好英语网你敢不敢乘坐无人驾驶客机？
Have you ever had a panic attack in mid-flight? Those that have will tell you it’s not fun. And there are plenty of reasons that make people panic. Some of them – irrationally so – fixate on the state of the pilot. Are they tired? Stressed? Paying enough attention?
飞行途中你是否经历过险情？曾经有过类似经历的人会告诉你这并不好玩。有很多原因都会导致险情的发生，尤其是飞行员自身出现的不良状态。飞行员们是否感觉疲倦？是否压力山大？是否保持着足够的注意力？
Would these people feel any better if we could get rid of pilots altogether?
要是彻底取消飞行员，乘客们是否会感觉好些？
无人驾驶所需技术已经成熟——无人机已经在各个领域大行其道。军方在战争中使用与标准飞机相同大小的无人机，这些无人机或是受到远程操控，或是沿固定航线自动巡航。甚至直升机也已实现了无人化，例如采用标准直升机尺寸的 K-MAX 无人直升机就能以难以置信的精确度向危险区域运送补给。
Aeroplane accidents are rare today, but when they happen, they are getting harder and harder to solve, says Tim Robinson, editor-in-chief of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s magazine Aerospace. That’s why investigations often focus on ‘human factors’, identifying psychological and physiological issues as a probable cause.
今天的飞机失事概率很低，但是一旦发生，就会造成极大的损失，英国皇家航空学会下属期刊《航空》杂志主编蒂姆·罗宾逊（Tim Robinson）说。因此，事故调查往往把飞行员心理和生理问题等“人为因素”看作是首要事故诱因。
“So with pilots relying on autopilots for 95% of today's flights, the argument goes, why not make the final 5% – take-off and landing – automated?” says Robinson. “Computers fly ultra-precise, repeatable trajectories, do not fly drunk, do not get tired, do not get distracted and so the thinking goes could be safer than human pilots in the future.”
“当今的飞行员在95%的飞行时间里都开着自动驾驶仪。人们不禁会问，剩余的5%——主要是起飞和降落——为什么不能也实现自动化呢？”罗宾逊说。“计算机能够沿着重复航线高度精确地飞行，不会酒后驾机，不会疲倦，也不会分心。因此可以想象，未来计算机将比人类飞行员更加安全。”
He says that in a debate at the society earlier this year, with pilots, engineers, scientists and airline representatives debating autonomous planes, the motion ‘there will be no need for pilots in 40 years’ was carried by approximately 60 votes to 40.
他说，在皇家航空学会今年早些时候举行的一场讨论会上，飞行员、工程师、科学家和航空公司代表就自动驾驶飞机展开了讨论，讨论的结果是：有大约60%的人投票认可“40年后，飞行员将退出历史舞台”这一观点。
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, Chinese company Ehang unveiled the first-ever passenger drone, the electric-powered Ehang 184. The quadrocopter can fit one person with a small backpack, and even has air conditioning and a light. To fly, the passenger needs to set up a flight plan, click ‘take off’ and ‘land’ on a tablet, and the computer does the rest. With its propellers folded, the 184 takes up as much room as a small car.
1月，在拉斯维加斯举行的消费电子展（CES）上，中国企业亿航推出了史上首架无人客机——电力驱动的亿航184。这架四旋翼直升机可以搭乘1名携带小型背包的乘客，并且配备有空调和照明灯。飞行之前，乘客只需先设置飞行路线，然后在一台平板电脑上点击“起飞”和“降落”即可，其余一切都由计算机搞定。将旋翼折叠之后，亿航184的占地面积只相当于一辆小型轿车。
There are other similar efforts to develop personal air transport systems. In the US, a twin-propeller experimental plane with two passenger seats and two cockpit seats was flight-tested last year. Made by Aurora Flight Sciences Corp and called the Centaur, it can be operated by pilots from the cockpit or from the ground – and during the test, it successfully flew with no one on board.
