Airline Pilots Manually Fly Airplanes For 3.5-7 Minutes Per Flight

The Germanwings suicidal/homicidal depressed and narcissistic pilot is providing the impetus to speed up development of remote and robotic ways to control an airplane. Already pilots spend very little time controlling an airplane manually. Boeing pilots work twice as hard as Airbus pilots. Does that make the Airbus pilots lazy? Or the Boeing pilots overworked? In a recent survey of airline pilots, those operating Boeing 777s reported that they spent just seven minutes manually piloting their planes in a typical flight. Pilots operating Airbus planes spent half that time. NASA is going for remote control by ground operators - which is how UAVs are controlled today. But remote control seems like a transitional technology until computers on the airplane do...

Source: FuturePundit - April 7, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs