It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull back and get airborne, you're far past the point you are going to be able to stop.
Where's the basic pilotage here?
I'm a US CPL holder and there are numerous basic airmanship systems in place to prevent this. For one, you note your acceleration rate and how far down the runway you are. Then you have V1, V2 speeds where you rotate.
How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. You ignore them and figure out what went wrong when safely in the air.
This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it.
But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc. - because it generally has to be to cause a bad outcome or even get close to it.
Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. It was a near miss that needs to be addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.
>>Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here.
This is the exact wrong way to think about it.
With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it.
With risk management by knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, you can make an ordinary practice of very risky activities very safely.
But when you are rolling the dice and getting away with it, you may get away with it for a long time, long enough to think you are safe, but it WILL bite you, and hard.
"Near misses" are very clear indications that your risk management has a failure mode you didn't account for - and you are now in the zone of rolling the dice. If you do not attend to that, you are about to get bitten.
So, just because no one was hurt or died — this time — does NOT mean you can be relieved.
As I said, I do acknowledge that a near miss still needs to be taken seriously, but the point is that in terms of actual harmful consequences (not "might be could have been" hypothetical ones) from this incident, there was either basically nothing, or absolutely nothing.
It definitely was a failure in the sense of "we need to do failure analysis and make sure we don't get this close again", but it also was a success in the sense of "ultimately, something prevented a catastrophic outcome" (and studying that, and potentially trying to replicate those positive aspects at other airports, is also something that should to happen).
>>"ultimately, something prevented a catastrophic outcome"
The most likely "something" was Pure Dumb Luck, just a random combination of factors that happened to work out favorably. Of course, on the chance that there was some particular factor/event/action that could be replicated and reliably prevent the disaster, then sure, we should have a look.
I'd definitely make a good survey for that, but the focus really needs to be further back in the chain of events to find out what thing(s) failed.
And of course to be in any way relaxed about this because they weren't scraping up parts from 300+ bodies this time is folly.
Crew Resource Management should have kicked in and the Pilot Monitoring should have taken over on rotating the moment the Pilot flying did not steer after V1.
That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.
Yup, and that cultural rot is also a key failure to manage risk.
Just because you are [using knowledge, technology, skill, & planning] to manage risk once does NOT mean that the job is done. It needs to be constantly maintained.
If it is not constantly maintained, you are slipping back into the zone of [rolling the dice and getting away with it]. It will bite you.
What comes to mind is the last video from the very experienced skydiver which was normal until chute-opening-time, then got very chaotic and ended - he'd become so comfortable/complacent that he didn't do his checklist, jumped with only a knapsack instead of his chute. I'm sure he started out checking everything well. But getting casual and complacent killed him.
Flying was one of my most irrational fears until Westjet introduced me to a pilot. He went into a truly massive amount of detail on their systems (both manual and automated) that prevent things like this.
I’m not a pilot (I’m still very scared) and it’s been a long time so forgive me if my language isn’t correct. However, my understanding from that conversation is that this sort of thing is a system failure. Nobody got hurt and there may have been no damage, but they would consider this an overall system failure.
Several people made mistakes here. There was the pilot who made the near fatal entry. And many pilots failed to spot the error. They didn’t perform their pre-flight properly and would have had to forget a checklist.
They apparently didn’t even figure it out when the runway lights changed to signify “you done fucked up.” (Can a pilot weigh in?? Is that an aviation term?) :)
This system failed. It’s pure luck that everyone survived.
It definitely was a failure in the sense of "we need to do failure analysis and make sure we don't get this close again", but it also was a success in the sense of "ultimately, something prevented a catastrophic outcome" (and studying that, and potentially trying to replicate those positive aspects at other airports, is also something that should to happen).
The real problem here is that many overseas governments and airlines don't hire pilots based on competence, but on their coziness with the ruling class.
Events like this are not Boeing's fault and will continue until foreign airlines can get rid of corruption.
