MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Mounting evidence that the co-pilot crashed a Germanwings plane
into a French mountain has prompted a global debate about how to better
screen crewmembers for mental illness and how to ensure that no one is
left alone in the cockpit.
But
among many aviation experts, the discussion has taken a different turn.
How many human pilots, some wonder, are really necessary aboard
commercial planes?
One? None?
Advances
in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making
human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit. Already,
government agencies are experimenting with replacing the co-pilot,
perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote
operators.
“The
industry is starting to come out and say we are willing to put our
R&D money into that,” said Parimal Kopardekar, manager of the safe
autonomous system operations project at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
In
2014, airlines carried 838.4 million passengers on more than 8.5
million flights. Commercial aviation is already heavily automated.
Modern aircraft are generally flown by a computer autopilot that tracks
its position using motion sensors and dead reckoning, corrected as
necessary by GPS. Software systems are also used to land commercial
aircraft.
In
a recent survey of airline pilots, those operating Boeing 777s reported
that they spent just seven minutes manually piloting their planes in a
typical flight. Pilots operating Airbus planes spent half that time.
And
commercial planes are becoming smarter all the time. “An Airbus
airliner knows enough not to fly into a mountain,” said David Mindell, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology aeronautics and astronautics
professor. “It has a warning system that tells a pilot. But it doesn’t
take over.”
Such
a system could take over, if permitted. Already, the Pentagon has
deployed automated piloting software in F-16 fighter jets. The Auto
Collision Ground Avoidance System reportedly saved a plane and pilot in
November during a combat mission against Islamic State forces.
The Pentagon has invested heavily in robot aircraft. As of 2013, there were more than 11,000 drones
in the military arsenal. But drones are almost always remotely piloted,
rather than autonomous. Indeed, more than 150 humans are involved in
the average combat mission flown by a drone.
This summer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
the Pentagon research organization, will take the next step in plane
automation with the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System, or
Alias. Sometime this year, the agency will begin flight testing a robot
that can be quickly installed in the right seat of military aircraft to
act as the co-pilot. The portable onboard robot will be able to speak,
listen, manipulate flight controls and read instruments.
The
machine, a bit like R2D2, will have many of the skills of a human
pilot, including the ability to land the plane and to take off. It will
assist the human pilot on routine flights and be able to take over the
flight in emergency situations.
A
number of aerospace companies and universities, in three competing
teams, are working with Darpa to develop the robot. The agency plans for
the robot co-pilot to be “visually aware” in the cockpit and to be able
to control the aircraft by manipulating equipment built for human
hands, such as the pilot’s yoke and pedals, as well as the various
knobs, toggles and buttons.
Ideally,
the robots will rely on voice recognition technologies and speech
synthesis to communicate with human pilots and flight controllers.
“This
is really about how we can foster a new kind of automation structured
around augmenting the human,” said Daniel Patt, a program manager in
Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office.
NASA
is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the
cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote
operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft.
In
this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher
managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible
for the ground controller to “beam” into individual planes when needed
and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became
incapacitated — or worse.
What
the Germanwings crash “has done has elevated the question of should
there or not be ways to externally control commercial aircraft,” said
Mary Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at
Duke University and a former Navy F-18 pilot, who is a researcher on the
Darpa project.
“Could
we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control
the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today’s systems? The
answer is yes.”
NASA
would like to see fewer humans guiding planes on the ground, too. This
month, in a research laboratory here, agency officials ran a simulation
of new software intended to bring more automation to the nation’s air
traffic control system, specifically to help with congestion and spacing
of aircraft.
Last
month at the NASA Ames facility, retired air traffic controllers and
commercial pilots sat at air traffic control terminals and helped
scientists test the system as it simulated air traffic arriving in
Phoenix.
The
software, known as Terminal Sequencing and Spacing, can coordinate the
speed and separation of hundreds of aircraft simultaneously to improve
the flow of planes landing at airports. Ultimately, NASA says, it may be
able to increase the density of air traffic in the nation’s skies by as
much as 20 percent — with fewer human controllers.
Indeed,
the potential savings from the move to more autonomous aircraft and air
traffic control systems is enormous. In 2007, a research report for
NASA estimated that the labor costs related to the co-pilot position
alone in the world’s passenger aircraft amounted to billions of dollars
annually.
Automating
that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane
piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit?
“You
need humans where you have humans,” said Dr. Cummings. “If you have a
bunch of humans on an aircraft, you’re going to need a Captain Kirk on
the plane. I don’t ever see commercial transportation going over to
drones.”
In
written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line
Pilots Association warned, “It is vitally important that the pressure to
capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis
of the aircraft and operations.”
The
association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: “A pilot on
board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an
impending problem and begin to formulate a course of action before even
sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of
trouble.”
Even
at NASA’s recent symposium, experts worried over the deployment of
increasingly autonomous systems. Not all of the scientists and engineers
who attended believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always
be safer planes.
“Technology
can have costs of its own,” said Amy Pritchett, an associate professor
of aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If you
put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can
fail.”
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