19 ms·
Can Claude Fly a Plane?
- webprofusion 5mo ago"Can I Get Claude to Fly A Plane" isn't the same thing. Interesting though, would be a good test for different models but it relies on the test harness being good enough that a human could also use the same info to achieve the required outcome. e.g. if latency of input/output is too slow then nobody could do it.
- thewhitetulip 5mo agoHumans can also fly. Once.
- Findecanor 5mo agoDouglas Adams formulated how it would be possible for a human to fly continuously, though. http://extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php http://extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php
- thewhitetulip 5mo agoI have the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy but I never got around to reading it. I might have to read it next
- est 5mo ago> main issue seemed to be delay from what it saw with screenshots and api data and changing course. This is where I think Taalas-style hardware AI may dominate in the future, especially for vehicle/plane autopilot, even it can't update weights. But determinism is actually a good thing.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoThis is a limitation of LLM i/o which historically is a bit slow due to these sequential user vs assistant chat prompt formats they still train on. But in principle nothing stops you from feeding/retrieving realtime full duplex input/output from a transformer architecture. It will just get slower as you scale to billions or even trillions of parameters, to the point where running it in the cloud might offer faster end-to-end actions than running it locally. What I could imagine is a small local model running everyday tasks and a big remote model tuning in for messy situations where a remote human might have to take over otherwise.
- travisgriggs 5mo agoThe bit in the middle where it decides to make its control loop be pure P(roportional), presumably dropping the I and D parts, is interesting to me. Seems like a poor choice. I try to fly about once a week, I’ve never really tried to self analyze what my inputs are for what I do. My hunch is that there’s quite a bit of I(ntegral) damping I do to avoid over correcting, but also quite a bit of D(erivative) adjustments I do, especially on approach, in order to “skate to the puck”. Density going to have to take it up with some flight buddies. OR maybe those with drone software control loop experience can weigh in?
- aetherspawn 5mo agoDumping the I part instead of just tuning it properly is kind of an insane thing to do … speaking as an actual controls engineer
- gbgarbeb 5mo ago"Actual controls engineers" use PD loops (no I) all the time.
- rcxdude 5mo agoIn some circumstances, yes (usually when the system itself acts as an integrator somehow). Aircraft controls do not strike me as a system where this is sensible (trimming an aircraft is basically an integral control process). (d'oh, should have read the specific context: in the case mentioned, it is where the system acts as an integrator (pitch -> altitude), and so pure P control is pretty reasonable)
- bustah 5mo ago[flagged]
- userbinator 5mo agoThe real question is, can it keep the plane in one piece?
- thewhitetulip 5mo agoAnd which human will fly in an llm operated plane?!
- ccozan 5mo agoPlease welcome aboard of Airthropic Lines!
- Markoff 5mo agoI am sure some Ryanair customers would risk it for good price.
- stnikolauswagne 5mo agoGive the whole scheme some sort of mile multiplier and you will get high-freq fliers salivating over taking a llm flight with a 12 hour layover in Iceland to get to Portland from New York for those sweet miles.
- hdgvhicv 5mo agoKeeping a plane on the ground seems easy enough. Keeping in the air in one place would be impossible. Keeping any place in the air is only temporary.
- morpheuskafka 5mo agoSurely at least part of the issue here is that even an LLM operates in two digit tokens per second, not to mention extra tokens for "thinking/reasoning" mode, while a real autopilot probably has response times in tens of milliseconds. Plus the network latency vs a local LLM.
- linzhangrun 5mo ago[flagged]
- leptons 5mo agoDoes Claude know the plane isn't at the car wash?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- otabdeveloper4 5mo agoYes, but for a limited time only.
- mihaaly 5mo agoFriend participating in some sort of simulated glider tournament trained a neural network to fly one some way (don't ask details). I recall rules were changed to ban such, not because of him. Using Claude sounds overkill and unfit the same time.
