Yeah this has and will continue to be forum fodder for decades.

The whole "they are working on politless airliners!" Chicken Littles almost seem to want it to happen so they can get credit for bearing the news to us uninformed.

The fact is they have had the tech for pilotless airliners for a long time. There is nothing magical about remote controlled airplanes. The problem is they can't do it for anywhere near the same cost at anywhere near the same level of safety.

The software side of it (to get it to that point) doesn't exist yet. But even if it were here today, and free, the hardware side of engineering that much redundancy into every single system would be financially crushing. They could build one tomorrow. But it will be a very long time before its economically feasable to start introducing them into the 121 system in any significant numbers, if at all.