In episode 24, we discuss EVTOL HEXA’s first flight and design, DARPA’s Ai Dogfight contest between artificial intelligence pilots and real ones, combating bird strikes and the “snarge” they leave behind, Boeing 737 wire harness issues, and more.
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Full Transcript: EP24 EVTOL HEXA, DARPA Ai Dogfight, Bird Strike Countermeasures and More
Struck 24 Audio for Podcast
Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at weather guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy.
You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett
Allen Hall: I’m Allen hall.
Dan: And here on struck, we talk about everything. Aviation, aerospace engineering, and lightening protection.
All right, welcome back. This is the struck podcast episode 24, Alln, how are you?
Allen Hall: Great Dan. Boy, uh, aviation just doesn’t keep churning. Does it busy weekend?
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And we have a really interesting show today. We have lots of like very diverse, strange, strange topics from guns. Found it TSA, more Boeing problems, uh, lightening rods, protecting birds, hitting planes.
Um, Crazy looking EVTOLs, DARPA Ai Dogfight, and drones. So look forward to an interesting show today. So let’s get started. So new article shows that right now, TSA is finding guns and carry on bags. 80% of which are loaded at three times the rate compared to last year. So 15.3 guns. Per million passengers compared to 5.1 guns last year.
So, Allen, what’s your take? Why do you think this has happened?
Allen Hall: Well, I haven’t seen any good reason for it explained, I’ve seen the articles and TSA has put out some notices about it because they were alarmed about it and trying to make everybody aware, like, Hey. Check your luggage for the, the weapon you left in it.
But I either chalk it up to people. Haven’t been driving around a lot and have forgotten about, and we’re moving around a lot. And I had forgotten about the handgun they have put in their backpack or a handgun that may be sitting in their duffel bag. And. Load it up and go to the airport, not thinking it’s in there and TSA will find it.
They will clearly find it. Yeah. That’s the one thing I think the other one is that in this sort of a climate of, of concern, everybody’s in. Maybe people are thinking it’s a smart thing to take a handgun on an airplane. And that is never a smart idea. A TSA will take you down and it’s a, yeah, it is a big problem.
Uh, when you, cause that’s, that’s basically you breaking federal law, when you do that. So there’s no, there’s no reason to be carrying a handgun onto an aircraft ever. Uh, there are rules in which you can take care, uh, weapons onto aircraft, obviously unloaded, obviously in a hard case, obviously you’re checking that luggage in with the counter so they know what’s going on.
Cause you see it around hunting time all the time. You see people traveling out to the Montana, Wyoming, whatever to go deer hunting. But yeah. Yeah. I mean that, and that’s totally cool, but we can’t. Have something stupid happen on an airplane. So TSA has been really vigilant. I know the times that I have traveled.
I’m surprising one. It still, how few people are actually on aircraft, but to how long it takes to get through the TSA lines. And I kind of wonder if they’re not being overly cautious on handguns and generic weapons coming through the security lines and taking slower looks at luggage. Uh, and. Find it. So it’s either they’re ticking, stolen that luggage and finding more weapons or two thirds.
They get the same rate of weapons coming through there and only catching one third of them, which is hopefully not
Dan: the right. The answer. Yeah. Well, I mean, do you think that it’d be interesting if they could break it down by route? And of course there’s probably not. I mean, 15 guns per million, there’s probably not enough guns to have a statistically significant difference between routes.
But you wonder if people who are flying to Portland where there’s constant unrest are taken more guns, you know, like if you’re flying to. I don’t know if like a hotbed city for a protest. I just have older folk maybe who are just. You know, they want to be prepared. I don’t know. Like you said, there’s a, there’s a lot of fear right now and there’s a lot of conflict.
Allen Hall: yeah, it’s
Dan: a dangerous
Allen Hall: world. And if you happen to be traveling somewhere and something happens, um, otherwise, uh, relatively calm place, it could be chaos. And the next minute from what we’ve been seeing and. That just, uh, I don’t know. The news media is not doing a good job here, so it, it does raise awareness and people start taking actions on their own, uh, to defend themselves rightly or wrongly.
