Dateline: March 19 2038
In the last couple of decades air traffic has rocketed. Annual air passenger numbers have shot up from fewer than 8-billion in 2018 to more than 20-billion today. That’s almost three times the world population, every year.
Bearing in mind that hardly any flight exceeds 24 hours, that means 60-million people are boarding flights somewhere every day. And that doesn’t include drone taxis and private aircraft.
The only way major air terminals can cope with the hordes is increased reliance on technology. So now we have become used to biometric check-in on our wearable devices or implants, and AI-assisted flight scheduling.
To say nothing of air traffic control and routing; without the “internet of flying things” and saturation satellite communications, the crowded skies would be deadly dangerous. Thank you Nasa, ESA and SpaceX.
Which leaves you and me wondering. Is it really worth the rush, the just-in-time logistics, the enormous fleets of costly airliners, with all the attendant attendants, safety and maintenance systems?
Electric planes are great, but very small; they’re basically passenger drones. So now aviation is the biggest consumer of liquid fuels globally – and that’s a hefty number for sustainability scientists to worry about, never mind the exhaust emissions.
Perhaps we should just get used to taking the hyperloop instead. /First published on Mindbullets, October 17 2018.
Heathrow bans human pilots
Dateline: July 25 2027
As we approach the UK summer holidays and air traffic rises to its seasonal peak over southeast England, aviation authorities have announced that only autopiloted flights will be allowed at airports servicing London and surrounds.
“Automated take-off and landing is just so much more efficient,” says Juliet Kennedy, ops chief for National Air Traffic Services. “Humans can’t deal with the pressure of 14-second gaps between planes.”
Without this blanket ban on human-piloted craft and reliance on digital systems, the area would suffer countless delays, which have a knock-on rolling effect, causing chaos for holiday travellers and business people alike. Airlines that still have older, manual aircraft will simply have their landing slots cancelled for the duration.
Almost all modern jets have been upgraded for fully automated flights, enhanced with the latest AI systems that take security and weather into account in real time. Like driverless cars, these systems are continuously communicating with each other and the digital control towers on the ground. It has become too complex for humans to get involved.
Since drones and “flying taxis” have been integrated into the city airspace it has become critical to utilise swarm technology to avoid collisions and maximise air traffic capacity. Human pilots are only allowed on restricted routes.
“We expect some passenger anxiety,” says a major airline executive who did not want to be named, “but the fact is 99% of flights are fully automated already, even if you don’t know it.” /First published in Mindbullets, July 26 2017.
- Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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