除此之外，也出现了其他类似的个人空中交通系统方案。去年，美国极光飞行科技有限公司试飞了一架拥有两个乘客座椅和两个飞行员座椅的双旋翼试验飞机“Centaur”。这架飞机既可由地面遥控，也可由机上飞行员控制，飞机在机上无人的情况下顺利完成了试飞。
Airbus Group is working on Vahana, an autonomous ‘flying car’ for passengers or cargo, while in Germany the Volocopter project hopes to build a ‘scaled-up’ drone that can carry one or two people. Another European endeavour, myCopter, looked into the kind of technologies that would be needed to bring personal transportation into the air. Researchers who took part in the project, from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, are still trying to figure out how to make it easier to control, says Heinrich Bülthoff, the managing director of the institute. “We try to make flying a helicopter as easy as driving a car with very little training,” he says.
空客集团正在研制“Vahana”，一架可同时用于客运和货运的“飞行汽车”。德国“Volocopter”计划希望制造一架能够搭载1-2名乘客的全尺寸无人机。另一个开拓者欧洲 myCopter 公司正在研究个人空中交通技术。蒂宾根（Tübingen）的马克斯·普朗克生物控制论研究院（Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics）的科学家参与了这一项目。该研究院院长海因里希·布特霍夫（Heinrich Bülthoff）说，他们的任务是提高飞机操控的便利性。“我们的目标是，让驾驶直升机和驾驶汽车一样简便，仅需很短时间的培训即可。”
In the UK, similar research was undertaken by a consortium of public and private companies called Astraea; in 2013 they received £62m to investigate civilian pilotless aircraft concepts. The aim was to “investigate the kind of technologies you would need, such as sense and avoid, secure communications and so on, to integrate UAVs into manned airspace,” says Robinson.
在英国，一家名为 Astraea，由国营和私营企业组建的企业联合体也在进行类似研究。2013年，这家联合体获得6,200万英镑资金用于研究无人飞机概念，目标在于“研究感知和避让等所需技术，确保通信等系统的安全，实现无人机和有人驾驶飞机的整合，”罗宾逊说。
But be it a plane that’s controlled remotely, or by an artificial intelligence system, whether it’s just a passenger pressing a button, or a ground crew pulling the wireless strings, one fundamental question hasn’t been answered yet: Would we feel at ease flying if we can’t see two smartly dressed pilots at the helm, calmly providing us with weather updates during a storm?
但是，假如一架飞机由地面驾驶员远程操控，或者在乘客按下按钮后由人工智能系统控制，都存在尚未解决的问题：如果驾驶室里没有两位西装笔挺的飞行员镇定自若地告诉我们风暴即将袭来，我们是否能在整个飞行过程中气定神闲？
“It appears that people are more comfortable with a pilot directly at the controls, and on the plane,” says aeronautics expert Stephen Rice, formerly at the Florida Institute of Technology and now at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, who co-authored a 2014 report on public perception of robotic flights. "People are of the opinion that being in the vehicle while controlling it is easier than controlling it remotely. Most people have driven remote control cars or planes and find it difficult.”
“在有机上飞行员直接控制的情况下，人们会感到更加安全舒适，”航空专家史蒂芬·莱斯（Stephen Rice）。他曾经就职于佛罗里达理工学院，目前任教于安柏瑞德航空航天大学（Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University），同时也是2014年度自动飞行公众调查报告的联合撰稿人。“人们感觉，与远程控制相比，在机上操控飞机会更加容易。玩过遥控汽车或飞机的大多数人都感觉很难控制。”
Still, these days nobody thinks twice before getting into a lift – even though decades ago their ‘safe’ operation required an operator called a ‘liftboy’. The same goes with unmanned trains and self-driving cars. It shows that “society is now undergoing a mental shift over autonomous vehicles,” says Robinson. “If, in the future you grow up living in a society where cars drive themselves and UAVs reliably deliver packages – would passenger aircraft that fly themselves be a big surprise?”
今天的人们不会在一脚迈入电梯之前踌躇再三，而在几十年前，每部电梯里都曾经配备有一位电梯操作员。同样的事情也出现在无人驾驶火车和汽车上。“社会大众对于自动驾驶交通工具的心理正在发生变化，”罗宾逊说。“如果你从小就习惯了自动驾驶汽车，以及能够可靠地递送包裹的无人机的话，自主飞行的客机难道还能让人大惊小怪吗？”
Today, however, Rice thinks that it might be trickier for people to accept unmanned planes because when trains or cars lose their autopilot, they don’t necessarily crash. “When a plane stops, it falls out of the sky,” he says. And of course, many people are already nervous about flying, while not many of us are nervous about riding in a car or on a train.