- progx 5mo agoPrepare for landing "rate limit exceeded" (Error 429)" ;-)
- bottlepalm 5mo agoAI being able to quickly react to real time video input is the next thing. Computer use right now is painfully slow working off a slow screenshot/command loop.
- operatingthetan 5mo agoWe already have advanced autopilots that can fly commercial airliners. We just don't trust them enough to not have human pilots. I would trust the autopilot more than freaking Claude. We already do, every day.
- dewey 5mo agoI don't think anyone is suggesting we should do that...but it's still a fun project to play around with?
- codingconstable 5mo agoAgreed. I think thats a really fun way to test out Claude's ability to perform an abstract task it's probably not trained on, was nice to read
- freedomben 5mo agoyeah, I think GP misunderstood the nature of a thing like this. It's what hackers do, we play with things. Nobody is suggesting we replace the pilots in real planes with claude, certainly not OP
- Ekaros 5mo agoI think we can trust them to not have human pilots. It is just that having human in loop is very useful in not that rare scenarios. Say airfield has too much wind or fog or another plane has crashed on all runways... Someone needs to make decision what to do next. Or when there is some system failure not thought about. And well if they are there they might as well fly for practise. And no. I would not allow LLM in to the loop of making any decision involving actual flying part.
- LiamPowell 5mo agoThere's also the issue that when something goes wrong, many people will never trust an autopilot again. Just look at how people have reacted to a Waymo running over a cat in a scenario where most humans would have made the same error. There's now many people calling for self-driving cars to never be allowed on roads and citing that one incident.
- basfijneman 5mo agoIf planes can fly autopilot I assume claude can make a pretty good flight plan. Not sure if claude can react in time if shit hits the fan. "spawning 5 subagents"
- dnnddidiej 5mo ago"Rate limited try again in 10 seconds"
- jmward01 5mo agoThe question of 'can it fly' is clearly a 'yes, given a little bit of effort'. Flying isn't hard, autopilots have been around a long time. It is recognizing and dealing with things you didn't anticipate that is hard. I think it is more interesting to have 99% of flying done with automated systems but have an LLM focus on recognizing unanticipated situations and recovering or mitigating them.
- stnikolauswagne 5mo ago>I think it is more interesting to have 99% of flying done with automated systems but have an LLM focus on recognizing unanticipated situations and recovering or mitigating them. Seeing how Claude (or any current LLM) perform in even the most low-stake coding scenario I dont think I would ever set foot on a plane where the 1% of most risky scenarios are decided by one.
- amelius 5mo agoUsing an LLM doesn't mean it has to take the final decision. You can also use it as a warning system.
- stnikolauswagne 5mo agoIs there any indication that current warning systems are insufficient in any way that would be improved by LLM involvement?
- vidarh 5mo agoWe won't know that until someone has actually investigated how an LLM would do in those scenarios.
- stnikolauswagne 5mo agoThat sounds like a solution looking for a problem though, i see plenty of arguments against throwing critical safety information that are in charge of peoples lives into an LLM "just in case the result is better than the result that the current battle-hardened systems already provide"
- edu 5mo agoBesides the article, I think a big issue for this would be the speed of the input-decision-act loop as it should be pretty fast and Claude would introduce a lot of latency in it.
- nairboon 5mo agoLet's hope you don't reach Claude's session limit during approach, while trying to correct a slightly too steep descent angle.
- chha 5mo ago...or that the satellite network connection disconnects for some reason.
- Markoff 5mo agoI wouldn't really worry about flying, but more about taking off/landing. Related from December 2025: Garmin Emergency Autoland deployed for the first time https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/aviation-news/aviation-safety/garmin-emergency-autoland-deployed-first-time/ https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/aviation-news/aviation-sa...
- stinkbeetle 5mo agoAutoland has been used for 60 years and on much more complicated aircraft than that Beechcraft B200.