I think the OP was focusing on the consequence, not the probability. Since risk is often defined as consequence x probability, I think you are both talking about distinct but related things
I agree, that's covered by the probability part of the risk equation. Even if you got lucky and nothing bad happened, the negligence still increased the risk by increasing the probability that something may have happened.
> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft.
I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me.
If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.
I've been wondering why we haven't really had any advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade - things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted to be able to perform.
Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the bottom and map is hard locked to current heading, when navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with zero visibility of the rest of the route as they still haven't bothered doing a projection and modifying rotation dynamically - they're not even trying.
All your examples are exactly the kinds of things that an intelligent system should be able to respond to, in order to be useful.
Getting that haircut ordered is the _last_ thing we need.
Because it takes a dedicated team reviewing commands all day, every day, and dev team implementing event handlers, coordinating with other product teams. It takes lots of dedication.
I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day. And here is the problem: management will ask: "so if we add handling for 'rotate the map 30 deg', how many people will appreciate it?". The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions". For an MbA trained manager that means there is no reason to do it. And its the same with every other similar discovery.
Running an NLP based tool requires staffing a 10-20 people full time, telling them to keep the quality high and leaving them the fck alone. Thats anathema for most companies that proclaim to be "metric based". Google is a prime example of this behavior.
> The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions".
But you control that to some extent. If more people are aware of the command and believe it will work (I wouldn't) then you'll probably get higher incidence rates. I wouldn't believe it would work because like the person two parent comments above, less than half the novel crap I try works. So I try novel crap less and less frequently compared to things that I know will work.
I just disabled Google assistant and all of its functions, it's beyond useless and probably the most frustrating thing I have ever used on my phone. And I don't mean just the voice controls, but all the "helpful" tips and suggestions are just bad and I can't stand them.
When driving I don't bother to use Siri for anything other than "call <person>" or "text <person>".
The most hilarious example of how bad Siri is for me, is that literally 100% of the time that I'm playing something on Apple TV, if I say "Hey Siri, pause the TV" (or any variation, calling it Apple TV, including the name of the room, etc.) it always replies that there's nothing currently playing. And if I tell Siri on my phone to play on the Apple TV, all it can do is start Apple Music playing a random song on the TV. It can however respond OK to "resume on Apple TV" which restarts whatever I was watching that had been paused.
OK Google is awful for me, it repeats back exactly what I said but rarely interprets it, at all. "Don't know how to help with 'navigate home'", "'send a message'", "'find a supermarket'". Bleurgh. This is via Android Auto. Next minute it's reading me a text and asking if I want to reply by "SMS or WhatsApp".
None of these systems show you enough 'under the hood' to know why it's failing and so react. Clearly, here the voice recognition, tts are working well; some optional visual feedback would be great - like show on screen a list of responses:
- Keyword heard
- OK Google responding
- Voice1 recognised
- Input "navigate home"
- Input sent to maps
- Maps didn't understand
- Reporting failure
I guess Google know all this, at the time of the query, but as they don't know what I'm trying to do (though 'navigate home' is pretty clear, perhaps I was actually saying 'buy a gnome') ... doesn't seem like there's a proper feedback loop to help direct/correct the system?
"OK Google, navigate home" has never failed to work for me for a couple of years now. Maybe you had opened the app to a profile that doesn't have your home address configured? Maybe you had been logged out?
The sole thing I use it for is setting alarms/timers, or starting the process of a calendar appointment. Those are the two use-cases I've found useful.
Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.
Last time I tried, I couldn't even figure out how to exit navigation using voice. I'm sure it's possible, even easy, but the combination of not knowing the right incantation, car noise, language issues (does it expect German or English commands?) and overall stress meant I just ended up muting the sound system, which is a physical button.
Would you like to see a map of the nearby roads with no lables on it? I fyou zoom in to the point where a road is half the width of the screen I'll deign to add a label on one of the little side roads you don't care about.
