Well, it's certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!

Yes, like he said, it's tragically easy to quantify the latter. But what about the former, how many accidents are prevented by having a pilot on board? That's not such an easily available statistic but trust me, it's a lot higher. I've prevented my fair share of accidents (just doing my job like any other pilot, it's what we're trained to do) but haven't caused a single one.

There's also a list of flights where the exact same failure occurred, but the pilots handled the situation correctly and landed safely. I don't know what a remote pilot would have done, but it's certainly easier when you are actually on board so you can look outside or at least just feel the motion of the airplane. And as for automation, well, it would have crashed every time.

80% of accidents may be due to pilot error, but probably close to 99% of all would-be crashes due system failures do not turn into an accident because of pilot intervention, and therefore never make it into the accident statistics. Take the pilots out, and you'll see at least an order of magnitude more crashes unless technology improves drastically.

I'm a pilot, I've never had a crash (like the vast majority of pilots), but I've had several situations where automation failed (either completely shutting off or doing something unexpected and dangerous) and a crash would have resulted if we hadn't taken over.

In fact, there are lots of crashes that are attributed to pilot error not because the pilots were the only cause for the accident, but because some system failure occurred that should have been handled safely by a well-trained pilot and somehow wasn't. We are expected to handle these problems, so if we don't, it's our fault (and rightly so).

Take Air France 447 for example, airspeed sensors iced up, autopilot disconnected, other flight crews in the past had had the same problem but handled it well, these pilots got confused and crashed. Probably goes into the statistics as pilot error, but without pilots the plane would have crashed anyway. Every time, including on those flights where the crew did handle the situation correctly (even with inadequate procedures for this particular failure at the time) and landed safely.

Another example, the Turkish Airlines flight that crashed short of the runway in Amsterdam. The plane was flying on autopilot, yet it's "pilot error" because the pilots should have immediately reacted when the autothrottles pulled the throttles back to idle and the airspeed decayed rapidly. Caused by a malfunctioning radio altimeter which let the automation think the plane was low above the runway and it was therefore safe to pull the throttles back for touchdown. There's a reason why we have an initial training and a yearly recurrent training for automatic landings. Haven't had the training? Manual landings only.

So no, automation is not safer than human pilots. Not by a long shot, at least not yet. And given the slow pace of technological advancement in aviation, it will be a very long time before it will be.

Take military drones, for example. Their mission is not exactly complicated: in relatively nice weather, take off, fly a predetermined route, drop some bombs, fly back and land. There aren't nearly as many drones as airliners flying around, yet drones crashes happen all the time, it's not even news.

They really ought to switch to floating point: one float per color component per pixel. That's 24 bits plus 7 bits of exponent (not using the sign bit). Would also get rid of the problem where the average between two colors isn't really the perceptual average. Thanks to the separate exponent, floating point has such a wide range that it could correspond to our actual perception of color, and basic mixing operations would look a lot better.

So you're saying that the Apple... errr... "Watch" is not a timepiece and therefore no confusion is possible?

Or it could just be a story from April 1 2012. This is Slashdot after all.

What about all the cash they get from civil forfeitures? Oh, I forgot, that just pays for vacations, margarita machines, tanning beds, gold plated whistles and things like that. Not for solving crimes.

That's exacty the reason I gave in my explanation, if you read it again. (Just after your cut)

Minimum fuel consumption per mile (ergo total fuel consumption for a trip from A to B) is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and a lower speed in a tailwind.

If an airship can fly at 80 kts (which is very fast indeed for an airship), it will *not* require 100% more power to increase its speed by 5 kts. That's just preposterous. Drag probably increases with the square of the speed just like (roughly) for airplanes. Obviosuly an airship will have more drag at any speed because of its huge frontal area, but the shape of the drag curve will not be drastically different. Certainly not to the point of requiring twice as much power for 5% more speed.

So the comparison with a small plane that has a cruising speed of 80 kts is in fact perfectly valid.

The GGP was talking about making headway against a strong headwind. In a steady headwind, any airplane with an 80 kt cruising speed will see the same effect from that headwind. The fact that the airship happens to be really big does not change the fact that it simply gets the same wind speed vector added to its airspeed.

Gusts would just make the flight more turbulent, but would not change the average speed much.

It was filled with hydrogen, and an exploding shell did not make it explode?

There are legal reasons requiring companies to react to violations of their copyright and trademarks, since they may otherwise legally lose them. However, they could have just reacted with "place a notice on your website that we own all the trademarks and copyrights but gave you explicit permission to keep this excellent remake on your website as long as it's limited to part of the first level."

It's more publicity for their game and may actually lead to more sales from people trying out the web version and then buying the real thing. But alas, lawyers don't think that way.

I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.

Just to clarify a common misconception about wind and "windage": many people seem to think that wind affects airplanes the same way as cars, needing more power to keep moving in a headwind. That is not the case. Airplanes fly in the air, they don't care about the ground. If that air happens to be moving, they move along with it. It's an extra speed vector to be added to airspeed, nothing more. Like walking on a conveyor belt, you don't get more or less tired (per minute) when walking at the same pace, but you do move more quickly or slowly depending on the direction of the belt. Airplanes don't "feel" crosswinds either, they just fly straight through the air, but end up moving sideways relative to the ground because of the addition of the two speed vectors.

The only reason why airplanes often use more power in a headwind, is because the pilot may elect to fly faster to (partially) compensate for the wind. An 80 kt airship in a 40 kt headwind will only have a ground speed of 40 kt, so the pilots may well choose to increase power to get a higher ground speed. The economic optimum speed for total fuel consumption over a given distance is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and at a lower airspeed in a tailwind, simply because the math works out that way: the airship in a 40 kt headwind will get a 10% boost in ground speed (44 i.o. 40) for only a 5% boost in airspeed (84 i.o. 80), which shifts the economic optimum speed upward. But fuel consumption per minute at the same airspeed is the same no matter what the wind is.

So headwinds don't affect the airship any more than it affects a small plane with a cruising speed of 80 kts.

Changing gusts of wind are a different matter, of course. The plane or airship definitely does "feel" those.