Out of curiosity, what do you fly? Our autopilot would probably cause at least one crash and several FAA violations every 4-day trip, if we never intervened or exercised human judgment. I'm not being dramatic, the AP is really THAT bad.

I also have a hard time buying that airlines will get shrunk down to 1 pilot. With 2 pilots we can turn a jet in 22 minutes on the schedule; take that down to 1 pilot and that'd be at least 45 minutes. 5-6 leg days would never happen. I could maybe see them reducing crew for wide bodies flying over the ocean, at least for the enroute portion, but definitely not domestic flights. Also, pilots are relatively cheap, considering the pay is loosely $1/passenger/hour of flight for FOs and $1.50 per for the CA. I get the narrow profit margins, but to put it in perspective, TSA is $5 per passenger, one-way. After they've lobbied to cut TSA and shown that fully automated planes can operate for a few months without getting violated or over-Ging in towering CB every time they fly into CLT in the summer, then I'll be worried.