Originally Posted by O2pilot

Comparing a car to a plane is ridiculous. They have been working on self-driving cars for over a decade. They still haven’t deployed them yet. You can teach a teenager how to drive a car in 5 minutes its that simple. Making the jump to an airliner is an exponential leap, and its not tech that is the limiting factor, its the infrastructure. Boeing and Airbus would first have to start designing a plane to fly autonomously, which nobody will buy now. Also ATC and the existing human-powered system won’t integrate well with autonomous planes. The risk factor is basically ZERO for aviation, and much higher for cars. Also you over-estimate how expensive human pilots are. We are 7-8% of the total cost of a ticket. How much more is it going to cost to redesign planes to operate without humans. More than 7-8% of an existing plane for sure. How long will airlines have autonomous planes sitting around because nobody will fly in them. How long will manufacturers build them if airlines stop buying them? If just ONE crashes, then NOBODY will ever get on one again. Comparing cars to planes is ridiculous. I got this from listening to my brother-in-law who is an engineer at Waymo (you can google them). He said 30 years at the earliest for commercial aviation, and it won’t happen first in the US. He said its been a monumental effort with Billions of dollars of investments to just get a fricking car to drive by itself. He also told me when I asked “Why is it so important to self-drive a car. Its not that hard”. He said the #1 reason is the TIME OF THE DRIVER. When you commute to work, and its an hour is many cities, that time is virtually wasted. You could be working on something, sleeping, doing whatever, but NOT driving. That makes it very valuable to people. People on a plane already aren’t doing anything. So whether there are pilots, or not, it doesn’t matter to them.

No investor, venture capitalist, or startup founder wants to spend that kind of money, time and effort to knock 7-8% off the cost of an industry. There isn’t enough money there. Economics are what keeps us in our seat. Yeah, if there was some massive pilot shortage and 30% of all flights had to be cancelled and they needed to solve the problem of lack of pilots, there would be enough impetus to do this, but there isn’t.

There are just enough pilots who are worried about being replaced because someone at McDonalds lost their job to a machine that takes a customer’s order, so airline pilot must be next.

The level of self-importance of airline pilots never ceases to amaze me.

I only have 15 years left as a pilot. I’m not worried about it at all.