Originally Posted by
Rotorover
Axl, you're exactly right. I was an Air Force UAS pilot during my furloughs and my take is that the military will soon conquer the dreaded "see and avoid" problem that has plagued the UAS industry with a "sense and avoid" technology. At that point UAS will be safer than manned aircraft as far as ability to avoid mid air collisions. The FAA will then allow UAS routine access to the NAS and the civilian market will explode. Bandwidth is the most critical issue that will prevent the airline industry from going pilotless. There is not enough of it for the public and government to rationalize and accept giving all of it to the airline industry (yes,maintaining a link to every airliner out there would take every bit of it). Military, CBP, local law enforcement, Dept of Forestry, Amazon, CNN, Verizon, etc. will all claim a need for bandwidth and will have priority. What's left will certainly not be used by the passenger industry. It will take a monumental leap in technology to increase available bandwidth before our jobs are threatened. That being said, overseas cargo industry may well be going pilotless within our career time frame, and the First Officer may go the way of the Second Officer. For what it's worth, every single Global Hawk landing I ever saw was as good as my best landing and it never had a bad landing. I, on the other hand...
Dont forget, beyond the existing UAS example, the DOD’s official multi-year foray into this topic recently concluded with the ALIAS system field tests by DARPA on the major weapon systems (essentially your standard R2D2), which stopped short of fully automating anything. It’s a stepping stone but the researchers acknowledged the hurdles of “pilotless” were not even worth pursuing at this point. So I don’t lose sleep at night. As long as they wait until we’re all old enough to rate a robot FO, I wouldn’t mind, as long as it laughs at my jokes and doesn’t drink all the coffee without starting another pot. You know, the basics.