Never will I ever tell you what the arterial route you're currently on is called though. Sucker.
It's not just Google Maps though. Also Apple Maps, Music, Podcasts... I find it so frustrating to use voice commands on my phone in the car that I mostly just don't even try. I set things up before I head off as much as I can and mostly stop somewhere before I make changes.
I've just gone from a 2004 Corolla to a 2020 Serrato. It's a low end car but it has lane assist, braking detection when a car slows in front, cruise, speed limiter, etc. Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car and make mistakes.
All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.
Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever activated. But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.
Driver training should be updated to include what to do when self-driving modes are used (ie what do you actually do to supervise the vehicle, which checks to do, etc).
I don't really see how the needed monitoring would be more interesting than fully driving the car, maybe with a few convenience and safety assistances. Planes can use autopilots because there are not litteraly surounded by traffics 2m away. If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.
> If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.
This is the crux of the intractable problem of AI/self-driving marketing vaporware, and why until this nonsense is shut down, the situation will probably have to get scandalously worse before it gets better (better meaning regulating fake "self driving" off the road as a public safety travesty).
> But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less.
And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work (phone calls, laptop, w/e) or sleep, and pay to be driven everywhere than to drive yourself. FSD lowers that income threshold tremendously and could be a significant boon to overall human productivity. If it ever happens.
>is the ability to do something more productive with my time
Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly. Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely offloading the responsibility to the car and doing whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if it was public transit.
But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.
Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.
But aside from all of this theorizing, the actual product is NOWHERE near high 9's reliable. As it gets better, attention will drop but errors will still be pervasive. And with this as backdrop, the fact the marketing has ever even hinted at being general-AI type FSD (the name itself for example) is a scandal. The videos of people riding in the backseat, or any other instance of not monitoring the car fully because they think it can drive itself. I predict there's going to a be an endless stream of accidents from these cars then FSD will be shut down until fully proven, which won't be technically possible for a long long time if ever in our lifetimes.
> But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.
Agreed. If I got a Telsa tomorrow I wouldn't do so with "FSD".
> Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.
I'm not sure what effectiveness you're measuring. There will always be fatal accidents with heavy vehicles moving at high speeds. It's more of a regulatory issue where the accident rate of auto-pilot systems is sufficiently lower than human drivers (because I believe it is already lower in many situations, just not sufficiently lower or ubiquitously lower) and we decide its good enough to no longer require monitoring by the driver.
Edit: I guess its even more complicated than that. Using hypothetical numbers, if the accident-free rate of a human is 99%, and auto pilot is better at 99.9%, but combined (auto-pilot with human monitoring and rare intervention) is 99.999%, can we justify allowing no monitoring in that situation? Can we expect people to follow the law or will it turn in to more of a speed-limit type grey area.
Not all errors or accidents are created equal. As someone else mentioned in this thread the nature of human error is qualitatively different than the nature of seemingly random errors we see with self-driving. Code bugs can produce any scale of error. Humans do no in any given situation have open-ended likelihood of making any errors.
Search youtube videos of Teslas if you haven't seen them yet. The cars will randomly swerve into parked cars, inexplicably steer out of turns, aim directly at medians on the highway. Human errors on average do not equate to this if we want to compare human error "rates" to machine. What is the rate of a random catastrophic error? Machines are way way too high for the foreseeable future, and because of the nature of software bugs they arguably always be higher than humans. The scope of what AI has to be to achieve "general" driving on open-map roads with near infinite variables nearly equates to "general" AI itself.
You can't allow "halfway" monitoring the car. It's all or nothing. It's always monitored or it's not monitored because errors can happen at any time. But anyways, humans aren't robots. Their attention basically not focused if it's not focused completely... multi-tasking is false, and humans already fall asleep fairly easily driving manually. If they have to sit there "focused" but not driving this will lead to even more instances of sleeping or just not monitoring generally.
