Pilotless planes and driverless cars

My column in The Times:

The Civil Aviation Authority is concerned that
pilots are becoming too reliant on automation and are increasingly
out of practice in what to do when the autopilot cannot cope. We
now know that a fatal Air France crash in the Atlantic in 2009 was
caused by confused co-pilots reacting wrongly when the autopilot
disengaged during turbulence. They put the nose of the plane up
instead of down.

But there is another way to see that incident: the pilot was
asleep at the time, having spent his time in Rio sightseeing with
his girlfriend instead of sleeping. When roused as the plane
stalled, he woke slowly and reacted too groggily to correct the
co-pilots’ mistakes. Human frailty crashed the plane, not mistakes
of automation.

Human error, or sabotage, also seems most likely (though we
cannot yet be sure) to have disabled and diverted the Malaysian
Airlines jet that vanished over the Indian Ocean in March. Human
action certainly caused 9/11. For every occasion on which a Chesley
Sullenberger brilliantly and heroically landed a plane on the
Hudson River after a flock of geese went into the engines, there
have been many more where people caused catastrophe. Human error is
the largest cause of crashes in the sky, as it is on the
ground.

That is, I suggest, why we will embrace the inevitability of
pilotless aeroplanes at some point in the not so distant future.
Already, automated systems are better at landing planes than
pilots, even on to aircraft carriers: they react quicker. Drones
are crashing less often when allowed to land themselves rather than
be guided in by ground-based pilots. Even Hudson River heroism
could possibly be automated. I confess I am probably an outlier
here and that most people will be horrified by the prospect of
boarding pilotless planes for a while yet. But I think they will
come round.

Driverless ground transport will help to assuage our fears. I
took a driverless train between terminals at Heathrow last week,
and Transport for London has begun tendering for driverless Tube
trains, to predictable fury from the unions. Prototype driverless
cars are proving better and safer than anybody expected. It cannot
be long before they seem preferable to an occasionally distracted,
risk-taking, radio-playing or grandee-teasing taxi driver.

Google’s prototype self-driving cars have now covered more than
700,000 miles on public roads with only one accident — which
happened when a human took the controls. They may be commercially
available after 2017. Testing of self-driving cars will begin on
British roads next month.

Getting out of a driverless car, after a restful journey working
and reading, then telling it to park and come back when you need
it, would bring the luxury of the chauffeured plutocrat within
reach of ordinary people. Driverless lorries on the motorways could
be confined to night-time operation, leaving the roads clear for
cars in the day.

In the air, small drones are now commonplace and not just in the
military. The “Matternet” is a plan to use them to supply the needs
of remote areas with few roads in poor countries, leapfrogging poor
infrastructure as mobile phones leapfrogged the lack of landlines.
Once drones can refuel each other in the air, they should quickly
take over (for instance) searches of the ocean when planes or boats
are lost — so as to put fewer lives at risk.

The next step would be that cargo planes would fly without human
beings aboard. The sticking point will be air-traffic control’s
reluctance to sanction such planes landing at airports in built-up
areas. At the moment, drones and piloted aircraft are kept apart in
separate zones. If you live under a flight path it is comforting to
know that the planes overhead are piloted by people with every
incentive to land safely: with “skin in the game”. The existence of
a “ground pilot” who can take control of a plane from the ground,
as drone operators can do now, would be of little comfort to such
people, let alone topassengers on a plane.

But pilots’ wages and training costs are one of the highest
contributors to the cost of flying, after fuel, and if pilotless
planes can fly safely for years without passengers, objections to
them carrying passengers will gradually fade. An ordinary aircraft
is now regularly flying between Lancashire and Scotland
with nobody at the controls(though there is a crew
on board to take over if necessary). The offspring of a
seven-company consortium called ASTRAEA, it uses radar, radio and
visual sensors to detect and avoid hazards.

Are we approaching the era when it will be more reassuring to
know that there is not a human being in the cockpit than to know
that there is? We might find it comforting to know that the cockpit
was wholly inaccessible to terrorists and that the machine within
it had not spent the night drinking.

It is true, as the CAA has spotted, that we currently have an
uncertain mixture of people and machines flying planes, with a
danger that the former are getting out of practice and confused.
But since accident rates are low and falling, there is no evidence
that this partial automation has been a problem, or that going
further towards full automation would not help.

Perhaps robotic surgery holds a lesson. Justin Cobb, a
distinguished professor of orthopaedic surgery at Imperial College
London, tells me that his engineers build into his experimental
robots — which carve out, via keyholes, slots in your knee or hip
bones of just the right size and shape to fit the necessary
implants — what is little more than an illusion of control by the
surgeon. The surgeon is allowed to move the tool about, but only
within a certain boundary. Beyond that, the robot’s software
prevents the tool straying.

So an automated aeroplane might allow the pilot to play with the
joystick and the switches, but only within limits. Thus can the
pilot retain what is left of his dignity and the passenger indulge
what is left of his irrational fear of submitting his life to a
machine. Imagine a future hijacker or suicidal pilot finding the
controls of the plane refusing to obey orders. Like Hal in the
film 2001, but in a good way: “No, Dave, I can’t let
you crash this plane.”

So in practice, despite the cost, we will keep pilots around in
the cabin even if there is not much for them to do, and surgeons in
the operating theatre, farmers in the cabs of tractors, teachers in
the classroom, lawyers in the courts, and columnists on
newspapers.