Sit Back, Nvidia Tegra Can Land Your Plane

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NuclearShadow

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That is pretty cool but I think I would much rather prefer a human pilot despite this. With how airline workers are known to tend to strike I can only imagine how much push the airline companies will push to try to have it accepted by the FAA (and the other nations versions of such) to have them actually fly without a single human pilot.

If you think I am being overly paranoid. The CEO of Ryanair wants to take not only seat belts out of planes but the seats themselves. The idea is you could herd and fit more people like cattle this way.
What to do in the case of turbulence to avoid injury he gives no suggestions. If a airline company would be willing to put people in that much risk for profits would it not make sense for them to save money by removing the pilot and co-pilot and have a computer that they would not have to pay to do the same job and remove the chance of a worker strike?
 

scannall

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This is a solution looking for a problem. Commercial aircraft have had this ability for quite some time now. It is neat though, in that it is an example of just how far technology has come in a relatively short period of time.
 

ddpruitt

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Bleh.

You take all of the spacecraft built up to and including the space shuttle and they had less computing power than an old Pentium, yet these things managed to land, navigate space, worked reliably for over 30 years.
 
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[citation][nom]ddpruitt[/nom]Bleh.You take all of the spacecraft built up to and including the space shuttle and they had less computing power than an old Pentium, yet these things managed to land, navigate space, worked reliably for over 30 years.[/citation]

I have a shovel that dates from before the Space Age, it still works, go figure!
 

Maxx_Power

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Humans > Machines. We have creativity in problem solving, not just computational power. Should a plane be in trouble, I would MUCH prefer the creativity of humans to find a solution, usually outside the box.

Any one here watches "Mayday" ?
 

sliem

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[citation][nom]Maxx_Power[/nom]Humans > Machines. We have creativity in problem solving, not just computational power. Should a plane be in trouble, I would MUCH prefer the creativity of humans to find a solution, usually outside the box. Any one here watches "Mayday" ?[/citation]

True unless that human doesn't get enough sleep or too much sleep and then thinks the world is ending so why bother land the plane at all.
 

freggo

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Finding an airport and landing on it are two rather different things.

Kind a like in auto racing; catching up to the guy in front of you is one thing, now passing him ican be a different matter.

In 25 years of flying I never had a situation where this would have come in handy; simply because that information is already available today in the cockpit; if you did your flight planning as you should have. :)

 

dark_knight33

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I don't think this is particularly news worthy. UAVs, drones etc have had this capability, likely using ARM variants for a very very long time. This is just doing it on a larger scale. The math required for this is no more impressive than the Motorola CPUs that have been running the fuel injection & ignition advance in GMs since the early 80's.
 

pixelpusher220

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[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]In 25 years of flying I never had a situation where this would have come in handy; simply because that information is already available today in the cockpit; if you did your flight planning as you should have. :)[/citation]

And how many seconds did Sully Sullenberger have to spend to figure out where he could go? This app would have told him was and wasn't possible since it would have already calcuated it.
 

igot1forya

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[citation][nom]pixelpusher220[/nom]And how many seconds did Sully Sullenberger have to spend to figure out where he could go? This app would have told him was and wasn't possible since it would have already calcuated it.[/citation]
Gravity, lift and momentum was already calculating where he would land for him... in this case, he selected the least of the worst places possible as a runway was impossible to return to.
 

SuperVeloce

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yeah, perfectly balanced, 10% lift, impossible without a computer. It was a combination of high tech airplane, good actions by pilots under stress, weather... count one out and you have a disaster.
 
[citation][nom]nuclearshadow[/nom]If a airline company would be willing to put people in that much risk for profits would it not make sense for them to save money by removing the pilot and co-pilot and have a computer that they would not have to pay to do the same job and remove the chance of a worker strike?[/citation]

Jeeze you are the whiner about corporations and CEOs. I highly doubt the FAA would ever approve of that happening, and more importantly and to the point, I highly doubt the general public would approve of that happening. As a private pilot myself, I will never ride in an airplane without humans in control. Now for automated airport train shuttles like Atlanta's airport has for transporting between concourses and baggage/ticketing, that's another thing.

In any event, this tool would never replace the current IFR approach procedures. Flying in the real world is not like flying X Plane or FSX on a PC. But let's not forget there are FAA-approved navigation apps for tablets. Pilots have been using Jeppesen's Mobile FliteDeck on iPads for a couple of years now.
 
Wow lots of strong emotional reactions, maybe from how this was presented.

This will NEVER replace a pilot, in fact nothing will ever replace a pilot. It's just an advanced navigation system, you plug it into the airplane and it's an improved auto-pilot. There will still be a pilot sitting right behind the controls watching everything and able to take control should anything overly "bad" happen.

Once it's part of the airplane it then connects to local ATC towers and can coordinate approaches and correct for any irregularities at a faster rate then a human can.

It's a fact of life, computers have faster processing capabilities with faster reaction times then any human could hope to have. Trained humans tend to have better long term pattern recognition and prediction abilities then computers have.
 

QEFX

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[citation][nom]Maxx_Power[/nom]Humans > Machines. We have creativity in problem solving, not just computational power. Should a plane be in trouble, I would MUCH prefer the creativity of humans to find a solution, usually outside the box. Any one here watches "Mayday" ?[/citation]

I've been to Wal-Mart ... I'll take a machine over these "humans" any day.
 

fractalsphere

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"There are plenty of other scenarios in which such a system could come in handy, especially for those pilots on rely on flying by sight."

I thought a REQUIREMENT of getting a pilots license was flying on instruments only or in low visibility. Now, I can see this as being a backup system for now (the next couple years/decades), but skilled people should be the first line in this situation.
 
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The first commercial aircraft with a fully automated blind landing system was the Hawker Siddeley Trident that made it's maiden flight in 1962. The first actual use of the system on a normal passenger flight was in 1965.
So while it's cool that it's done on a mobile SoC, it's not anything new and if pilots would be made redundant by it then that would have happened over 40 years ago...
 

bit_user

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Planes can already themselves and land themselves. In fact, the FAA mandates that pilots do a minimum (I think 1 out of every 5) completely manual landings, to keep their skills sharp.

I'm sure the avionics in these commercial aircraft are nowhere near as powerful as Tegra. So, what's really new, here? Is it that such a system is being made available at a low cost for use is small aircraft?
 
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