Trains are VERY easy to automate, compared to aircraft. Trucks are harder than trains. Elon Musk is committed to replacing truck drivers. It will save 2.5m? lives per year, if all trucks worldwide are automated. The efficiency gains will be very, very high.

This is a big reason why we need GBI (Guaranteed Basic Income). When almost no one has a job, due to automation/AI, people will need money to live on, and to buy stuff.

 

The environment trains operate in is much less dynamic than that aircraft operate in.

...and freight trains still have both a Conductor and an Engineer.

 

Just because something is technologically feasible doesn't mean the economics will make sense. Just look at the Concorde. I bet every new pilot back in the late 60's/early 70's figured they'd be retiring on supersonic aircraft.

 

This. The devil is in the details. We have not been on board to hand-fly the plane for a long time. We are onboard to make decisions and provide redundancy.

Can it be done today? Yes

Can it be done today with Equivalent Safety? No. The last 0.001% is the real hurdle, and that's where humans come in. We're flexible and creative, and AI isn't there yet.

Can it be done economically today? No. Too much required redundancy, and too many CANX flights due to WX, MX, computer flashes a code, etc. Frankly cheaper to just pay pilots to do it for the time being.

It will have to be a special-built airliner. Just because Boeing is studying it doesn't mean they're building it, or could build it.

Once you solve all of that, you have to get regulatory approval, and re-design the ATC system. That's 30 years and about a trillion dollars right there.

I understand this is scary if you're an liberal arts major, but anybody with a background in systems engineering, computer science, or even government knows this is a lot harder of a problem than it seems.

People are OK with fatal highway accidents. But they have very low tolerance for fatal airliner accidents (it's a control thing). They will have zero tolerance for fatal accidents involving unmanned airliners. The people who would build, approve, and operate such things know this. They will most likely not launch any half-assed experiments. Long ways to go.

Big ROI on automated trucks (millions of truck drivers).

Big ROI on self-driving cars (billions of drivers, who could make better use of their time watching jerry springer).

Not much ROI on eliminating airline pilots, orders of magnitude less (fewer than 100K airline pilots in the US). But the cost of replacing us is orders of magnitude higher than for automating cars & trucks.

 

Economics (and government) got in the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1QEj09Pe6k

 

Uh no... that's not how it works. I love Star Trek as much as the next nerd but their portrayal of economics is completely off.

Someone has to design the AI, the machines, build them, test them, install them, monitor them, and repair them. Those are all new jobs.

 

The inaccuracies in that video were too many to count.

 

Me too, mainly for the same reason FedEx was still flying 727s up until several years ago.

 

This happened on December 17, 1903!



So in 114 years we went from a 120' long hop across a remote field in North Carolina to transcontinental flights and space shuttles roaming the space.
I'd say history shows something vastly opposite to what you're describing.

I didn't start this thread because I believe 'the sky is falling' the way boiler implied. I simply think that young people contemplating aviation as their profession need to be aware of the possibility they'll be flying single-seat, long haul flights 25-35 years down the road with a monitoring pilot assisting from the ground.
Again, I didn't say tomorrow but yes, one day it'll become inevitable. ..and several decades later even this single-pilot job will become obsolete.

Maybe some of the former navigators and flight engineers would've selected a different career path had they been able to predict the rapid advancement of aircraft technology?

.

 

And saved everyone on board. Don't tell me a computer could do that. The only way this will happen is if airlines are dumb enough to assume the immense risks with this. Wait till one of these kills 200 passengers in the middle of America. Cargo maybe, pax? More than a century away.