but notice there aren’t any additional staff, only your fellow passengers.

You take your seat and fasten your seatbelt.

[There are sensors on the plane that detect when all seats have been occupied and seatbelts fastened]

You can hear a faint woosh as the doors close. A few minutes later, the engines begin a low frequency hum as the plane leaves the gate and taxis on to the runway.

The screen in front of your seat turns on, as does everyone else and a safety screening is shown.

The frequency of the engines climb higher and higher as you sink into your chair — the plane without a pilot, is taking off.

See, now when I was thinking about this whole experience, I wondered if everything could be automated and funny enough, I laughed at the irony that we could eliminate the pilots, but not the flight attendants.

I mean, who would serve your meals? Check that your trays and electronics were stowed? Make sure your seat was in the upright position?!

You need someone to keep order. Ok, so we’re keeping the flight attendants.

There is a severe shortage of pilots in the industry — especially at a time when demand is only going to increase. This is a perfect fit for automation.

Theoretically, if one were to automate the process of loading and unloading luggage; fueling the planes… Passenger jets would be able to operate 24/7. We may need new maintenance schedules and better engineered planes to deal with the increased load, but it would be a definite solution to our current challenges.