The numbers are a thought experiment what I mean by effectiveness or mistake or error is just the driver (man or machine) doing something they shouldn't have. Messing up. Humans have very low rates of these mistakes/bad actions/errors. They have very very low rates of catastrophic mistakes. I predict Tesla's won't be 99.anything for a long time. But think of how error-free they have to be to account for the huge domain of roads, signs, weather, terrains, other cars such that when they make their mistakes it doesn't result in disaster... or just "accidents" galore.
What is a Serrato? I've not heard of this kind of car. If it's a typo or something, apologies, I don't know what it could be. I'm not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious what it is?
> Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car and make mistakes.
This along with the fact that in my 2020 Toyota Corolla those features can more than likely get you into an accident is the reason I have them turned off. I don't actually feel safe with them on after experiencing their performance. Also notice a stutter in acceleration due to fuel injection timing and response from the gas pedal that concerns me.
This is exactly why the mass delusion propagated by Elon that Tesla's have full self driving is terrifying, and why "self driving" in general is a sinister lie that endangers the public.
After working in the industry, I can safely say self-driving is a massively profitable lie. It can work in limited instances, but I don't think we'll have full self driving aka level 5 in urban environments until infrastructure changes. You simply need 5G/V2X for that. Just relying on cameras will not work. On that page, I have my concerns about EVs in general, who knows what the long-term health effects are for sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by that electro-smog.
> On that page, I have my concerns about EVs in general, who knows what the long-term health effects are for sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by that electro-smog.
Say what? Is this some kind of industry joke that I'm not getting?
All I'm saying is there's a possibility of discovering the power electronics affecting us in an adverse way. Similarly how we thought lead, asbesthos, radium were harmless at first.
> I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.
I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or government concern needs to become great enough to enforce it through regulation.
I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits, people like
me don't want to give up convenient packaging etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and businesses at the same time by banning it too fast. Similar story for the climate crisis.
We already know that microplastics are dangerous (BPA, leeching of random compounds, plankton overpopulation, animals with stuffed stomachs), there's no need to wait 50 years more.
Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.
I don’t think you’ve followed completely the phases that need to be gone through: the fact that microplastics are still being produced is the most straightforward demonstration that can be had on the fact that companies are still to be forced by the general public to stop producing them
I’d be less worried about long term effects and more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very flammable. It’s bad enough that airlines ban lithium of quantities no more than a single smartphone from entering the cargo bay of a passenger airliner.
And then you have an entire car’s worth just strapped to the bottom of your chassis.
Metal fires (class D) are much harder to fight than petroleum fires (class B). They can burn way hotter, reignite after seemingly going out, and of course react to water to produce hydrogen.
Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.
Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.
I'm also very pro EV. Working in self-driving and hybrids/EVs driving around in prototype vehicles I often found the on-board GPS jammed. I just found it unnerving to drive around in a vehicle emitting such strong EMF even on-board devices go haywire. That made me think.
As the sibling post said, lithium fires are a completely different class and beast than a petroleum fire.
Material science improvements won’t overcome the fundamental fact that the third atomic element on the periodic table just really wants to light things on fire.
This line of reasoning makes littke sense. The fact that certain things were incorrectly labeled as harmless should definitely inform how we go about determining id something is harmful. But the leap that we should expect harmless-seeming things to be harmful is unhelpful.
It's not far removed from flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.
If it’s good enough for us (two small cameras and two microphones all mounted right next to each other) why is it inherently infeasible for a computer?
Those cameras are backed by processing that's so far ahead of anything silicon can do it's not even funny. It's not inherently infeasible, but it seems computers will need a huge leap in certain capabilities before they will be able to act as a drop-in replacement for human drivers.
I find that argument being thrown around once in a while, but let me ask you this. Why are we spending billions of dollars in research that we can vaguely hope to reach human perception levels in one distant day. This whole thing is just not worth it. That's why I said especially for dense urban traffic driving, we need extra sensing, and need from the environment so it can help the car. Imagine if the car knew there is nothing coming from a junction we don't need to stop all the way etc.
