Autonomous vehicles help make roads safer →

A new study says that while autonomous vehicle technology has great promise to reduce crashes, it may not be able to prevent all mishaps caused by human error.

Auto safety experts say humans cause about 94% of U.S. crashes, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study says computer-controlled robocars will only stop about one-third of them.

Take a look at the first two paragraphs. The headline itself states, “Autonomous vehicles won’t make roads completely safe,” but you could have also stated it as, “Autonomous vehicles will help make the roads a third safer.” This is what I call bullsh*t headlining. The first two paragraphs already show conflict. We know that autonomous vehicles won’t manage and mitigate 100% of all accidents but we do know that 94% of automobile accidents are caused by human error so… let’s reduce that by a third and that’s lives saved. What’s the freaking issue? Let’s continue to make improvements and not title this articles like it isn’t working.

Tales from the Cockpit

It's pretty awesome how a foreign carrier like KLM is able to post videos such as these that educate the public on what we pilots really do. This is just Part One of a great series. Yes, we actually do touch and play with all those buttons and switches on the panels and even some of the callouts are similar too. As you can see, even with the autopilot on, there is still a lot of continuous monitoring until it is taken back into manual control prior to landing but in this case, the Captain is demonstrating an autoland sequence.

I wish that I could share with you my personal experiences and videos. Maybe sometime in the future with permissions from the FAA, VP of Flight Ops, Safety, etc... you get the point. A lot of hoops for this kind of educational video in the US.