A worldwide pilot shortage that is predicted to become more acute has led Boeing to begin research on commercial flights that are pilot-free and use artificial intelligence that guides automated controls to make in-flight decisions.
A report in the Seattle Times quoted Mike Sinnett, former chief engineer for the 787 Dreamliner and now vice-president for future innovative technologies, as saying that the basics were already in place.
“There’s going to be a transition from the requirement to have a skilled aviator operate the airplane to having a system that operates the vehicle autonomously, if we can do that with the same level of safety,” Sinnett said. “That’s a really big if.”
He said his team would fly a simulator this year, using an AI system making some of the decisions. Next year the system would be used on a real plane, both being experimental flights with only engineers and pilots on board.
{loadposition sam08}“We are not smart enough to pre-program all those things," Sinnett said, referring to the landing of an Airbus in the Hudson River by a pilot after both engines were put out of commission by geese in 2009.
"The machine has to be capable of making the same set of decisions. If it can’t, we cannot go there.”
Boeing has forecast that the next two decades will see demand for about 40,000 new commercial planes, almost doubling the world's total, and Sinnett raised the question of where experienced pilots for all these new jets would come from.
He said these days a commercial jet would only be certified if it operated deterministically – that is, it reacted the same way to a certain set of inputs. But given that any number of additional things could happen during a flight, an autonomous system had to be capable of responding non-deterministically.
Building a system that was capable of intelligent, non-deterministic behaviour was the toughest challenge, Sinnett said.
“I have no idea how we’ll do that. But we are studying it right now and developing those algorithms," he said.