I don’t object to providing extra data to self driving cars, I’m just a teeny bit confused (as I think many people outside of ML are) about why certain problems are much harder than others for AI.
I think there is more senses being used in driving then just eyes and ears. I am not the best driver in the world, but I use a lot of senses while driving, abnormal vibrations that are felt cause me to be more alert. Constant awareness of hills and road conditions are felt.
Saying it's just cameras and microphones vastly over simplifies what driving involves for a human.
It's interesting that you talk about using more senses while driving. I always crack the window to listen to the road noise as it helps me guage what the other cars are doing and has helped several times in avoiding collisions with other drivers that weren't paying attention since I could hear the change in noise within the standard noise of the road.
who knows what the long-term health effects are for sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by that electro-smog.
A fellow named Planck knew, when he used the expression E=hv to describe the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. You just missed class that day, I imagine. Fortunately it's never too late to learn.
The premise behind self driving cars that can handle most situations themselves relies on the assumption that a human operator is paying attention and can take over in situations the computer can't handle. I'm not a pilot, but it's likely that assumption can hold while flying at cruising altitude, but not so much when driving in various inconsistent road and traffic conditions.
Think of how silly this is though. You offload driving to a car, then...demand passenger give absolute attention every second that car operates itself. For one, this is a pointless tool if you have to monitor it all the time. For another, it is impossible that humans will be able to focus their attentions fully when they aren't really doing anything to drive the car. The better self-driving gets (say, safe and effective 99.999% or any incremental level higher), the less the human monitor will actually be watching. Thus the more likely any error will be catastrophic.
My own experience is that I tend to snooze as a car passenger on a long trip while I do not when I am the one driving. No need for speculation, I know I would be incapable of taking over on a short notice if the car does something bad.
It doesn’t follow that errors will be catestrophic. It could be the car just fails to handle edge case situations and just stops… granted on a highway that’s bad but everywhere else, that’s a hassle to traffic at worst. Also highway full self driving is much closer to being a solved problem.
Even the failures you see in the beta of Tesla FSD, aren’t catestrophic. The worst I’ve seen is a curb strikes in terms of actual “accidents”
What you are describing is level 4. And if tesla were anywhere near that that would be freaking brilliant.
Tesla FSD has many deaths and countless serious accidents under it's belt. Which doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but as expected a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does and the kind of mistakes that tesla does doesn't inspire confidence (but rather nightmare fuel that you just can't wake up from).
They should be banned until they have level 4 and take responsibility for their cars actions. Blaming it on a human driver and calling it a day is ludicrous.
> a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does
I think this is particularly problematic because with other humans, we can at least develop a sense of what types of mistakes they tend to make and try to adjust our driving accordingly. Things like not driving in another person's blind-spot, etc. but also more subtle stuff. I feel like there a sort of hive-mind that develops amongst drivers and probably makes things safer than they would otherwise be.
I just looked up a random video of someone testing FSD 10.8 and in the first few minutes, it failed to signal before changing lanes and it almost caused an accident. All the while the driver is saying how good it is and how comfortable he is.. The car drives not smoothly at all and does random braking when around pedestrians.
The car also features a yoke instead of a wheel. Which makes holding the yoke while autopilot is driving almost impossible.
This is because drivers are giving 100% attention to monitoring the car in these scenarios. So again, this means the tool is useless (right now it is), or if the driver stops paying attention and becomes an unfocused passenger (the actual point of self-driving) then the tool becomes absurdly deadly.
Everywhere along this spectrum, as attention declines, catastrophic risk goes up. Self driving is vapor ware at best, a scandal at worst. It's not going to end well.
You just keep adding nonsense to the discussion. Is self driving going to be limited to 50km/h? No it's not, so what are you talking about?
Is crashing your car at 50km/h not potentially deadly or dangerous? Of course it is. So, what are you talking about?
