rickair7777

They might do it as part of a much broader context, such a complete revamp of the ATC and aviation system in the US.

The problem is that you have to overcome a lot of regulatory and cultural obstacles, which can clearly be done IF there's a potential for great benefit. But what's the benefit? Not safety by any means...to achieve safety with automation equivalent to what we have to today would probably be impossibly expensive (or impossible in the near term).

The FAA, by mandate, CANNOT accept a regulatory change which reduces current safety levels. So Congress would have to order them to to do so, and that's obviously not a popular election year platform!

Even so that's not absolutely impossible, US airlines are statistically very safe so if the public was offered an 80% reduction in airfares they might give up one statistical decimal point. But crew costs are about 25% of total costs so knowing that automation is always going to be at least a little more expensive than non-automated hardware the best you could get is maybe a 20% fare reduction (not even that really since the airlines will pocket as much of the savings as they can).

Also if you're looking to trade a little safety for big fare reductions, beware! The airlines would ultimately make out like bandits, but not so much the public. If you greatly reduce the cost of flying, then more people will fly! But guess what our national aviation infrastructure is getting near capacity (especially the big hubs) so once it's maxed out fares will shoot right back up as travelers essentially have to outbid each other for seats. But the airlines still enjoy the lower cost of automation$$$