Are you on reserve? You'd have to do that math for the entire pilot group on a fleet to get an actual cost benefit of eliminating them all.

Also you have to consider the cost to develop and implement such a program. In the very long term it would obviously have a huge potential payoff but you have to get over this very large hurdle of re-engineering the entire system before you can can even do a single revenue flight with one pilot. Cost has to born by someone, the fed will not be interested unless they are forced to, politicians won't be interested until voters are protesting in the streets DEMANDING they eliminate airline copilots RIGHT NOW. Manufacturers will advance automation but their shareholders will not tolerate their spending significant sums on something with no clear need or timeline for ROI.

It can happen but it's going to evolutionary, and something is going to happen to push over the really big implementation hurdle. Nobody has an incentive to do that (airlines definitely have an incentive to let other people do it for them, if they can find a willing sucker).

I can only read 2 paragraphs because I don’t have a login. But I believe I read the full article from the WSJ a couple weeks ago and don’t remember reading they were going single pilot. The article states they are transferring more control to automation, leaving pilots to more aptly assimilate information. At least that’s how I remember reading it and that’s what the first 2 paragraphs indicate. You said Boeing has flipped on the issue and they’re saying single pilot. I don’t believe your quoted article states that.

Flying a commercial airliner is so much more that simple control inputs. Anyone who has been in a flight deck during a very busy time while the plane was ‘on autopilot’ knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Well the whole world is moving to Data. I don’t think there’s any profession that’s going to not be affected. I recently read an article in Vanity Fair that said 2030 will make 2019 look primitive. Even actors can be replaced by CGI. And another article has Elon Musk saying AI will code itself one day.

No that is using 500 hours a year. The median cost per pilot here is about $305,000 a year (my total was slightly under that). The doubling in pay and lack of qualified pilots in training has definitely increased the push towards this.

We're going to get to a point where traffic levels demand computers control aircraft. It's going to happen initially with the small UAV and air taxi market around 2023-2024 when everyone goes ADS-B compliant. Over time that will prove the tech and it will move into bigger and bigger airframes.

For a long time aviation was strictly dominated by old school group think and technology. Example the Lycoming engine. But what's happened is tech companies have now got a bug in their ear and engineers the world over are turning their attention to it.

You are right that things happen really slowly from a regulatory standpoint and for sure this Boeing thing will definitely give regulators here a long pause when it comes to approving any sort of autonomous large scale activities.

I think you read too much wired magazine. Whether or not commercial UAVs or air taxis even have a viable market is still up for debate.

Many really smart people have issued dire warnings about code that can reprogram/update/improve itself. They even made a series of successful movies about it (starring Ahnaold).

Such code could potentially run away and have unintended consequences, or hypothetically if you develop generalized AI to replace humans it could become self-aware, at which point it would almost assuredly develop it's own motives and priorities. Better hope your new god is benign and loving. This is not a joke at all, I think Elon is one of the high-profile people who has issued such warnings.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that a system which could function in a manner indistinguishable from (or better) than a human would not be self-aware. In fact it seems more likely that not.

Technologically that last is a very far leap from the learning software of today. The danger is that it's likely that the human mind cannot conceive/create a system to fully replicate itself. Therefore a system complex enough to evolve on it's own towards that goal will be inherently unpredictable by us. We'd basically have to turn it lose and see what happens... and we might not like what happens.

Containment you say? You think it's not smart enough to find a weakness in it's cage, or just talk somebody into making a mistake? Bet humanity's future on it?

There is obviously a potental market... a small one, between key nodes which don't involve flight over residential neighborhoods. What helos do today, maybe more of it if the costs are low. I'm sure it will do well in Dubai.

But for the whole thing to take off economically they REALLY need massive economy of scale, and people may not be willing to have these thing buzzing in and around their neighborhoods, over their back yards, all hours of the day and night.

I think the big hurdle (show-stopper more likely) is public acceptance, not of the product itself but of the environmental impact. Don't believe me? Try to get a permit for a second-story addition to your urban house.

Good, fast, cheap, you can have any two. For UAM they need good, fast, cheap, quiet and safe. And maybe invisible. Good Luck.

The industrial revolution was successful because the bosses wanted it to happen and the people had no say in it. It could not have happened today, at least not as a *revolution*. Industrial Evolution perhaps. Today we have voters, NIMBY's, activist judges, and plaintiff's lawyers.

Wired? No. NASA...yes.

https://youtu.be/pl1boIlt8xs is a good place to start.

This is a fairly long podcast:
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/nisv-podcast-live-air-taxis

It talks about some of the stuff I've mentioned.

A good general reference site:
https://www.nasa.gov/uam

NASA is calling it "the grand challenge", that is the traffic management system being designed and computer operated.

And yes I agree...will these be as cheap to operate as they are making them sound? As with anything I remain doubtful but them being electrically powered helps a lot. But that wasn't my point I was getting across, it's that NASA has been involved in researching computer controlled traffic management software since 2014 and late last year was their first test...targeting a 2024 implementation date for these drone and air taxi services. And the logical next step is combining something called FIM which has been in the works for a couple years...you may remember all our testing done in CLT with gate holds etc, that was the second phase of that.

https://www.aviationsystemsdivision....cal/atd1.shtml

It's basically aircraft spacing off each other vs via ATC directives. ADS-B is the missing link in allowing all of this stuff to come together.

Yes I've read battery technology is also limiting this

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/20988/...sional-fantasy

Here’s a really good article. The authors point is not that this theoretically can never happen, just not by 2023. He references the NASA research too.