You're confusing low-intensity, politically-sensitive, stand-off meddling with war. Nobody in the military is making that mistake.

The priority for combat aircraft is winning against peer competitors. They can use MQ-9 if they need to bomb third-world ground formations and ensure none of our people get hurt.


You can do that with manned aircraft. Getting rid of pilots doesn't make it faster. From a technology readiness level, supersonic airliners or even scramjets are far more plausible than un-piloted pax aircraft. Artificial Generalized Intelligence does not exist, and no one knows how to make one. To say nothing of the ethical, certification, and reliability/safety issues if it did exist.


Maybe someday. But that infrastructure is going to cost about $1 Billion per mile (in the flatlands). The flight levels are free, and you can stack and offset planes. You need to break this down to the basics: Greed. Who's going to pay for it, and what do they expect to get out of it? If you can't answer that, it's not happening.

Kind of like going to the moon... we did that to beat the Ruskies. If Uncle Sugar is going to write the check, he'll need a darn good reason. If businesses are going to write the check, they'll need to be able to articulate technology readiness and an ROI timeline to the BoD.


I'm not saying it's not going to happen, I'm saying many folks don't understand all the hurdles. I am by no means going to ignore history and make blanket statements about what cannot happen in the future.

Frankly I'm a tad disappointed in the lack of progress in aerospace and space since I was a kid. I expected more by now. Politics and economics got in the way of cool whiz-bang new stuff.

Huh? :confused: Putting a Pilot who has specific local knowledge of a harbor, aboard a ship when that ship is operating into or out of the harbor is nothing remotely like what's being proposed.

With single pilot, they would put in a second pilot virtually, during high workloads. That may even not be necessary.

the pilots are put on board because they have specific knowledge of the channels, procedures, markings hazards and other local conditions of that particular location, that the crew of an oceangoing vessel wouldn't have, and couldn't be expected to have. The pilot isn't put on board because they are shorthanded by 1 person on the bridge.

The current system is even better: Two pilots on board, and during periods of low workload, they “virtually” go to one pilot while the other one takes a nap. :D

Yes that's an apples to oranges comparison with aviation. No relevance.

They don't do it by remote control either, in fact they occasionally die getting on and off the ships.

As long as Teslas keep hitting semi trucks and swerving into concrete barriers, our jobs are safe.

Wasn't NextGen and RNP introduced back in '96? Yet here we are, still getting vectored for a 20nm ILS in 2018.

Mgt: "How can we seamlessly enhance trafflic flow and improve our approach capabilities?"
ATC/FAA/Pilots: "Spend money."
Mgt: "Nevermind."

Our airline has an RNP 0.1 approach to almost every airport we fly into. How often do we get to use them? Maybe 5% of the time because no one else can.

Come on man! Kit Darby was just dusting off his briefcase!

None of what you said is factually correct, especially unmanned cargo ops? That is simply untrue. We are still flying 40 year old C-130Hs.