That’s shown up in airports and that’s not good.
Dan: Yep. Keep your guns out of the airport folks. So moving on Boeing, uh, instructions. So there’s some new work that needs to go on with the max Allen. So what’s, what’s the deal here with the 737 max he had again.
Allen Hall: So when they were doing the seven 37 max reviews and looking at all the changes that had incorporated, one of the things that happened is they noticed that they had some wiring issues where one wire bundles went across another wire bundle.
And I know if you think about it that way, like, Oh, Well, what’s the big deal there, right? Well, when wire bundles cross, there is a possibility that could eventually rub. And if they do rub and a, uh, actuator line touches a power wire that actuator could move. So in this particular case, I think it was elevator, but coulda been rudder.
Uh, there’s two wire harnesses across one contained power, one contained basically actuation. And, um, they weren’t separated properly. And so there could be a failure mode or a series of failure modes because it’s, you don’t inspect wire harnesses all that often because there tends to be buried in dark places.
Uh, there could be a situation where you have wire harness, uh, interaction and on commandment. Command and movement of a control surface, which can be catastrophic if you lose the aircraft. I don’t think the design had that design had been that way for a while. I just don’t think anybody’s gone back and looked at it over time and, and applied the new regulations, new wire harness regulations to it.
And then when they saw it, um, The notify the FAA and said, Hey guys, we got this, we’ve got this wire harness issue. We don’t think it’s. I think the first approach from Boeing was to say, it’s probably not a problem, but, uh, you know, and the climate ran right now with the 737 max and other things that are happening at the FFA said, no, you should fix it.
The problem with the fixing part, it’s not. It’s a major event. When you have to reroute wiring, you have to reroute all the mechanical supports that go along with it, and more than likely change out the wiring for longer wiring or shorter wiring, because the path from a to B has changed. So it’s not as easy as like taking that wire bundle, lifting it off and scooting it over or putting some sort of standoffs in it.
It is more of, we’re gonna have to replace those harnesses and the number of aircraft. So there’s seven maxes that are hanging around out there. And the amount of time it does take to fix them, I think is close to eight hours to fix one wire harness. It’s going to take up a lot of time. So it’s gonna be a lot of electricians sitting in the back of these airplanes, trying to correct a situation sometimes.
When these wiring situations comes up, uh, in my personal opinion, on the smaller aircraft. So sort of business aircraft, things like Learjets and Sesnas and citations, and those kinds of ESOS, uh, kind of aircraft is anytime you’re walking around those backless airplanes and making some sort of repair mod, uh, is a time an opportunity to do other damage because there’s not a lot of room to move around in there.
And it wouldn’t be unusual to. Bang on a hydraulic line or step on a harness. You weren’t supposed to step on or step on a component that was, you know, using it as a step. You can’t see it, that kind of stuff. So it’s not just the replacement time to fix the harnesses. It’s all the other things, all the inspections that have to occur afterwards, all the replacement of things that may have been broken or bent or stepped on as the, the mod is being made.
So it’s. It’s a lot more intensive than what people think.
Dan: All right. So we’re going to move on to our engineering segment. So first up is, and is a really a beautiful photo of these . So an article from, uh, the drive.com. Just showing that a lightning rods have been used to protect during, uh, exercise Northern lightening. And, um, so you think thought this is a pretty, pretty sleek idea because obviously these jets are being stored outdoors in a pretty lighting intensive area.
Is that right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Right. And it’s very common for aircraft that are stored outside. A ticket struck from little Cessna, one 70 twos, one 50 twos to obviously bigger airplanes, seven 37, seven 47, 83 eighties. You see it all the time. The aircraft on the tarmac, a storm comes through and whammo. There was a lightning strike to the aircraft.
It’s not even moving. And as you know what the F five, it’s a quote unquote stealthy aircraft. So if it does take a strike on the ground, you have, there’s a series of events that are, that have to occur to make sure the aircraft is back in an era where the condition, including all the coatings. Yeah. And, uh, all the special features that may have been damaged when that happens.
