Originally Posted by RJ85FO
It stops in about 15-20 more years when the pilots are no longer necessary and the aircraft fly themselves. This is what airlines want, this is what the manufacturers want. Even the FAR's support it. Currently they say that "no person may act as...."
Dispatch will control all the aircraft movements from their armchairs in an office building. Labor will be out of the question and profits will be restored. The technology exists.
Not in the next 50 years...
The military has a pretty good operational safety rate with UAV's...not counting combat losses, they run something like 97-98%. That means that 98% return successfully. To put that into perspective, out of the approx 10,000 daily airline departures in the us, only 200 would end up in smoking holes ON ANY GIVEN DAY! BTW, each hull loss costs about $1Billion when all is said and done. $1B x 200/day x 365...well never mind, we'd use up all of our airplanes in a week or two.
From an engineering perspective, you would have to get something like a 99.99999 (approx) safety rate out of UAV's to achieve airline compatibity. Any engineer knows that the last 1% improvement in statistical reliability is harder than the first 99%, to say nothing of improving 6 or 7 decimal places!
Besides, you would have to have a means for ATC to direct the airplanes in flight...basically you would be creating a ready-made fleet of thousands of gi-normous cruise missiles loitering over the continental US just waiting for the first terrorist @-hole who can hack the system!
Not gonna happen. Save your anxiety for the REAL problems in the airline industry.