When planes typically fly in the air, how many other planes are nearby? 0
When cars drive on the road, how many other cars or pedestrians are nearby? Often many
Just because planes get completely obliterated at the speeds they travel doesn't mean cars going much slower in accidents come out unscathed. This is like elementary school stuff here.
Apologises for triggering you here. I’m not meaning to troll, or add nonsense.
I agree that there is a lot more going on with cars, as traffic and road conditions vary more than air traffic and sky conditions.
But my response is the failures aren’t that bad in the car world. Autopilot (ie lane keep and cruise control) have been probably safer than human drivers. Navigate on autopilot is very stable, but limited to highway… that’s why I referred to the lower speed, because high speed is closer to solved. The hard part of full self driving, is city streets, which is typically lower speeds. The failure mode of FSD is typically for it to just stop… I have never seen a single failure where it full speeds into another object. This did seem to happen sometimes in autopilot in the past, but not FSD
Agree that isn’t good. And definitely looked like it would collide. I guess if you agree to sign up to train the NN you need to accept the fact it’s going to do this stuff.
As an aside, it seems strange to me that the high beams switch Off as they approach the oncoming car. Seems the driver disabled them… auto disabled would have meant they detected the car, which then seems unlikely they’d move into it’s path. But very hard to judge off camera alone… they might not even be on FSD. Shrug.
I almost crashed into a tesla on the highway when I changed lane right behind a Tesla. The Tesla was going much faster than me, and when I changed to its lane a bit too close, it started breaking for no reason, forcing me to jump on the brakes as well. I do not believe it was the driver, but the automatic brake assist that did not like me coming in too close…
Problematic and completely unexpected. No one speeding past you is going to brake check you for moving into their lane, so this kind of behavior from a computer is inevitably going to lead to accidents.
You can’t know what is in front of the other car or why the Tesla braked. It could have been passing a slower car or truck (likely given the situation as described). If that car swerved a bit into the Tesla’s lane, braking could have been the right choice.
The car behind is always responsible for maintaining distance.
Realistically, if the tesla felt squeezed by a car it was passing, going a bit onto the shoulder would have been what I would have expected from a human driver. But no auto steering, tesla or otherwise, is going to do that.
> of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from behind is at fault
I don't know where you live, but where I live (Denmark) brake-checking is a serious traffic offense which can lead to loss of license. While the driver behind has to keep distance, you cannot brake for non-traffic reasons. I.e. you cannot simply brake-check someone on the freeway because you think the driver behind you is driving too close (also a serious offense).
I think that is not really related. Following a “guidance system” that’s using gps (and altitude in the planes case) is very different from having a neural net interpret the surroundings visually and make decisions based on that.
I don’t know where/why you are attributing sinister motives here… it seems a very understandable motive to make transport better.
I would hope I would not drive into a lake or any other obvious hazard, but I have driven the wrong way onto a one-way portion of a street when I was following Google Maps.
My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was very still standing water in one of the canals with leaves on top.
It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.
We used to have a big pond in the frontyard. One day it was completely covered in duckweed (kroos in dutch) and one of my friends just walked straight into it, not aware of the water underneath.
that's just very bad design keeping water at same level with street, I was under impression channels in Netherlands are always below ground level for many obvious reasons
It wasn't designed that way. In other locations in the city, street level is at least 150 cm above the water. But because of natural subsidence, ground water extraction, construction and peat oxidation, some parts of city's peat soil have subsided in the last few decades to only 25 cm above the water.
Sometimes the water decides to do that on its own.
I've ridden through Chiang Mai after a heavy rain when the streets were all a foot deep, so you'd get a nice foot wash riding along and despair for your flip flops when stopped.
And if you strayed too far from the car in front or cut a corner, you'd find the 4 foot deep drainage ditches and 12 foot deep canals along the sides of the main roads.
> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.
There is a well known video among commercial pilots called "Children of the Magenta Line".
