PILOT SPIN
Pilot Zone => Pilot Zone => Topic started by: Rush on December 22, 2025, 07:04:13 AM
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I had no idea this existed.
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Amazing stuff. Couple of my clients have the Garmin 500 autopilot and it’s pretty amazing. One guy also has Garmin Autoglide. Not real familarbwith it yet but it basically displays airports within gliding range and I think it may couple to the autopilot and fly the plane to the closest suitable airport. Pilot has to takeover and land it though.
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We're obsolete. :(
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I have a book that analyzes the human factors in crashes and it talks a lot about erosion of skills with, at the time that book was written, simple autopilot that did as much as keep you on an approach and that’s it. But just not having to hand fly the whole cruise and approach resulted in degradation of hand flying skills.
Fast forward to today, and onward, it’s only going to get much worse very fast. The end point is fully automatic flying, like Elon’s self-driving cars, where technically you don’t need a human pilot at all. That's coming. It’s nice as a fallback if you become incapacitated, but as a regular thing, we will simply lose all our skills.
Maybe I’m the old fogey bemoaning the fact that nobody knows how to shoe a horse anymore because we ditched horses for cars, and maybe fully self-flying planes will end up being statistically safer, but I have a visceral distrust of it.
Think of it this way: The Blue Angels (or Thunderbirds); would we love them so much if they were pilotless drones? Surely the technology to fly such jets completely autonomously is not too far away. A close formation with no humans in those seats would hold zero interest for me. Because the whole entire miracle of it is the human skill and teamwork. That’s what’s impressive.
Perfecting skills of brain, nerves and muscles is what we need to feel good about ourselves and admire in others. Offloading that to computer circuits while we sit back passive, I don’t see how that can be good at all, and it’s way more than airplanes, AI is set to take over a whole lot of human activity.
We are going to end up disembodied brains like that old star trek episode, living vicariously by forcing lower species that still have bodies into gladiator games.