Planes Without Pilots

By JOHN MARKOFF

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.”

無人駕駛客機 你敢搭嗎

紐約時報報導，德翼航空副駕駛盧比斯駕機撞山事件，引起有關如何檢查機師心理狀況和機艙內不能只留一個人的討論，但許多飛航專家討論不同的面向，商業客機需要幾位機師？一位？還是完全不需要？無人駕駛客機是未來趨勢？

感應器科技、電腦運算和人工智慧突飛猛進，美國政府已在實驗用機器人或搖控來取代貨機的副機師，甚至正副機師。

美國太空總署的安全自動系統部門主管柯巴德卡說：「航空業開始願意投入這方面的研發經費。」

目前的民航機已大幅自動化，由電腦自動駕駛飛行，利用行動感應器和航位推算法追蹤飛機位置，必要時用全球定位系統修正。軟體系統也用於商用飛機的降落。

駕駛波音777客機的機師表示，在一次例行飛行中，他們用手動駕駛的時間只有七分鐘。空中巴士客機機師手動駕駛時間只有三分半。

麻省理工學院航太科技教授明戴爾說，客機愈來愈聰明，「空中巴士客機知道不要去撞山，有警報系統告知機師，但不會接手操控飛機。」但若獲得允許，這類防撞系統可以接手。美國國防部已在F-16戰機上裝置自動防撞系統，據說去年十一月在對抗「伊斯蘭國」時救了一架戰機和飛行員。

2013年美國有一萬一千架軍用無人機，不過無人機是搖控，而非自動駕駛。一架無人機的作戰任務，平均需要一百五十多人參與。

美國國防部研發「機組人員座艙自動化系統」，可望在今年測試以機器人取代軍用飛機的副駕駛。機艙內的機器人能說、聽、操控飛行和讀儀表。機器人和人一樣能幹，能起飛和降落，並能在緊急狀況時接手飛行。已有三組航太公司和大學與國防部合作研發機器人「副駕駛」。

美國太空總署則在研究如何由塔台的一名搖控人員同時操作多駕飛機，取代商用飛機的副機師。必要時，這名塔台人員能導航飛行，在機師失能時，讓一架飛機降落。

曾任F-18戰機飛行員的杜克大學人類與自動實驗室主任瑪莉．康明斯說，德翼墜機事件提出疑問：應不應該從外部控制一架商用飛機？「我們能不能有只有一名機師的飛機，並可從地面控制飛機，比現有的系統更安全？答案是肯定的。」

問題是，人們敢坐由機器人駕駛的飛機，或是由幾千里外的塔台控制的飛機？康明斯說：「有人的地方就需要人，如果飛機上有一票人，就需要一位寇克船長，我不認為商用客機會變成無人駕駛飛機。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/science/planes-without-pilots.html

2015-04-08．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