Originally Posted by Bucking Bar

Had a passenger, a school teacher, query me on "why do we even have pilots" as we talked while waiting for equipment to arrive.

Had a bleeds off take off to clear ships in the harbor, then a couple of rapidly changing clearances to get us around an arriving American 757 they did not have radar coverage on and some VFR traffic not talking to anyone. Flying back, across an ocean, solar storms were effecting HF. There was a lot of blow off which had light turbulence (doesn't paint on radar) and as we got closer to our destination more and more weather to work around. Mostly we were able to keep the seat belt sign off, but, we had to suspend cabin service once. The cabin temperature controllers were doing their usual game of getting cold when fed with a lot of bleed and warming up as the throttles came back. ATC wanted everything from 330 to 150 as they tried to sequence traffic into JFK for the VOR DME to 13L, changed to 22, back to 13L, can you take the right? ... instead of an 8 quartering headwind we had about a 19 knot quartering tailwind, but the tail wind component was within limits. Runway was a little wet. Glad we used autobrakes 3 to get stopping early & flaps 40 to slow for the RJ that threw out the brakes once he cleared the VOR (nothing wrong with that, esp with the slight tail wind). Then the taxi in was fouled up by a foreign carrier who had a difficult time getting their taxi worked out after a gate change.

Uneventful day at work for a professional airline crew, but a nearly impossible task for a drone operator. How does a drone operator have the situational awareness to work around weather that they've not flown in? How does the drone operator know that row 11 gets cold, or feel the relationship between temperature and bleed air output. When does the drone operator suspend cabin service, or know to drop flaps 40 and swing wide to give the guys ahead a bit more time and thus avoid a go around? What does the drone operator do when traffic in front of him suddenly swings back out of the ramp without calling ground because there is no gate available?

IMHO there are too many variables in the environment to make a drone operation successful, either from a safety standpoint or a passenger comfort standpoint.