The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer.
The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.
And this video is exactly what happened here from my limited understanding. Due the the desired altitude being set at zero, the magenta line the pilot flying was aiming for was... well, set to 0ft.
I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.
> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft.
Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track 90° from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was look outside.
> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the top levels.
People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or because of fame rather than because they like it.
People that have some other favourable attributes to flying Emirates.
Lack of CRM on the cockpit.
But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't disagree with this.
I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was focused on managing the computers rather than actually flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.
> The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.
What does that have to do with anything?
The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 550 people.
If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the smallest aircraft in their fleet.
And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.
I thought based on how pilots were paid, longer routes were more desirable? And shorter routes would be in lower demand, since airlines don't typically pay for time spent on the ground?
Even the least promoted pilot shouldn't be this incompetent in an airline like Emirates. I could perhaps understand it from some small airline in developing country where the pilots got their licences through bribery.
You shouldn't be flying a Cessna 152 if you can't follow a checklist. Although I would wait until the investigation is finished...it's hard to know what goes on in the cockpit until all the data is gathered and analysed.
Well, I wouldn't doubt one of the best airlines on the planet. However, the article claims that they hire pilots with lower flying hours as they cannot find experienced pilots like American or United does. I fail to understand this. Can't they just hire experienced pilots from other airlines instead of hiring the inexperienced ones ?
They can't, because their working conditions are terrible compared to those other airlines. Nobody with thousands of hours of jet time would ever switch from a US or EU legacy carrier to someone like Emirates.
This is pretty sad. Emirates, for all their glory doesn't pay their pilots well. I mean, what's the point in spending on stuff like fancy first class seats and all that without paying pilots well. True irony. Fanciest and the most comfortable airline for the passengers, the exact opposite for the pilots.
It's not just pay, it's also very demanding schedules (which is a safety concern, many incidents happen due to crew fatigue) and zero labor protection in UAE laws. I know a few ex-Emirates pilots that got fired during the pandemic, they were treated like trash almost literally thrown out of the country.
I've been a frequent flyer of Emirates for the past ~ six years. From my perspective, the airline suddenly changed about three years ago. The quality of their service dropped and still every time that I take an EK flight, I notice something else is missing from the service. Flying Emirates does not have any glory anymore.
They still have some of the brand association of luxury, but indeed it's a very normal airline just like all the others. With similar service, legroom and food. But with no direct flights, which is less comfortable.
It’s more a question of Emirates being a relative newcomer with no strong unionization, and therefore not having to align with the absurdly high salaries the legacy carriers are saddled with. Compared with other new airlines (EasyJet, Ryanair etc) Emirates pay quite well
Comes down to a few things. First, money. Second, location. Third, skill.
The Middle East doesn't have nearly the pool of pilots to start with compared to North America, and even NA is suffering from an extreme shortage of pilots. (Wonder why the airlines no longer fly to your small town? Probably because of a shortage of pilots)
Is there actually a pilot shortage, or is there a pay shortage? Most of the people I know who wanted to be pilots bounced off of the extremely low salary for a very long time. Unless someone does military and gets a lot of hours, and even then not always, they are stuck paying for their own license then making a bit above minimum wage flying between cleveland to nashville or something like that. If the airlines paid more money I think the shortage would probably disappear quickly.
Pilots for large airlines are paid very well (100k-200k+). The training is expensive and time-consuming, but not that expensive or that time-consuming, if we compare to e.g. medicine or science.
There is a low-paid and debt-heavy portion of the career. However, Medical students aren't paid and even the lowest-paid pilot is making more than the average phd candidate.
The fact that medical students have it hard doesn't justify it being bad for the pilots.
Also it's probably easier to get student loans for medicine than it is for piloting.
Maybe the regional carriers should pay more and have better conditions but funny how they describe it as a "pilot shortage". It's just supply and demand.
new commercial pilots who are flying small airplanes for large airlines in the usa (eg “united express” pilots) barely crack 50k usd salary. and this is after big pay rises the last year.
