For what it’s worth, I don’t see the biggest danger of this to be aircraft/pilot related. When talking about advanced networks the biggest danger is network security.

When you automate the second pilot via a remote network, it becomes possible for someone else to intercept and augment that network. It’s the same challenge with the concept of a pilotless aircraft. Hacking a network of pressurized tin cans carrying 100+ people or several tons of cargo gives you a nice little missile to play around with.

The largest argument I normally hear is that “the military has done this for years and never had an incident.” That we know of. And for the record, the military is a small network of several hundred drones that are operated discretely. The pool of people knowledgeable in the operation of the advanced networking of these drones is relatively small, and the work required for someone to intercept and augment the network is high, with I high probability of data interference detection.

Make the same system commonplace and widely deployed across tens of thousands of daily operations and the chance of network intrusion detection goes way down. Additionally, the Regs don’t keep up with the ever-changing technology marketplace. Certifying new, more secure data management systems for aviation is a grueling process. The yield would be that hackers would have access to older coding, technology, and systems that would over time become easier to manipulate.

How that manipulation affects an aircrafts operation is to be determined. But anyone questioning the validity of data systems security need only to ask how hard it would be to bring an entire TRACON to the floor by precisely placing and activating several VHF transmitters on the right frequencies in the right places. Even Guard isn’t safe. The reason this DOESN’T happen is because it would take a serious, concerted effort of labor. An automated airliner network would only take access to a port on the network, which could happen from the comfort of ones couch.

WHEN the airlines, politicians, and manufacturers debut single pilot airplanes and pilotless airplanes, I foresee the first casualty to be the cause of a nefarious individual with an axe to grind, and access to the network.

In data management systems, it’s not if, it’s WHEN will a breach occur.