莱斯认为，火车或汽车的自动驾驶系统出现故障后不会有坠毁的风险，所以无人驾驶飞机让人们接受起来更难。“一架飞机失去动力就会从空中坠毁，”他说。实际上，现在有很多人惧怕乘飞机旅行，而很少有人不敢坐汽车或者坐火车。
But computers also don’t suffer the kind of mental stress which leads to incidents such as co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who in 2015 flew a Germanwings passenger jet into a mountain in the French Alps. Unmanned planes could potentially prevent such incidents, thinks Rice. “This is not to malign human pilots… No autopilot today could have landed the plane on the Hudson River. But a machine doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get emotional, doesn’t let fear or fatigue affect its performance, and doesn’t make poor decisions. It simply does what it’s programmed to do. So, in the long run, I believe they will be safer overall.”
计算机不会出现容易导致事故的精神压力。例如，2015年，德翼航空（Germanwings）的副驾驶安德烈·卢比茨（Andreas Lubitz）驾驶客机故意坠毁在法国阿尔卑斯山区。莱斯认为，无人驾驶飞机将会给此类空难事故画上句号。“这不是在诋毁人类飞行员……当今没有任何自动驾驶仪能把飞机安全降落在哈德逊河河面。但是一台机器不会疲倦、不会出现情绪波动、不会让恐惧和疲劳影响表现、也不会做出错误决策。它忠实地执行程序设定的任务。因此，从长期看，它会让航空交通更加安全。”
Having a remote control pilot or autopilot available to take over the cockpit could potentially have prevented the Germanwings suicide accident, he adds. It took eight-to-10 minutes for the plane to descend from 38,000ft and crash; “if protocols had been in place, this should have been enough time for ATC to authorise a lockout of the human pilot and have the remotely controlled pilot or autopilot divert to the nearest airport,” says Rice.
如果当初采用了远程遥控系统或自动驾驶系统代替飞行员操控飞机，就有可能避免德翼航空的自杀式空难，他补充说。飞机从11590米高度要经过8-10分钟才能坠落到地面；“如果配备了相应通信协议，ATC系统就会有足够时间取消人类飞行员的控制权限，并由远程操作员或者自动驾驶系统接管飞机并飞往最近的机场，”莱斯说。
But not everyone agrees. Michael Clamann, research scientist at the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, thinks the level of safety will be about the same. “While it’s true that there have been rare cases of pilots purposefully crashing planes (or making grave mistakes), there are also examples of pilots preventing disasters through creative problem solving. For example, using throttles for flight control. Some complex problems may be difficult to diagnose from the ground, without direct access to all the plane's systems.”
但是并非每人都同意这一观点。北卡罗来纳（North Carolina）德汉姆杜克大学（Duke University in Durham）人类及自主化实验室（Humans and Autonomy Lab）科学家迈克尔·克莱曼（Michael Clamann）认为，两种操控模式的安全性大致处于同一水平。“飞行员故意操纵飞机坠毁（或者犯下致命错误）的案例非常少见，同时也有飞行员通过创新手段修复故障从而避免了重大灾难的发生。例如，通过节流阀控制飞机。在飞机出现复杂故障时，地面操作人员由于无法直接检查飞机所有分系统，因此很难找出故障原因。”
And controlling the plane from the ground will be far from easy, he warns. “Sitting in a cockpit taking in all the information through the window, from displays and controls, from the ‘feel’ of the aircraft is very different to experiencing flying through software. While replicating the controls of an aircraft is possible with current technology, ensuring a feeling of ‘presence’ and giving a ground controller access to 100% of the information in the cockpit is a more difficult problem.”