So for the cost of throwing up a couple of metal pipes, Uh, on the, on the tarmac there, you can save yourself. Thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars quite honestly, from a lightning strike damage to one of these aircraft. Yeah. It’s a cheap alternative. I think it’s, I think it’s a brilliant quite honestly.
Yeah. Uh, I had seen some posting that the feds, uh, post, uh, uh, offerings that you can, uh, bid on and I saw this pop up. I dunno, it’s been a little while ago where I saw lightening rods for tarmacs to protect airplanes. That seems like a good idea. We should implement that at some of these airports. Save save a lot of time on fixing airplanes.
That’s good. That’s a smart, it’s a very smart move.
Dan: Well, it seems just very obvious and simple. I mean sometimes, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but you can look for really complex solutions when the obvious, simple answers right in front of you. I mean, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of moments of that, like that in your career as an engineer where it’s like.
Oh, yeah, we could just do this. And everyone at the end of the room is like, Oh wow. Redoing.
Allen Hall: That’s all done. Let’s all go home.
Dan: And then yeah, you just try to silently be like, okay, we didn’t just spend eight hours thinking all this crazy stuff when it was right in front of our nose the whole time, we’ll just ignore it and pretend that didn’t happen.
But it’s like a daily.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. That, and that’s what I mean, as a side note, that’s why outsiders, I mean, you and I are both baseball fans. Like some of these outsiders are just suddenly like. Hey, why do you do this stupid thing? Why don’t you just do this instead? Why have you been doing that for 50 years guys?
And you’re like, Oh yeah, I guess that is dumb. Right? It’s funny. I’ll outside. Eyes can just, uh, you know, have a fresh perspective.
Allen Hall: I think somebody had a fresh perspective here. Uh, well, I don’t want to say where they got up from, but I’m sure the army has done similar things to protect their vehicles out in the open.
So maybe the air force is taking some of the Army’s technology and implementing it themselves.
Dan: It’s pretty slick. Yeah. Well, speaking of archaic problems that are still a problem, uh, snarky, so interesting article from the wired or a wired.com. I’m just talking about. So snark is a, I guess, this interesting word, a combination between snot and garbage, which refers to the, the unfortunate goo that’s left.
When a bird hits a plane. Uh, but bird strikes obviously were the driving force behind the, uh, the, the movie title is gonna escape me right when I need it most. But, um, with captain Sali, right, as he piloted successfully into the, into the river,
Allen Hall: you remember it wasn’t a North by Northwest where he scares all the no, no, no.
It’s, uh, uh, Raiders of the lost, uh, Indiana Jones. Um, Well, they go, uh, for the chalice, uh, where they scare all the birds on the beach line and it crashes the airplane that’s shooting at them, same sort of thing.
Dan: Oh yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I actually watched those recently. I mean, how many classics didn’t we all watch during covert.
Right. But, so I actually did why I can’t, I can’t recall that one. I watched all the Indiana Jones ones, which are great, but also had that little bit of weird slapsticky this to them. Just interesting. But the last crusade anyway. The Lasker C w E right? The last crusade. So obviously bird strikes at geese.
You feel like this isn’t an issue, but it is right. And these things, especially if it’s like a goose, I mean, that’s a, I don’t know what 12 pound object getting hit by something going 400 miles per hour. So what is, what is the, what is the damage like in here and how do they. What is the technology, keeping us safe from say from these bird medicines?
Allen Hall: Uh, it really is testing. That’s what it is and designing for the regulatory requirement. So the regulatory requirement for aircraft for par 25 aircraft, which are. Sort of transport carrier category or larger business jets is a four pound bird. I think it’s going at VC. Um, so that’s a pretty fast speed.
I’m an electrical guy, not a structural person, but those tests are super destructive. And if you ever, you can go online and go on YouTube and see bird strike.
Dan: I’ve seen them. Yeah.
They’re crazy. It is look like they become liquid hitting these. Oh yeah. Everything becomes at that speed.
Allen Hall: Yeah. There’s so much energy being dispersed in such a short span of time that basically the bird turns to jello and. Uh, it kinda, it kinda absorbs into the structure and which is running into, and then there’s really no way today.
