Originally Posted by rickair7777

There's juice left. I have extensive IT education and experience, as well as experience with government and business management. Worst case you might see transport category cargo planes go single pilot in a few decades.

The AI required to reasonably replace most human capabilities does not exist. The industry has also recently realized that they don't know how to get there. The systems which attempt to "model" human capabilities are non-deterministic and therefore non-certifiable. Do some reading on the current status of autonomous road vehicles.

In addition to that, there are a wide variety of other legal, ethical, political, public perception, and financial challenges to automated airliners.

This is likely the last industry on Earth which is still using 1980's info technology on a regular basis...

https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/a...confirmed.html


One of the challenges is YOU. It will take decades to ramp up airliner automation, the process will be very visible, and that will scare off new entrants... that would cause the airlines to run out of pilots long before automation is actually available. That's aggravated by the high cost ($ and time) of entry into the profession, and also the long-term nature of the career payoff. So they have to bridge a "valley of death" on the road to automation, to avoid running out of pilots early.

There are several ways they could do that, but the obvious one (which would work the best) would be to contractually specify guaranteed pay to retirement age if replaced by automation. Or some reasonable fraction thereof for younger folks. That way prospective pilots would know that once they get a seniority number they're set either way and won't end up 50 years old, kids in college, no job, and no marketable skills.

That would be an economically reasonable transition cost for the airlines, since presumably automation would be a lot cheaper than pilots (or why bother). Also there will be a required "transition period" where airliners are fully automated but still have a cockpit and at least one pilot with over-ride authority until the automation is considered proven. That will take years anyway.