Elided bits at link:Who's really flying the plane?(CNN) -- The last time you flew, did you wonder what's really going on behind that closed cockpit door? Who's actually flying the plane? Is it a human being, or Capt. Autopilot?
By Thom Patterson, CNN
March 24, 2012 -- Updated 1312 GMT (2112 HKT)
Based on its record, America leads the commercial airline industry in safety. And for most passengers, that information alone provides all the confidence in the world.
But there will always be nervous fliers who need to know: Who are they trusting with their lives, human or machine?
"There are millions of people out there who are under the impression that the airplane is flying itself and the pilots are only there in case something goes wrong," says Patrick Smith, a 22-year veteran commercial pilot who blogs about airline issues.
...
As technology becomes more and more sophisticated -- and trusted -- an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says commercial airliners could one day be piloted by remote control.
"We fly many unmanned air vehicles around the world today, mainly for military or small airplane applications," said R. John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and head of the Division of Humans and Automation, at MIT. "At a technical level, there's no reason why we couldn't do that with a commercial airplane."
Far-fetched? Hansman isn't the only one in the airline community talking about this.
At an aeronautical conference last August, Boeing President and CEO James Albaugh announced that a "pilotless airliner is going to come; it's just a question of when. You'll see it in freighters first, over water probably, landing very close to the shore," according to IEEE Spectrum magazine.
The idea won't be widely accepted until at least a couple of generations from now, said Hansman, who's also a licensed private pilot. But experts are already planning how it might work.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/24/trave ... ?hpt=hp_c2