We actually have some competition ways to predict the amount of damage that occur, but we still do testing. So it’s sort of a computational first look. And then we followed up with some validation testing, but as we have done that the last several years, we kind of get more and more sort of the computational side, but it’s very easy to see.
Aircraft that was struck by birds and the level of damage. Cause it usually is not just one bird. Usually they’re flying into a grouping of birds. So birds hitting windshields, birds, sitting nose, radon, spurts hit wings, burns hitting vertical stabilizers or horizontal stabilizers. Birds being adjusted into engines are a huge problem because you can.
Like on a, on a wing, you can penetrate that leading edge and get into the fuel tank now. So you got a fuel fuel coming out right on an engine. It’s going to go through that engine and you couldn’t lose, or maybe, maybe one more than one burn typically, but you can lose that particular engine. And just like you’re talking about with Sali, they had birds going up engines and lost both engines.
Dan: So it’s,
Allen Hall: it’s really serious thing. And if, if you’re around airports that have, uh, bird problems and it tends to be at least an arm. Part of the world, Canadian geese that migrate and want to hang out at the end runway. You’ll see things like these, uh, noise cannons, propane cannons that fire off once a minute to encourage the birds to land somewhere else.
Because a Canadian geese is bigger than a four pound bird. Right. Yeah. Uh, so if you hit something, it’s obviously, hopefully you’re catching it closer to the ground where you’re going to get slower speeds. So the energy is less, but, uh, the amount of damage that can occur from a birdie impact is substantial, substantial, uh, to the point where now we do a lot of testing to make sure that a bird can’t bring down an airplane, but still in the Cpt.Sully situation,
birds going to both engines, just really, not much you’re going to be able to do there. Uh, the FDA puts up notices about where birds are, and I don’t know, Philadelphia had a problem for a while, so yeah, it’s really, really serious.
And it happens pretty often. A lot more. It happens more often than lightning strikes, in my opinion, or at least the damage a lot more visible. The lightning strikes cause it there’s a debt left somewhere, uh, on the aircraft windshield knows rate home for, you know, all over. All over
Dan: well, so these engines are pulling in so much air and creating so much thrust.
I mean, is it yeah. Create like a vortex where a bird is likely to go into the engine or not really so much
Allen Hall: everything’s happening so fast. I mean, you can kind of suck it in if it’s, if it’s not directly in that line inlet line, uh, it can definitely could pull it in. Just
Dan: grab it.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It can kind of grab it.
Cause you know, they do have some mass there, but it’s. The engine is pulling so much air sucking so much air into it. It’s got a, it’s like a vacuum. It’s gonna suck anything that’s around it into it. Um, so you know, the engine manufacturers, the GEs Pratt Whitney’s, um, a rolls Royce. Look at that as part of the, one of their certification task is to validate what happens in a bird
goes to the engine. Cause what you don’t want to do is start losing the heavy rotating parts of the rotors. Um, create a rotor burst situation. So not, no idea lose a bird, but then he got this flying grenade of an engine blowing holes in the wing and the fuselage and tail and all this other stuff, which causes other problems.
So it’s a really serious certification thing. But when we don’t think about that much and. I don’t think of all the years. I don’t think I’ve been on an aircraft. That’s actually struck a bird. I’ve seen damage from it, but close, but I, I don’t think God I’ve been an airplane. It’s actually struck a bird.
Have you ever been in an airplane? That’s hit a bird.
Dan: It now it now makes me very nervous. So I’m going to have my eye out for these birds when we scowling at them.
Allen Hall: I worry about it with a Canadian geese are, or this large flocks.
And you occasionally see it at airports as you drive into an airport, like, Hmm. There’s a large flock of whatever geese hanging out down here. That probably isn’t smart. I hope we’re not taken off in that direction today.
Dan: Well, it’s and it’s funny because like, I, I was, uh, by Reagan airport the other day in DC.
