Originally Posted by
Lowslung
Let's not forget that it's not just the airplanes that need to be capable, but the entire aviation infrastructure around the world will need to be upgraded. ATC will need to be able to effectively take some of the workload off of the single pilot or assume all of the workload if that single pilot is incapable for whatever reason. Traditional aircraft will need to be upgraded in order to participate with new "see and avoid" systems that will be necessary on the newly designed airplanes. Airlines pursuing this technology will undoubtedly need to hire more dispatchers to effectively monitor and provide support for the overloaded single pilots in the air. Communications, navigation, and datalink systems need to be 100% reliable and 100% secure. They will need to work perfectly in the face of hacking, jamming, 100 year solar storms, minimally trained third world operators, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. Airports themselves will need to be extensively modified before anything like autonomous operations can take place on them. All of this and more will take time and, more importantly, lots and lots of money. Is it likely to happen eventually? Probably. Is that someday in our generation's ot even the next generation's future? Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but given the hurdles and the costs, I don't think so. It'll be a long time before the cost of making single pilot/ autonomous ops feasible is lower than just continuing to pay pilots, distasteful as that is to airline management types.
This will be their ultimate downfall should any company decide to be the ‘test dummy’ and go forward with this. Management types. These people are so out of touch with reality with regard to the ENORMOUS technological, financial, regulatory, and safety hurdles, as well as the hurdle of public perception, for this to be remotely possible. But all they see is money.
The first airline that tries this WILL have an accident with one of these things, and when that happens the public will be absolutely terrified of getting on one of these things again. Then the ensuing fallout begins when the airline loses billions and eventually folds. If multiple airlines have these aircraft, then they will probably fold too. People are already scared enough to fly, and we think having robots fly them around is gonna change that? It’s just way, way, way too risky to try this, even if it’s still 100 years out.
I’ve said this many times before and some say I’m insane, but I believe this to be reality: it will never happen. Not with passengers. Maybe in freight, but even with freight I doubt it.
Some people will say ‘well we’ve been doing this with unmanned military aircraft for at least 2 decades now.’ And they’re right, we have. But the military and civilian environments are vastly different when it comes to acceptance of risk. There’s no comparison. It’s foolish to try this in the civilian realm. Like the poster above alluded to, until they design software that is 100% reliable, and doesn’t crash, doesn’t ’bug up,’ doesn’t do weird things every once in a while that nearly every device that has software eventually does, then it’s a no-go. These airplanes would go through a long period of design, flight testing, certification, and very likely redesign all over again because the original prototypes were flawed in many ways. The price tag of these airplanes would be huge in the end. I mean it’s taking Boeing 10-15 years to get the 777X certified for crying out loud, and that’s with 2 pilots required. And then look at all the problems they’ve had with the 737 max. Not to mention all the Boeing fuxx ups with the max along the way and being deceitful about it. And we’re gonna trust them or other manufacturers to build a completely new design that is without pilots?
Every time this subject gets revisited every few months to weeks on these boards, I just roll my eyes as it’s a pipe dream. And anyone who mentions it or puts out an article about it, is usually a ‘tech geek/guru’ and isn’t a pilot. Airline management would LOVE that, they salivate at the idea of getting rid of pilots. Thankfully airline management types aren’t engineers. How scary would that be? I could go on and on deeper as to why it’s not gonna happen, but I’ve got a deadhead flight (that has 2 pilots onboard) to catch.