Originally Posted by
ccb2000
Like it or not folks, drones are on their way. The first commair industry to succumb will be freight. Drones are a financial win for company's bottom line. To say that it won't happen is blind ignorance. I think 10 years from now, it will be starting to happen. The folks in Edwards AFB already have a drone that can take-off, fly an international route, aerial refuel, and RTB completely autonomously. The FAA is going to have experimental drone routes in the US airspace within the next 2 years. And yes, Google has cars that drive completely on their own. I see them every week on hwy 101.
We are probably the last generation of pilots as we know it. Let's just hope we will make it through a career of it before tech makes us obsolete.
Funny, I have yet to see unmanned freight trains or container ships. And which drone are you talking about that can refuel "completely autonomously"?
Drones and robots have great application in high risk combat zones. But their attrition rate is high for a variety of reasons. Much higher than the attrition rate of manned vehicles. That's an acceptable risk in an environment where things are blowing up all over the place. Not so acceptable in your average peacetime environment. Also, unlike a lot of military applications, pilots in civilian cargo aircraft are not a limiting factor on mission accomplishment. FedEx doesn't need to have its aircraft loiter at high altitudes for days at a time, fly halfway across the world and back without landing, or pull 15Gs to defeat a SAM threat. It just needs a couple relatively cheap monkeys in the cockpit to make realtime decisions in the somewhat dynamic environment of international airspace.
Until shipping companies are willing to pull engineers from trains running on a track, or crews from ships sailing at slow speeds across wide open oceans, don't expect that they will be too eager to pull pilots from cockpits.