在地面遥控飞机远非想象中那么简单，他警告说。“坐在驾驶舱里，通过飞机舷窗、显示控制设备和‘体感’操控飞机和通过软件体验飞行二者之间存在巨大差异。尽管目前的技术可以轻易复制飞机的控制过程，但是给地面控制人员创造一种‘现场感’，并且显示100%的座舱信息却依然是一个很难完全实现的任务。”
Robinson believes that the first step to remove pilots on commercial airliners could be to do it gradually. For instance, a European research project called Across (Advanced Cockpit for Reduction Of Stress and Workload) on future passenger aircraft flight decks is looking into the ‘reduced crew’ operations with just one pilot.
罗宾逊认为，取消商业客机的飞行员应当是一个逐步的过程，不能一蹴而就。例如，欧洲为未来客机发展计划启动了一项名为Across（“可减轻疲劳及工作压力的先进驾驶舱”的缩写）科研项目，目标在于将飞行员数量减少到一人。
Two decades ago, it was standard to have three pilots in the cockpit; now the standard is to have two, says Scott Winter, assistant professor of aeronautics at Florida Institute of Technology. “I think over time participants will become more trusting of this technology.” Both he and Rice recommend conducting trials in cargo aircraft as a good starting point to deploy unmanned planes, make them totally reliable and in the process make the public trust the idea of a plane flying without a pilot.
20年前，三人驾驶舱还曾是标准配置；现在的标准则是2人驾驶舱，佛罗里达理工学院航空学助理教授斯科特·温特（Scott Winter）说。“我认为随着时间的推移，乘客将更加信任这种技术。”他和莱斯都建议先从货机开始进行无人驾驶飞机试验，在验证可靠性的同时让公众逐渐接受一架无人驾驶的飞机。
Nasa is looking into the same thing. Its Single-Pilot Operations (SPO) concept features one seat in the cockpit for a captain and one seat on the ground, for an operator who would be at times dispatcher and at times first officer. The ground operator would wear the dispatcher hat when the flight is progressing smoothly, and oversee not one but 12 planes – effectively being what Nasa calls a ‘super dispatcher’. And if there is a problem or difficulty on one of the aircraft, he or she would become first officer dedicated to that specific flight.
NASA也没有袖手旁观。NASA提出了单飞行员操作（SPO）概念：飞机驾驶舱内只安排一位飞行员，同时在地面配备一名操作员。在不同情况下，地面操作员将担任调度员或者机长。当航班正常飞行时，地面操作员将佩戴调度员帽，同时监控12架飞机——NASA称之为“超级调度员”。如果其中有一架飞机出现故障或遇到异常情况，操作员就将担任该架飞机的机长。
Even if it works, there will still be one nagging worry: the risk of the unmanned plane getting hacked. Ground systems would have to have highly secure datalinks and potentially military-level cybersecurity, thinks Robinson. Clamann adds that it would be necessary to have not only preventive but also recovery measures – to stop an attack from happening and ‘rescue’ the aircraft during a hack. As the final backstop, says Robinson, a UAV airliner “might also have a higher-level AI or knowledge that if it received ‘odd’ instructions (for example, to accelerate and dive towards the centre of a city) it would not comply until it had double-checked with its airline or another human supervisor.”
这个方案即便投入实用，也存在一项潜在的重大隐患：无人驾驶飞机有可能被黑客劫持。罗伯逊认为，地面控制系统必须拥有安全性能极高的数据链和军用级别的网络安全特性。克莱曼补充说，不仅需要预防性机制，还要有修复措施——在抵御黑客攻击的同时，让飞机脱离被劫持状态。作为最后的安全手段，罗宾逊说，一架无人驾驶客机“应当具备高水平的人工智能或知识，如果接收到了‘不合理’的指令（例如，向城市中心加速或俯冲），飞机将在与航空公司或其他人类监控者重复确认之前拒绝执行该指令。”
So maybe in a few decades, you’ll be sipping your wine in the lounge where the cockpit used to be. Until then, be prepared to listen to your captain’s updates, and know that they’re seeing the same view out of the window as you are – but they’re just in the best seat.
在几十年后，你可能会坐在原本是驾驶舱的位置轻松愉快地喝葡萄酒。但是，在这一天到来之前，还必须打起精神聆听来自地面机长的指令，此时此刻，你透过舷窗看到的景物正在如实呈现在他们面前–他们才是飞机真正的操控者。
