‘Automatischer Start für Verkehrsflugzeuge kommt bald‘
Ich war lange davon ausgegangen, dass die Piloten sich nur im Cockpit aufhielten, um die Passagiere zu beruhigen, und dass, außer in äußersten Notfällen, die ganze Show automatisiert ablief.
Is it just me that assumed we already had this tech?
byu/LordBrixton inFuturology
3 Comments
Quite the opposite — pilots are in the cockpit to fly the plane. There is a lot of automation that helps to reduce the tedium and boredom especially on long distance flights where they’re just flying an aircraft at a fixed altitude, bearing and speed for several hours.
There are auto land operations available, but they do not interact with traffic control. The pilots still need to program the auto land, and auto land only works at airports with appropriate infrastructure (which is admittedly most of the high traffic airports in the world). Every now and then traffic control will ask the pilots to go around, divert to a different runway, or switch to a different approach pattern. There’s no automation available for these diversions at this time.
Pilots also need to monitor the automated operations because things can and will go wrong. An air speed sensor might get clogged, an engine might have trouble leading to an off-axis thrust scenario that the autopilot can’t fully accommodate. Over time we’d expect to see these edge cases getting fewer and further between, but the automation available today is still a tightly controlled tiny subset of the conditions that an aircraft might be expected to meet in the real world.
No, in fact takeoff is the last bit that has not been fully automated. It is stil a mostly manual process.
No, landing and takeoff are the most complicated parts and takeoff is almost entirely manual. Heck, we’ve just recently gotten to the part where we can park cars automatically semi-reliably and that’s way easier and typically doesn’t involve having to coordinate with a tower. Most automation is for cruising, like keeping the plane at a constant-ish altitude.