Originally Posted by
fadec
Those are technical problems. The chain of trust, authentication, and even multiple party verification of commands can be maintained with cryptography. Spoofed signals (even from a suicidal pilot) can be defeated. The computer can be programmed to execute a fail-safe if it detects something fishy. The engineering is tedious yet trivial.
But we don't trust humans. We trust motives such as greed and self preservation. Taking a pilot out of the cockpit doesn't mean we're trusting a machine. It means we're trusting different motives. I'd sooner trust a machine than the motives of a man in the ground. So I say it's either 1) two pilots, 2) one pilot, one ground controller, and one non-overridable on-board autonomous computer with fail-safes for command disagreement or authentication failures, or 3) a totally autonomous on-board computer.
There are decisions I make on the line, that could never be programmed into an autonomous system. On time departure performance would basically drop to zero in a full auto aircraft. An AI can fly the plane from gate to gate, respond to any flight emergency, but it can't make management decisions that keep the airline running smoothly. So there always has to be a human upfront. Physically flying the aircraft, and most ATC functions are coming to end in the future, when that happens, depends on the government.