I feel that there are many more things that plane manufacturers need to iron out before concentrating their efforts on unmanned airplanes.

The general public would value improved speed of airtravel a whole lot more than pilotless airplanes. Spending less time in the tube would be gravy for them, and even better for airlines since it means more flights and or better utilization of aircraft. Cargo moving faster would also be amazing.

Fuel technologies need to be improved. Our general public is increasingly more aware and worried in this area, and greener planes would be up on their list of wants.

I could list more things. Lol... but I suspect that no customer of any airline goes like, gee, you know what I really need right about now as I’m barreling down the air in this tube, is for the pilots to be gone and replaced by a computer. Especially since they know that this won’t in anyway affect their ticket prices.

I suspect that in the future you’re going to have a sort of pilot engineer onboard the aircraft. Someone who knows how to fly, but at the same time, it won’t be a maverick that will dazzle you with their stick and rudder skills. It’ll be a guy who is very intricately familiar with the systems of the plane and can trouble shoot any problem with the software. This will go on for a while until he is slowly phased out. But I still think this is at least 50 years away. The magnitude of the systems and testing that must be done is still very massive, along all of the safety mechanisms and back up systems that must be figured out. I suspect that by the time this happens, a great part of our world will have gone down this rabbit hole and our landscape will be very different.

Things don’t happen in vacuums or as single events. If you have large planes that can fly themselves, it means that we have taken a big stride as a species in other areas as well. Remember, the airplane itself had to come after the car, because we needed an engine that was light enough that fly with.

Anyways, let’s see what this “new” Boeing plane will look like because Airbus is certainly pushing the envelope of technology with those big screens on the A350 that display the same information that a 320 did like 30 years ago, and same goes for the 787 and C-Series. All great planes, but certainly moving at a snails pace on their way to being fully autonomous, and certainly don’t warrant all these threads on APC regarding the subject. Lol