IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - 38
when will software
have the right stuff?
uNmANNEd plANES domiNAtE
thE bAttlEfiEld, yEt AirliNErS
Still hAvE pilotS-
ANd copilotS by philip E. roSS
T
imE wAS whEN A uNiformEd mAN
38
NA * iEEE SpEctrum * dEcEmbEr 2011
sean mccabe
would close a metal gate, throw a switch, and intone,
"Second floor-men's clothing, linens, power tools..."
and the carload of people would glide upward. Now
each passenger handles the job with a punch of a
button and not a hint of white-knuckled hesitation. The first
automatic elevator was installed by Otis Elevator Co. in 1924;
the things became common in the 1950s.
And back in the day, every train had an "engineer" in the
cab of the locomotive. Then robo-trains took over intra-airport
service, and in the past decade they have appeared on subway
lines in Copenhagen, Detroit, Tokyo, and other cities.
Quietly, automation has taken charge of many other lifeand-death functions. It manages white-hot ribbons of steel that
shoot through rolling mills. It guides lasers that sculpt the eye
and scalpels that excise the prostate gland. It runs oceangoing
freighters, the crews of which have shrunk by an order of magnitude in living memory. And, most obviously, it is mastering
aerial warfare. Today, the U.S. military trains twice as many
ground operators for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as
pilots for its military jets. Its UAVs started off by flying surveillance missions, then took on ground attack; now they are
being readied to move cargo and evacuate wounded soldiers.
In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has
thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot,
whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two?
Many aviation experts think not. "A pilotless airliner is going to
come; it's just a question of when," said James Albaugh, the president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airlines, in a talk he gave
in August at the AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies
Conference, in Portland, Ore. "You'll see it in freighters first,
over water probably, landing very close to the shore."
spectrum.ieee.org
http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2011
IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - 1
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IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - 76
IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum December, 2011 - Cover4
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