At what point, then, does the human being in the cockpit become completely redundant? Aerospace engineers have a lot of confidence in their abilities, as evidenced by the development of unmanned aircraft for the military. These so-called drones observe enemy territory, fire missiles at targets and will soon be used to bring in supplies. The "Global Hawk," for example, already has the range of a modern civilian short-haul aircraft.
After crossing the Atlantic, the windowless metal bird touched down at the Nordholz military airport near the North Sea town of Cuxhaven in Germany. The pilot was sitting at the joystick, but on a US Air Force base in California. "In 10 years, we will also have unmanned cargo aircraft in civil aviation," says Richard Deakin, a British manager at aircraft component producer Thales.
Engineers envision that aircraft would not be sent up into the air with no pilot at all. Instead, there would always be a person in the cockpit to keep passengers calm, like the conductor on a subway train. But is it really necessary to have two pilots in the cockpit? "Some airlines have already been asking manufacturers whether the one-man cockpit is doable," says Braun of the Cockpit pilots' union.
Based on the current logic of redundancy, one pilot would be as good as none. If he or she became incapacitated, the aircraft would have to be capable of landing entirely on its own. But what if remote control via a satellite becomes sufficiently reliable to safely land a plane in an emergency? Would the engineers feel confident enough to place the passengers in the hands of machines?
But there are also aircraft developers who favor technologies that would allow human beings to utilize their strengths during flight. "We need a reconciliation of man and machine," says DLR man Duda.
At the DLR's Institute of Flight Systems, engineers are developing an active sidestick that will allow both pilots to feel how the respective other pilot or the computer is controlling the plane at any given moment. The approach, dubbed "naturalistic flight deck," is also being investigated at Berlin Technical University's Aerospace Institute.
Advanced Imaging for the Future
At the institute, flight engineer Christian Berth and his team are experimenting with a display that projects the artificial horizon, altitude, position of the runway and the key flight data onto the cockpit window. Another option would be to completely replace the window with monitors and a wraparound projection. Berth wants to superimpose an infrared image of the approaching runway. "This would give the pilots perspective in the fog, enabling them to bring the aircraft down onto the runway using their own senses," says Berth. They would no longer have to stare down at the control panels, where the current landing system design merely provides the pilots with an abstract display of the plane's deviation from the optimal approach path.
A version of this imaging system is already installed in today's fighter jets and military transport aircraft. The airlines could also order the system, known as a head-up display, for civil passenger aircraft. "But many airlines shy away from the high cost," says a German pilot. "But the whole thing would be more intuitive, easier to understand quickly and easier to use automatically."
The current automatic landing approach system, on the other hand, requires more concentration from pilots than manual landing. Although the pilot is simply sitting next to the computer and monitoring it as it does its work, this is actually more taxing than manual flying.
What was once a dream job is losing the glamour of days gone by. Instead of heroes of the air, pilots become controllers of electronic equipment. Ironically, the engineers fail to recognize a pilot's ability to prevent errors from occurring in the first place.
It is rare nowadays for a human pilot to be able to demonstrate his superiority, as was recently the case with Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who executed a masterful water landing of his Airbus A320 on New York's Hudson River.
But once the pilot has lost control of the computer, he becomes as helpless as an ordinary PC user whose computer has just crashed. After the sudden nosedive of the Qantas plane, the mystified pilots called their technical center several times on their satellite phone to ask the maintenance personnel to explain what was happening to their aircraft.
But the calls were as frustrating as a call to a typical computer hotline. The technicians in Sydney were also unable to make sense of the error messages that the plane's computer had radioed to the center. At one point the technicians advised the pilots to simply shut off the third flight computer. But this did not stop the error messages from scrolling down the monitors.
Instead, the pilots were left on their own to battle the confusion of beeps and warning messages that had become so numerous in the cockpit that the flight recorder could not even record them all.
The last warnings did not disappear until the aircraft had landed, at 1:50 p.m., and the power supply had been shut off.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
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