There’s so much water. I mean, it’s surrounded by water, like, so it was LaGuardia, like, right. And you wonder, how could they ever avoid. All the birds in this area, they did. How can they keep such a, like a wildlife preserve almost around the airport, like free. It seems like an insurmountable. No problem.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And that’s what happens at LA at the end of these runways, because you don’t want to develop them. You don’t want to have houses down there in case of an aircraft runs off the runway, like in a midway situation. So a lot of the more modern air airports have these sort of. Landing areas or extended runway or grassy areas to capture aircraft, which ended up being marshes where it’s wet and then the wildlife starts hanging out there and yeah.
Then you have problems. You really have problems trying to manage it.
Dan: all right. So in our final segment here today, we’re going to cover electric tech. We’ve got a very interesting EVTOL well, we’re going to talk about DARPA and some of the cool stuff they’re doing with AI. And also, um, US approval of some US made drones, which is going to be a big bolster to the, uh, the industry.
So let’s start there. Let’s start with drones. So the, uh, the Pentagon, it has cleared five models for government use. And of course DJI is like the overwhelming, uh, you know, DJ is a Chinese company, brother. The they’re the overwhelming leader in drones globally. Right? Like anyone, like I have a DJI drone.
They’re super, well-made, they’re very easy to use. They’re essentially just like. It’s hard to compete on price with DJI because you get so much for so little relative. I mean, they keep out doing themselves and it’s a it’s, it’s impressive, but I’m trying to get away from Chinese. Made drones make sense for the U S but I mean, what’s your take on the situation?
So sky Dio and a couple of other companies, um, I’ve been approved here for use. Um, what does this say to you about the, about the drone industry?
Allen Hall: I thought the latest thing on drones was they’re going to limit the U S purchasing. The United States government was going to limit purchasing of drones to the United States or non.
Chinese companies, essentially what it sounded like. Um, and that’s going to put a lot of trauma in an industry because the United States is a big draw for drones. Most of the space in the United most places United States is open area, even though it seems like there’s a lot of big cities, most of America is open, so you’d not go very far to get to an open field and go fly a drone.
So. We’re a huge market here, and I’m not sure if there’s going to be ever, ever any, um, no, right now DGI is that leader, but you got to kind of
Dan: wonder that 80% of the market. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Allen Hall: That’s going to change. I think it’s pretty rapidly, honestly. I don’t think that’s going to last all that longer.
They have a home market. Uh, but how much control is the Chinese? There’s a party going to have on the use of drones in China? Probably a lot based on some of the news news items. I see kind of the China that had been drone based news in the United States, I think can create that marketplace. They have all the, we have all the infrastructure to make drones.
It’s not particularly complicated. We just have a more expensive workforce. And that’s what I think drove DGI to, to be in the position they are. Cause it’s just labor costs are less. And the technology wise, you know, we’re, we’re making rockets that land on ships right now, Tesla is.
Dan: And
Allen Hall: so if we can, if we can do some of those things, we could surely a little plastic drone, do whatever we want it to do.
You just gotta get a couple of American companies and European companies or. Companies in South America, honestly, to start filling in that as soon to be.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. So speaking of bigger, Uh, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. The air force, uh, watched a man demonstration of a lift aircraft, single seat Hexa and this thing is kind of bizarre looking.
It’s like a matte black, it’s got these big, like six feet on the bottom. It’s got the, it reminds me a lot of Volvo copter. Like the way I rotors are. It’s got a lot of small rotors in that. Yeah. Round like deer antler, kind of a look to it. Yeah. But then it’s like kind of open and this is fascinating and it seems kind of bizarre, but they’re saying that the CEO of Lyft is saying that, you know, they’re hoping to launch a consumer flying experience where you can fly less than an hour of training.
With no pilot’s license for less than 2,250 bucks a flight. How does that strike you? Siemens and tough.
Allen Hall: That seems really unrealistic. What was the little two wheel scooter that a Dean came and created? Oh that we used to run around. Um, Oh, you know what I’m talking about, Dan, the little two wheel
Dan: segway segway,
Allen Hall: the segway.
