Originally Posted by
Whiplash6
That's exactly what I'm going to tell you... because a computer COULD do that.. and not submerge the aircraft in the process.
A computer wouldn't need to take time to ask the controller where are the surrounding airports; it would already know. It wouldn't have to call for and run checklists; they would be completed in a blink of an eye. It wouldn't have to take a wild ass guess on whether it could make a return back to La Guardia to land on a runway instead of on a river; it would know precisely how far it could glide given the state of the aircraft and the environmental conditions.
I'm not knocking Sully. He did a great job. Far better than most human pilots could have. But better than a computer? Nah
And what happens when the computer gets damaged? Or what happens when the computer gets confused? Or when the computer gets conflicting data input?
AI is still a few decades out from being able to handle things like this. Yes a computer can fly a plane including taxi point to point under normal conditions. So can a monkey to be honest about it. Flying isn't that hard of a job.
However when there is an emergency, or a critical decision has to be made, ADM, only a human can do that with the level of technology that we currently have. And humans will make mistakes and not have a 99.999999999% success rate in their decision making. However, until AI is perfected, there must be a human able to take over and make decisions if the need arises. In a few decades, that may not be the case. But for the foreseeable future, a human is still needed despite the fact that the technology can handle all normal operations on its own.
We don't really get paid to fly, we get paid to make decisions.