Originally Posted by
Mesabah
The military drones have a very different mission, and are far and way more complicated than a single pilot aircraft would need to be.
I don't know why we are having an argument about whether the tech exists or not, it most certainly does. With 3D chips, machine learning computers are about the size of an iPhone, and cost less than $500 to make. 5 years ago, it would have taken the computer the size of a football field, and $10 million plus to drive a car by itself. The technology for single pilot has been here only very recently. The focus should be on making sure we don't allow the regs to change to make this possible. If the FAA allows 121 single pilot, in 5 years we will be transitioning to single pilot, count on it, even the current fleet can be retrofitted for single pilot in just a few years.
Do you realize the hoops that airlines have to go through just to get an EFB on board? But, you're absolutely right, we need to make sure the regs don't change.
After the Germanwings crash, I think the talk of single pilot operations will likely die down. Will the flying public accept a single pilot or drone passenger aircraft? Maybe, UNTIL the first accident, until the first ISIS hack into the datalink, until first report of a ground station losing power and CNN reports "no one was controlling the aircraft for 10 minutes!" Does the technology exist? Yes, of course it does. The technology exists to turn the ISIS strongholds into glass, but we don't use it.