Yeah. Right. That was the same thing, said about the segway. How many people toppled over to their deaths on that, on that segue in a shorter amount of time, didn’t the president at one point, take a huge spill in one of those and people run on themselves off cliffs and that kind of thing. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that happened.
So it always seems to me like if we can’t. Man his segues. I’m not sure. And it’s something that flies, I think it’s going to take more than an hour. I was adjusted it’s more than an hour that we go slow with it and try to make sure we don’t kill ourselves in it. I’m sure it’s totally cool. And I’m sure that’s a bunch of safety, um, provisions in place to make sure you don’t roll it or dump it into the ground and, you know, intentionally, but still it’s just, uh, no human always adds that.
Variable of craziness where they’re going, you know, again, flying by the seat of your pants. You don’t always make the correct decisions when you’re letting your backside, make the decisions, what tends to happen in these things. So, yeah, we’ll see. Well,
Dan: speaking of DJI, I mean, I have. One of their small drones, that’s incredibly easy to fly.
It was like a great, but a beginner drone called the Mavic mini. Yeah. And they, they put so much, they put a lot of technology in place to make it really simple, pretty crash proof. Although it wasn’t a high enough price point where they had obstacle avoidance in it. But if you take that drone where you just say, basically push a button to take off, it’s going to hover.
You can’t do that much to make it real. Like you couldn’t make it roll. Um, it’ll stray and go forward. And back when you like, couldn’t. You know, it’s had a lot of limiters on it for novices, right? So training wheels. Yeah. So why couldn’t they have that sort of thing? Just scaled up with great obstacle avoidance.
Like when mine runs low on batteries, it just says coming on home, like you can’t do anything about it. It’s just going to come back. Like it just knows GPS where to go back and it’ll land itself. And it’s pretty incredible. So you don’t have to worry about getting out somewhere where you’re out of battery.
It’s just going to say, Hey, we’re down to X percentage time to go back. So, I mean, can’t, they scale that up where it is much.
Allen Hall: I’m sure that there can, but, uh, If humans given the chance will not want to have those limits on them. Yeah, that’s true. It’s so any kind of, I’ll give you the similar, I’ll give you an analogy, which I don’t like using analogies, but you know, all the sports cars that come and you purchase the car and it’s got the chip in it and the chip limits how fast it can go and all the secondary market in which they’ve.
Got these chips or reprogrammed the chips. So the cars go as fast as you can humanly make it, uh, it’d be no time. Oh, that’s so much trying to reprogram one of these things to do whatever they want it to go do. That is an evitable, except for doing it to cars. We’re going to do it to aircraft, even if it’s a small scale, one person thing, um, that will, that will.
Clearly happen because there’s only takes one guy to figure it out and put it on YouTube, then everybody’s got it. Got it figured out, and he’s going to try it. So I am not so sure yet. I’m not, I’m not a big fan of these things for the, for the military service, uh, where they have a particular mission to go do.
And there’s obviously there’s a ton of training and supervision on the military side. Awesome. Awesome. I think it could be a real benefit on the battlefield or maybe in just sort of daily operations, but I think we got a little bit of a learning curve to go on the civilian side.
Dan: I’m going to quickly use another, um, analogy, which is, you know, what happened to dressing park in Jurassic park, they had the Jeeps or the, the Ford explorers on a track.
And they left. They just it. Right. And they got up and they got out of the track. And then, so I’ve got eaten by dinosaurs and they learned their lesson. Right. They learn their lesson,
Allen Hall: the track.
Dan: Exactly.
so our last thing, so DARPA put out a Ai Dogfight against a real pilot. So we had a simulation, actually a good friend of mine Anna Skinner was Mo’s one of the main driving forces behind this program.
And they put a, a veteran F 16 pilot against an AI named Falco. I think that was his name. And so, Allen, how did this, uh, how did this go down and what was your take on the, on the DARPA Ai Dogfight?
Allen Hall: Well, it didn’t go well for the 16 pilot. Uh, the human pilot and it was, I think there was five dog fights over about five hours ish.
