Not sure how conversant you are with the term but this morning we look at how we sink into the quicksand of humankind’s relationship with machines.
We will start in a very old elevator and somehow end up in what pilots call “the flight levels.”
And along the way, we will see some very difficult relational problems as the upright apes meet the rechargeable machines.
After headlines, coffee, and some fascinating charts about our 1929 Replay scenario.
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The first plane to fly across the Atlantic and land entirely on auto pilot was a 747 that flew from the US to France when Jimmy Carter was president. Fully automated airplanes have been a long time coming. In future a pilot will primarily be a safety officer who will only be there in case something breaks down. IMHO even then “switching to manual” will actually mean turning on a back up computer.
Imagine that technology combined with taking over the onboard operations remotely and you have 911!
This may only make sense to military aviators, but I can recall the first time I watched a CATIIIA approach being flown by a C-141 into the military base where I was a controller. It was solid IMC with very low ceilings and RVR that was at or just above minimums. A short time before the approach we’d hit “below all user minimums” a few times. I was monitoring the ILS approach on a PAR scope to see how smoothly the automation could fly the aircraft, and to give the aircraft a go-around if things got out of hand.
Have to admit I was a bit skeptical since there was some shear on final and the RVR and ceiling kept fluctuating between just above to just below minimums. Long story short, I couldn’t have directed a more smooth final approach on PAR and the flight landed perfectly using only the automation on-board. Today CatIIIA (and better) is routine, but in the 1970s it was revolutionary. New technological capabilities and air safety always seem initially to be in conflict (or suspicious) but except for the occasional quirk, it’s been a fairly smooth evolution in the industry.
FWIW, there’s a fictional take on the cracking of an Antarctic ice shelf in Icefire, by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, published in 1999. I thought it was a page-turner, but then again, I’m fond of the writers.