Can computers replace pilots?
The pilot (and crew) of the US Airways plane that went down in the Hudson River are being hailed as heros. When the investigation is complete they will no doubt be seen as having had a pivotal role in saving all the souls onboard that aircraft.
I've been seeing comments online by people, many of them flight crew, who are using this incident to make the point that computers can never replace pilots on airplanes. Some of them say the trend toward increasing levels of automation is dangerous - we just cannot take human beings out of the equasion, and we just witnessed an example of why not.
Well, never say never. I'd agree that a completely pilotless airliner at this point is inadvisable, but just a simple extrapolation of unmanned aerial vehicle development suggests to me that they are a future possibility.
Most UAV development has been for military applications, an admittedly different scenario than commercial aviation. But that's changing.
In Global Hawks to fly missions for NASA from The Sun, we see that environmental data will soon be collected by a UAV over the Pacific. Also:
...potential non-military uses for Global Hawks include use as aerial communications relays during natural disasters, wildfire observation, border surveillance and monitoring of illegal fishing and whaling activities on the oceans.
Sure, that's not the same thing as taking your family to Disney, but through continued research and applications, I think we'll see the technology develop significantly. Think about it: computers you have at home today do things that would have been considered "impossible" then the first personal computers came out.
So maybe it's 20 years, or 50 or a hundred years, but it's going to happen eventually. Don't you think?
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