- nnevod 5mo agoI suppose part of the problem with autolanding a small plane is that they have much less intertia and are much more susceptible to conditions. Large planes are autolanded in normal conditions with oversight of qualified, capable and backed up operator, in harsh conditions they are not used, as far as I understand. Autoland systems in small planes are emergency systems to land plane with disabled operator in any conditions generally acceptable for flying in that plane.
- johntopia 5mo agoIf there's a timeline where claude can actually fly a plane, then operating nuclear reactors can be possible as well.
- blitzar 5mo agoSky King managed it, no reason claude shouldnt be able to.
- ramon156 5mo ago> CRASHED #2, different cause. Plane was stable in a slow descent but between fly.py invocations (~20 sec gap while I logged and computed the next maneuver) there was no active controller. Plane kept descending under its last commanded controls until it hit terrain at 26 ft MSL, 1.7 nm short of the runway. Lesson: never leave the controller idle in flight Gold
- monour 5mo agothey say already used in some missiles which hit school at current war by mistake
- vachina 5mo agoGive a stochastic text generator to physics. What can go wrong.
- amelius 5mo agoI see you are still in the stochastic parrot phase.
- dist-epoch 5mo agotry using codex-5.3-spark, it has much faster inference, might be able to keep up. and maybe a specialized different openrouter model for visual parsing.
- xuxu298 5mo agohaha, if can, would you dare to follow it? :D
- rkagerer 5mo agoYou could also use your forehead as a hammer, but it's likewise going to result in more pain than gain. I wouldn't trust Claude to ride my bike, so I certainly wouldn't board its flight.
- razorbeamz 5mo agoI'd imagine Claude is too slow to fly a plane above everything.
- hansmayer 5mo agoMate, we don't trust it to write an email or the code it generates. Why should we trust it to fly a plane?
- Paracompact 5mo agoAs most others have pointed out, the goal from here wouldn't be to craft a custom harness so that Claude could technically fly a plane 100x worse than specialist autopilots. Instead, what would be more interesting is if Claude's executive control, response latency, and visual processing capabilities were improved in a task-agnostic way so that as an emergent property Claude became able to fly a plane. It would still be better just to let autopilots do the work, because the point of the exercise isn't improved avionics. But it would be an honestly posed challenge for LLMs.
- kqr 5mo agoLots of people commenting seem to have not read the article. The author didn't hook Claude up directly with the controls, asking it to one-shot a successful flight. The author tried getting Claude to develop an autopilot script while being able to observe the flight for nearly live feedback. It got three attempts, and did not manage autolanding. (There's a reason real autopilots do that assisted with ground-based aids.)
- resiros 5mo agoI think you gave someone an idea for a new RL environment :) Probably it will be able to fly it in the next iteration.
- nelox 5mo agoSo Claude crashed because it was busy figuring out how to fly the plane?
- alex_duf 5mo agoClaude uses the wrong modality to be a piloting model. Latency is critical, and outputting tokens in the hope they take the action at the right time is kinda bonkers. You'd want all the data from the plane to be input neurons, and all the actions to be output neurons.
- Nevin1901 5mo agoI wonder if using a model with a higher TOK/s would yield improvements, as the model will have faster feedback loops
- ikari_pl 5mo ago"Approaching for landing" "500 Our Servers Are Experiencing High Load" "500 Our Servers Are Experiencing High Load" "500 Our Servers Are Experiencing High Load"
- teeray 5mo ago“Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate... Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces?“[0] —Sully Sullenberger [0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters. p. 188
- penguin_booze 5mo agoI hope vibe coding enthsiasts are listening.
- gcatellani2k 5mo agoI‘d say the same holds true for other use cases and should not only target vibe coders. Eg self driving cars. Level 2 is fine and level 5 is good, it‘s in between these two where I‘m afraid of as people are distracted enough and not able enough to gather what‘s happening around them to react in every situation.
- black_13 5mo ago[dead]