Some of both: An early-career pay shortage leads to an actual shortage of experienced pilots to fly big jets.
You can, of course, easily solve the problem by raising wages for regional jet pilots, but it takes a few years for the excess pilots to propagate to the major carriers.
The error we're talking about here is something that shouldn't happen even to a rookie straight out of flight school. Hell, even a kid flying flight simulator knows that something is wrong if you're still on the ground at 200kts on a 777.
The takeoff isn't directly automated, but there's a system called the "flight director" [1] that provides indicators on the pilot flying's display that correspond with a configured trajectory. In this case, it sounds like the flight director was badly misconfigured and the pilots not only omitted to reconfigure it, but followed the erroneous indication far past any point at which it was remotely reasonable (or remotely safe!) to do so.
I mean, you say that as if it were a joke, and yet I can't fathom any other explanation for this kind of event but that the pilot flying assumed the automation "knows where it's going". Unfortunately, without Rainn Wilson as the PNF...
Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure the configured flight path is not going unreasonably close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and altitude or does the flight director incorporate waypoints and topology?
It's not controlling anything, just providing steering cues for the pilots along whatever route it's set up for. Setting it up for the flight's intended route is a checklist item, which appears not to have been performed on this flight. Also on the checklist is identifying the correct airspeed for current conditions, called "Vr," at which to "rotate" and bring the aircraft off the ground during the takeoff roll.
Actually doing that is a memory item, intended to be prompted by a "Vr" call from the pilot not flying. As far as I know it's not yet clear whether the PNF gave that call, but the PF certainly waited to rotate until well after reaching Vr. This is where the "sanity checking" appears to have failed, with the PF heeding the misconfigured flight director when it disagreed with other instruments and the situation visible out the cockpit windshield.
It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're currently accelerating to a target speed and climbing to a target altitude, it won't command you to pitch up so much that you stop accelerating.
The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.
The autopilot wouldn't have been in use for the takeoff roll, though, would it? The question of automation smarts seems like a bugaboo in what I understand to be a highly manual flight regime.
Correct, autopilot isn't engaged until at least several hundred feet AGL; varying by airline. Some airlines don't engage autopilot until reaching transition altitude or even cruise altitude. Still, the flight director is giving you the same information, and most pilots will just follow that because it's the most accurate way of getting you to where you need to go... if you've set it up correctly.
They are, but there's a system that almost shouts "VEE ONE!" and "VEE TWO!" over a loudspeaker in the cockpit, at least if the flight director is configured properly.
I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in the tires to blow.
At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn well like it or not, with the only exception being (I believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway.
Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.)
Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?" and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are completely boned if you lose both engines.
The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere even remotely close to the end of the runway.
Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the captain should have taken control a second or two after the first officer failed to rotate at V2.
My guess is that the captain was flying and the first officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell, and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that. Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of his buddies.
Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.
V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway.
V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous.
Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated).
The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case).
Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.
There are more Pakistani citizens living in the UAE than there are UAE citizens. So if Pakistan has a problem with fake pilot licenses, then so does the UAE.
This logic makes no sense. First of all, the citizenship of Emirates pilots would not mirror the citizenship of the UAE itself. Most Pakistan citizens coming to the UAE are not coming to work for Emirates. Secondly, Emirates is able to do their own due diligance on pilot licenses, and since the problems with Pakistan licenses are well known throughout the industry, they would receive extra scrutiny.
The problems that occurred here are neither unique to Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and complacency are global issues.
Where's the basic pilotage here?
I'm a US CPL holder and there are numerous basic airmanship systems in place to prevent this. For one, you note your acceleration rate and how far down the runway you are. Then you have V1, V2 speeds where you rotate.
How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.
Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. You don't fly the flight director command bars when they are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots. You ignore them and figure out what went wrong when safely in the air.