And it was, it was, it had been broadcast on YouTube. So you can actually watch the simulation for down and was pretty cool. Cause it was commentary with it and describing what’s happening in the situation, what the pilot will be feeling and what the computer is thinking and, and, and watch the dogfight play out.
But. Essentially AI one. Now, is there any surprise, I guess maybe there’s a little surprise with that based on the chess matches early with, uh, the big IBM computer and the humid wind by tricking the computer and then right. It’s this, it’s the, I’ve seen that in movies all the time. Right? We trick the computer.
And then when humans win, well, I think we went past that because the humans were Ofer in this particular experiment. Uh, I thought it was interesting that w that was broadcast. I understand why they did it to show their capability on the computational side and, and the learning. And, and because the computer has no constraints on it, doesn’t have a body isn’t a physical form where a pilot does.
And so there are certain, uh, maneuvers that are very stressful on the body and the computer doesn’t care. Right. Um, and so given equal craft and the computer can do a lot of predictions in his head where the pilots sort of going by experience and feel the computer’s just calculating calculate, calculating and do predictive things and watching what’s happening with the pilot, how he reacts and then react to that, you know, over time eventually, you know, The AI is going to be as smart as a pilot.
And then, then, um, it can do whatever maneuver it wants to go do. So the human pilot is that a, is that a significant disadvantage as we, as we saw. What they’re going to do with that. Dan, did you understand what the next step with that was? Obviously? Um, they have a very happy computational computer science staff over there where that happened.
I’m not sure the pilot community is thrilled by it, but what was going to be the next step out of that?
Dan: You know, I, I wish I knew, uh, like I said, my, my friend, Dr. Skinner. She’s brilliant. And she’s putting a ton of work on this program, but the whole AI stuff gets a little bit beyond me. I think it’s really just exploring the future and seeing what might be possible.
And it’s more about can humans coexist with, with. AI as far as, you know, whether it’s in the air or in the sea or on land, like, can we have a hybrid sort of force and how can they assist humans? Cause, uh, as far as she’s explained, like AI can’t and this goes for like driving cars, it can’t. Predict a lot of the stuff that humans know, like we were talking about me riding in the bike lane recently.
I know to look at all these cars ahead of, to see if, uh, one of them’s maybe got us sign that they’re going to swing their door open into the bike lane. And you can’t necessarily. Train AI to, to know that or to do that. Like they’re making lots of calculations faster than I could, but you know, they can’t necessarily tell if a, if a child is, looks like he’s about to dart into the road after a ball, or just like, you know, you as a person, you know, that.
That kid looks like he’s about to run to the road. I’m going to stop my car and AI’s not to the point where he can do stuff that, and they’re just, I think still exploring a lot of limits of what AI can do. And so this is a really interesting, I think just a extension of that. Just trying to push the limits and see where this might be at a go and where it might be useful to maybe aid pilots, not necessarily obviously compete against them.
So I think it’s just, they’re doing a lot of really interesting stuff for sure. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, the, the latest, uh, I think it was in Australia where they, uh, did a, a recent flight where they had a biscuit, a drone flying next to a human piloted aircraft and, you know, acting as a quote unquote wing man situation.
Um, I think this would be more of that where there’s going to be drones flying with human piloted aircraft to do special things or to monitor for electronic surveillance or all those kinds of things that I think is. Today, it probably is happening today. We just don’t know it. Um, but. Again, right. It’s it’s that pattern recognition thing.
And what patterns should you be checking for? I agree with you, Dan. There’s a lot of things that we as humans, we just take for granted because we’ve seen the patterns, even though we’re off humans are awful at sometimes pattern recognition. We’re not awful at it either because, uh, we’re still here. We’d be wiped off the face of the planet.
You know, the tigers would rule the world, but, uh, so it’s going to take time and I think. As we grow into it a little bit more, we’re gonna be able to do more pattern recognition, know what to look for and the computational speeds getting stupid. Crazy. So it doesn’t take any more time, quote, unquote, time to process so many different things and do such so large of a data crunch.
Yeah. We finally reached that threshold.
Dan: All right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show. Thank you so much for listening. And please leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out the weather guard, lightening tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full interviews and short clips from the show and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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