There are still safety critical things that the Airbus is unable to do itself. For example talk to ATC, make decisions about changing weather conditions, fly a visual approach, or know that the causes of an electrical problem is coffee spilled on the thrust levers.
Why would there be coffee spilled on the thrust levers of an automated airplane? There is not a robot in there drinking coffee, and presumably they don't just put the thrust levers in the cabin with the coffee drinking passengers. You don't have people in the wheel wells either debugging issues, you rely on the systems to work.
AI can definitely talk to ATC, in fact it could disrupt ATC who could send declarative commands to planes to remove chance of miscommunication.
Even my Telsa makes decisions about changing weather conditions (eg. disables automated lane changes in heavy rain & such, AI controls the wipers)
The coffee is a reference to this incident -- https://ukaviation.news/spilt-coffee-caused-smoke-and-fumes-... -- in which coffee spilt by the pilot caused an electrical fault. Apparently there is quite a lot of high-current equipment in the avionics bay and it is not ingress-protected....
Exactly, there is a limit to the intelligence that people are willing to pay for. For example, no aircraft manufacturer will go as far as to develop a differential thrust system that replicates how UA 232 pilots guided their plane after flight controls are lost. Its just not cost effective.
It's not necessary to reproduce all human abilities in recovering from emergencies because about half of crashes are caused by the human pilots in the first place. Just automating the routine things and letting it crash in exceptional cases could be safer than having a human that can save it in the exceptional cases but also mess up the routine things occasionally.
Although we have no idea how many potential crashes become near misses as a result of human intervention. For example a pilot initiating a go around in response to a runway incursion. I absolutely agree that most of those issues could be avoided with better technology. But that may require changes to all airports, all aircraft and perhaps even all airport vehicles. Suddenly every single approach is category iii, all the time without any alternative.
Is it really any different from a self driving car thats designed to pull over to the side of the road safely if its main functionality fails for an unexpected reason?
Yeah, aircraft can't pull over to the side of the road in a catastrophic failure, and aircraft manufacturers will not pay to have the unique actions that a human faced with death would take built into the aircraft systems.
