I am having fun with the AI pilot, finding out how creative he (or she) can be. It seems you can propose a flight plan and the AI pilot, lets call him or her Capt. Sim, will follow the main part of the plan, but do what he or she wants for the landing. The adventure is to figure out the rules being obeyed now and later as the software evolves. Right now, there seems to be no avoidance of mountains and the approaches are REALLY low (lots of broken approach lights).
Unlike Knight Rider, the AI pilot is absolutely dumb and can do nothing. As soon as the AI piloting is activated the first thing it does is reducing the thrust to idle (and it stays there, because one has no controls of the thrust levers as long as AI piloting is enabled.)
1 to 5 minutes later the airplane is stalling into the ground, depending on height and speed flown before enabling AI. This is AI flying, or more crashing.
The AI was not always this stupid, a few months ago one could really have the AI fly to sightseeing locations or airports and even align to runways, fly to the pyramids in Egypt, navigate to nearby cities or airports and so on.
Now the AI is no longer functioning at all.
Had a satisfactory hands off 787 flight from Kansas City to Denver, with a cruising altitude I set at 24000. I just put the plane on the runway and said go. It got creative on the landing, it left the straight in approach to RW25 and headed north west so it could create a base leg for itself. When it was time to turn final, it did. Approach into 25 was normal with the ILS diamonds centered. It observed all its transition altitudes and changed speeds accordingly. Approach got a little low at the end according to the slope diamond position. Landing was fine. Spoilers came up. reverse thrust was used. It is fun and works well enough for me.
Why am I doing hands off flights? I am a busy guy. I want something nice to look at once in a while.
If it turns out it only wants to do right traffic, then landing to the north at KSLC might be a problem.
Hands off flight from KSAN to KLAX with VFR and no destination runway declared. AI pilot had trouble, wanted to land on the houses short of the airport, then pulled up and headed straight for the tower in the middle of the LAX property.
Re-did the flight with IFR plan ending with an ILS landing on 24R. Everything went fine. AI pilot used the entrance point to the ILS as a goal and didn’t get too low and got rid of his extra speed early. It did do a left turn into final. This is what I wanted to find out. It will do right or left traffic as appropriate.
Works better the more one knows about it.
RNAV and LOC landings. The AI pilot doesn’t do well with RNAV. It touches down in the dirt beside the runway numbers and it ends up in the opposite side dirt half way down the runway and spins out. It doesn’t construct any version of the runway centerline for itself.
LOC is better. It doesn’t “supervise” the whole approach and the airplane can end up close to the airport going way faster than appropriate. If this happens, the AI pilot will do a circle to slow down. But once the airplane has concrete under it, it is aimed straight down the runway and has a good landing.
Hope this helps people enjoy Capt. Sim. I am glad the feature is there.
I’ve ben playing around with it as sometimes I just want to be a passenger along for the ride but I’ve found it to be inconsistent in that it will sometimes just fly into the side of a mountain on takeoff and the landings can be left or right of the runway and cause crashes and that’s after it wants to circle around the airport a couple of times first. I would like for it to be better unless I am doing something wrong. Right now I’m just activating the AI Pilot slider feature while on the runway and letting it do it’s own thing. Am I missing something?
I have more “tests” planned for this holiday week. I will post what happens. I got a strange result landing in Anchorage. AI flight had all kinds of time to get rid of speed before the airport and it didn’t. So it did a circle at 3K feet AGL. I am wondering if I mucked things up by specifying a named approach that was not what “automatic” would have picked for the runway I wanted or the direction I was coming from. I will not be picking named approaches for the next trial.
Eventually I want to find out if the VNAV button in the 787 cockpit is really Capt. Sim or some other bit of software.
