For vehicles carrying humans, driverless cars.
We have the technology for both, but I feel like the greater destructive edge cases for flying will keep it from being deployed.
Airplanes, though I suspect they will never be truly without someone to assist in case of emergency.
Cars have to contend with a number of random obstacles and unique challenges. Planes have defined runways and taxiways and, via autopilot and GPS, their flight paths are relatively easily defined and controlled.
The sky over one city is pretty much like any other. Main Street not so much.
less variables on a runway. its a very strictly controlled environment unlike most roads
Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.
From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It’s not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it’s that they have to always behave in a predictable way.
Pilot here.
There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.
Wait what. I have done all the shit of flying a plane, memorized the checklists on the damn Cessna we were using and all that, and because my eyes suck too much I never really pursued it. I never landed a plane myself. Now I wouldn’t have to unless someone spilled a coffee? Fuck this timeline.
Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday.
You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.
Airplanes will never be pilotless, there will always be a human in the loop for redundancy. A failure in a self driving car could kill a few people at most, a failure in a pilotless plane could kill thousands.
a human in the loop for redundancy.
No, but for taking the blame.
I think truck driving is probably the next thing. There’s laws (at least in the US) about how long a driver can run without rest, long haul routes are generally not very crowded with traffic nor complicated. If you can get twice as many hours out of a robot than a human, you can recoup the investment pretty quickly. I could see a hub-and-spoke model where robots handle the long spots with humans taking the busier spokes.
I’m surprised it’s not already in place for rail freight. Pre-defined, well known routes, automatic right-of-way. You’d need some exception detection - spot things on the line or if any part of the train is behaving abnormally, but like cars you can “fail safe” - do an emergency stop if the computer or a remote operator decides that something has gone sufficiently wrong which you can’t do in a plane
It already is for some specific rail freight, iron ore haulage in Western Australia being one example. Rio Tinto has been running them in WA since 2019.
The Sydney Metro is also driverless, albeit a passenger only line rather than freight.
Not exactly easy to stop a train, but yeah.
Granted, that’s also an issue with human conductors, though.
Im going to guess its a proportional cost issue. Drivers take up a much larger percentage of the cost of shipping a ton of cargo by truck that the cost a human engineer on a train.
Driver less cars, because cars in the US have less safety regulation and laws applying to them, so the US is likely to continue trying to make them a working technology. Planes already have alot of automation, but law requires a human pilot with alot of training.
Driverless cars because we already have them. I used to take one to work all the time.
We also have unmanned aircraft. And I’m fairly certain they came before the cars.
Why assume either is inevitable?
Because both already exist?
Then the OP makes no sense. So obviously, not interpreting it that way
Trains are already there, so I’m thinking airplanes next because they also have pretty fixed routes
One accident and nobody is going to board a pilotless plane.
The possible economical win is much bigger on the car side so I think cars, trucks and busses will be first.
It’s not a tech problem but a regulatory, political and eventually a human problem IMO.
Both kinda already exist.
Easier to control for variables with airplanes. It seems like a simpler (still hells difficult, but simpler) problem to solve, so them first I’d guess
I would think airplanes - the accident rate per mile is far lower so there’s much less opportunity for failures, and airplane maintenance and use are much better regulated, making it easier to eliminate the autopilot as the cause if something does go wrong. For a long time after airlines start using full auto they will probably still have pilots in the cockpit for quite a while even if they don’t do anything.
The reason plane accidents are less common is because the worst licensed pilot is more competent than the average licensed driver by a wide margin
Airplanes. You can account for natural phenomenon but you can’t account for the guy who decided to randomly swerve to the left cause they felt like it
