It's kind of funny though. Programming an autopilot for an airplane isn't even a very complicated thing to do. I'm pretty sure that I could make a pretty good one all by myself if I had a few months.

Making one that can be guaranteed to not cause any deaths though? Not touching that with a ten foot pole!

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I think passengers feel better about risking their life traveling on a plane if there's a pilot with the will to live risking their life, too.

Could they implement an autopilot that can take over in that scenario and keep the plane running until the pilots come back

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Too risky, because you have the entire plane's functionality hinging on a single point of failure: the network connection.

Talking from an engineering perspective, planes rely on sensory input to determine their state, say their flight path, and what actions to take to ensure they are on course. In the case where sensors pick up false readings, we have an intuitive source of information (i.e. the pilot) to correct the plane making mistakes based on bad input.

Say what you will about drones and driverless vehicles, but the catastrophic impact a out-of-control plane would have is too high no matter how small the risk is. All tech is fallible - we just test as much as we can until we think it can handle all of what we know it is supposed to do.

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In some countries, airlines and regulators are proposing the idea of single-pilot operation, at least in a normal cruise phase of flight. Even that is a regulatory hassle many aren't comfortable with

ITs not new. Remotely piloted aircraft aren't a new concept, its just way improved recently with technology and affordability. Taking the pilot out of any craft has long been discussed. Commercial Airlines would LOVE to have pilots not have to be physically in the airplane, it would make ops much much more effective and cheaper-- until something goes wrong, and it will.

Almost certainly not for liability reasons if nothing else.

This makes me wonder if remotely piloted passenger aircraft is something that is currently in the works.

Trains can be automated because they mostly operate in one dimensional space with minimal interruptions.

Automobiles operate in two dimensional space with lots of interruptions, but the fail state is to stop at the end of a two dimensional trajectory. We still haven’t fully sorted this one, so cars are limited to automation in conditions that are reasonably well defined.

Airplanes operate in three dimensional space with no marked paths and all sorts of unforeseen choices, from shifting winds and weather to fixed obstructions to wildlife and other airborne objects.

And yet despite that, much of what a modern passenger jet does is automated — autopilot navigates while at cruising altitude, and ATC manages landings.

But then there’s takeoffs and the many many things that can happen in an unexpected way in three dimensional space.

A lot can go wrong with a plane, pilots are kind of like in flight tech support these days. Even though autopilot is a thing, planes still require a lot of manual input to make the autopilot function as well.

Some of them land themselves, but only in nice conditions. The new and fancy ones land themselves in mediocre or poor conditions.

Wanna bet your life on Tesla Autopilot: Sky Edition?

Edit: oh, and the drones and things you listed still have pilots. They're just not in the vehicle. Auto-landing tech in aircraft is very rare.

If your driverless train fails, it slowly comes to a stop on the tracks and everyone gets out. If your pilotless plane fails, you've got 200+ people dead.

"Need" is the wrong word.

We WANT humans in the loop. In fact many commercial and military aircraft are flown almost entirely by computers, they can even take off and land without humans -- however we want a pilot in the loop in case anything goes wrong and for the events we can't predict or aren't yet able to create a good and safe enough computer for.

My favorite part of this is that the Brits get so mad at us for using our Americanism of “soccer,” but in reality we’re using old-timey British slang.

Very interesting. Thanks

It's "always" been "soccer" in English-speaking world outside of Britain—and for many people within Britain, too. The British stopped using the term relatively recently, possibly because it became perceived as an Americanism.

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The term "football" was applied to a countless number of medieval ball games played on foot (hence foot + ball). As with other professional sports, these games had very localized or ad hoc rules that were not codified until the 19th century. Notably, in the UK, the Football Association was founded in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871, which became the two major types of football played in England.

According to the OED, "soccer" as a colloquial name for association football and "rugger" as a nickname for rugby are attested first from 1885 and 1889 respectively:

>1885 Oldhallian Dec. 171 This was pre-eminently the most important ‘Socker’ game played in Oxford this term.
>
>1889 Boy's Own Paper 6 Apr. 431/3 In Varsity patois Rugby is yclept ‘Rugger’, while Association has for its synonym ‘Socker’.

As the latter citation suggests, these were primarily nicknames used among the upper classes.

By the 1880s, however, a game called "football" had already evolved elsewhere in the English-speaking world, so when these new games were imported from England, they were known by different names. "Rugby" is distinct enough, but perhaps "association" was too ambiguous, and "soccer" became the name of the game in Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, and the U.S. Some people in New Zealand refer to rugby league as "football" as well.

Two University of Michigan professors, Silke-Maria Weineck and Stefan Szymanski. wrote a whole book on the terminology fight in 2018, It's Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa). They point out that the term "soccer" was commonly used in the British press until about 1980—around the time that the game was becoming newly popular in the U.S. Essentially, the term "soccer," invented at Oxford, became coded as an Americanism, and then no self-respecting Brit would want to use it.

If you look at the Google NGram of "soccer" in the British and American corpora over the last 50 years, the divergence comes later than the book, but it is clear and very sharp—"soccer" was in roughly equal use in UK- and US-published books in 1970, but it is a distinctively American term by 2019.

The term "soccer" is believed to have originated in England in the 19th century as a shortened form of "association football," which was the original name for the sport. In the United States, the term "soccer" has been in use since at least the early 20th century, and it is now the most common term used to refer to the sport in the United States.

I like that the word sucker soccer was seen as posh and high class...

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Never thought of that. Thanks.

Wow, that's super cool, i never knew that !