Happy Holidays
The takeoffs and landings are quite flat. That may be why you run into buildings. Take off manually if necessary, get clear of things, then invoke AI. Do ILS landings into airports with no mountains around. There is no avoidance of obstacles.
happy holidays
Christmas morning AI flight tests in the stock 787 Dreamliner… all successful. You can try these. All arrivals are to KSFO using AUTO approach into ILS runway 28R. First one started at KSMF Sacramento. This flight stayed below 10K feet and didn’t exceed 250 knots indicated. Good landing, no go around due to overspeed. Did the same thing from KFAT (Fresno) by way of Hollister, the program selected about 20K feet for a peak altitude and 320 knots. When it came down through 10K feet south of San Jose, speed standard reduced to 250. Speed gradually came down to about 270 through air resistance at low altitude. AI pilot put out gear and flap about 10 miles from the runway at 270 indicated, which the placards say is “permissible” to slow down and arrived at the runway going 150 knots. It had to “cheat” by putting out lots of flap at high speed, but this got the job done. So far “Auto Approach” seems to keep the AI pilot out of trouble. It is up to the human pilot to look at the path Auto Approach has chosen and determine if there are obstructions.
Have seen 2 kinds of go-arounds. Coming into KLGA the 787 had too much altitude so it did a left turn off Statin Island at 5000 feet then came back around and landed on ILS 04. Coming into KLAX from KLAS the altitude was good but speed was still above 300 knots. It initiated this go around while over the runway at maybe 300 feet up. It turned left and climbed to 3000 feet to go back to where it could pick up the ILS. Capt. Sim has solutions for problems that come up.
Idea on Dec 26: Slower aircraft may give Capt. Sim more time to think. I flew the CJ4 into KLGA with no go around like I had in the slick, swept wing airliner that gains all kinds of speed coming down. The Kingair may be even better.
It probably has the IQ of an 8 year old child… It did an approach but it went well below the glide slope and crashed. Another taxi job to the runway, it spun abound on the grass like a drunk taxi driver. It works pretty well finding way to the general parking after I land, and never forgets to set the parking brakes
Mine has no AI at all anymore. Whenever I choose to let the AI fly to an interesting destination, the first thing it does taking the thrust/throttle back to idle or zero, and beginning to fly a curve to direct the airplane at the destination.
Afterwards it flies with zero thrust until stalling into the ground and that´s it.
“AI flying.”
I don´t know if this is a bug and will ever be fixed, but AI flying is no longer functioning at all in my sim. Hm maybe I should send a ticket to Zen desk… This is clearly a bug; I know that it´s a bug because AI flying was always functioning good.
I have never tried AI landing, but the AI never before took the throttle back to ZERO as soon as switched on.
Over the next few days as I have time to work with AI flying, I will take careful note of my initial conditions when AI works and conducts whole flights as expected. My computer is quite a new and strong one. Cost around 3100 bucks this summer. I9 cpu water cooled and 3080 graphics card. We will figure this out. I am also interested in “where” AI flying is done. I am setting up a local cache with some California scenery blocks. Once ready, I will start an AI flight from NorCal to SoCal, then disconnect from the internet. If AI goes away, then maybe it is being computed at Microsoft. This would make sense since MS is busy making their cloud as interactive as possible. Our flights might be like a “deep learning” training set for bigger things that governments and corporations will need down the road.
Jan 5. Unable to establish local cache to see if AI works offline. Establishing cache never ends. Have to do control -alt -del and stop application.
There is a hack for getting AI flights with the 787 to complete with a higher chance of success (a good landing after establishing a reasonable approach speed on the first try). When the airliner is descending through 20000 feet, I deploy spoilers to full up. The AI pilot doesn’t like this and will add throttle, but it will keep speeds down as 10K feet is passed. Somewhere at around 6k feet when the AI pilot is configuring the plane for landing, he (or she) checks spoiler status, finds that they are up and and lowers them as part of putting gear down and putting out flap. So, I just have to do one thing. Otherwise, completely automatic flight. Deploying spoilers is not necessary on the CJ4. It doesn’t pick up speed with its straight wings.