Originally Posted by
Iceberg
I imagine it will come down to the math involved with the money. Cost of the technology to include the required testing and certification. Cost of continued certification and dispatchability. What’s the cost of communications with sufficient bandwidth and coverage to be able to control the aircraft remotely? How about securing that communication to avoid hostile takeover? How much traffic do you risk losing or will techies choose to fly your planes? What’s the difference in insurance costs? How much greater is the risk of lawsuits or is it reduced? Does this all overcome the cost of an FO? Is it a short term to cost recovery or longer term?
Does the technology on an airplane reduce the responsibility of its pilots? Sure, they aren’t navigating by sextant, but now they are operating into airspace that is increasingly congested due to technology tightening the safety buffers. It makes it a different job, but it still has its demands.
Elon Musk is putting up a network of something like 42,000 satellites. Now granted, those are so people in the remote regions of the world will have internet, but the point there is that with a similar network, global navigation/communication will be seamless. Again with the 350, but there is a page we can pull up that shows how many satellites we are navigating off of. I think I remember seeing 12 at one time. That control you are concerned about is a hurdle that is rapidly becoming moot. It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but there are a lot of guys reading these pages that are going to have to contend with the issue in a future negotiation.
Your contention vis a vis the congested airspace is a hail Mary. Those demands are few and far between. The only reason you have to make the HF calls right now going across the Atlantic is because the Oceanic controllers have managed to convince governments they are needed for backup. That ain't gonna last either. If you have just started flying international in the last 10 years, you have no idea how much it has been dumbed down.