That's another HUGE factor that nobody every thinks of....

If industry (mfgs but especially airlines) start spewing diarrhea of the mouth about pending unmanned airliners the training pipeline will dry up in a heartbeat.... nobody in their right mind is going to spend $100K and 7+ years of their life to get a major airline job if it's all going to go away, or they even suspect it might go away during their career.

Even if airlines pay for ab-initio training, it's still a long game with dues paying and poor schedules early on. The airlines would literally be parking planes for lack of pilots, or more likely they would have to offer very significant long-term financial incentives to keep the noobs coming... like lifetime no furlough protection, or maybe a lavish DB pension if furloughed.

Flying can be fun but if I didn't think it was going to last I'd spend my time, money, and sweat on developing a more reliable career. Even worse it wouldn't just be the noobs who vanish, anyone on the younger side would probably start developing alternative career prospects as well and eventually walk off the job. Probably on Dec 20th.

So there's this "valley of death" in the human terrain which they (industry) will have to bridge. The valley starts at a plausible announcement of single or zero pilot airliner development with some sort of time frame and ends on the the date when the entire fleet can be fully autonomous. That's a wide valley.

But I'm still not worried until trains can ditch engineers and Tesla can develop an autopilot that won't miss key visual cues.

Operating small unmanned planes/helos in limited operational environments is not a concern or relevant to us... airliners can pretty much do that now, the issue is decision making, adult supervision, redundancy, and trouble-shooting enroute. It's not a question of can it be done, it's a question of can it be done safely and economically... and I think the proponents are waaaay ahead of themselves on that last.

Tesla for example is trying to do a "work around" on their strict liability for autonomous operations. They call it an "autopilot", but with a straight face they tell customers to "keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road" (wink, wink). The results have been entirely predictable. They only got as far as they did because no regulatory boundaries exist yet for what they are doing (although congress is about push back on their misleading marketing techniques). Unlike Teslas, airliners will have to be certified in detail before they fly...