Cutting Edge Computing

Will We Have to File a Flight Plan? March 26, 2021

I have been an airplane pilot, although I haven’t commanded an aircraft in years.  Depending on where you were going, you could just hop in the plane and go.  But if you were flying into controlled airspace, you generally had to file a flight plan, which defined your intentions.  Am I flying through, or landing at a controlled airport?  What am I proposing as an altitude and course?  And, of course, things may adapt based on actual conditions through the controlled airspace.

I am currently watching the Scale AI Transform conference online.  A speaker is talking about autonomous vehicles, and about how we (collectively) have spent billions of dollars without yet deploying those vehicles except in very limited tests.

It occurs to me that we may need to file the equivalent of a flight plan in order to get into our car in the future.  I wonder if we might have to specify our destination and route that we intended to travel.  Today air flight plans are mostly manual, but I will not be surprised if we have to spend some time on the computer in the future just to drive to the supermarket.

Autonomous vehicles represent an exceeding complex technical problem.  You need many exacting sensors in the car, real time processing and decision-making in the car, an unambiguous knowledge of road rules, extremely reliable communication between vehicles, and a broker, likely in the cloud, that can manage traffic flow and decisions on a real time basis.  Maybe, possibly, we might also have to have the equivalent of a staffed air traffic control to manage traffic.

In most circumstances, it is much more complex than flying an airplane.  The pilot is still ultimately in control, and can interact with both human controllers and automated systems to make the best decisions.

When I first started traveling to California, I was nonplussed at the red lights on merging onto freeways.  I came to understand that it was about traffic flow, a very primitive method that enabled a slightly better spacing out of cars.  While the advantage of autonomous vehicles has the potential to be significant, the sensing, decision-making, and control of autonomous vehicles extend far beyond this.

So I think it’s going to be a while before we get fully autonomous vehicles.  We have read stories about how people have accidents because they turn their fate over to self-driving systems.  That’s stupid today, and it will likely be a bad choice for years to come.