Edwards doesn't have to turn a profit.

I think Rock makes a good point. Military drones save money because they can outlast stomachs, rear-ends and bladders. ISR and light attack can be performed in something that is small, light and cheap to fly compared to a strike fighter. As previously indicated they're also cheap to crash. The USAF still pays some Officer to drive the thing from a ground based station somewhere.

So, if the expense in hauling freight is in operating a craft large enough to haul the payload, would drones really save money in the freight industry? They're still going to need operators on the ground somewhere (maybe one operator could drive a couple or more at once, I suppose) but it seems to me the savings from eliminating crews would be in the noise and likely not a worthwhile trade-off (safety or bottom-line wise) of having on-board, real-time judgment. Even compared to autonomous drones, hourly pilot pay seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the operating expense of something the size of a 777.

Thoughts?

I think long before we have autonomous aircraft one hat are now long augmented crew legs, we would see a paired down crew that would be in crew rest over the water why the computer does the work. Crew will be in seats during TO and approach and landing.

Unmanned is NOT "unmanned". The self proclaimed cognoscenti on drones, UAVs etc, don't really know the full burdened cost, limitations, liabilities, and upfront investments required. One-off drone flights & operations on a small scale in military applications don't translate to large complex, and dense commercial applications. From previous alpa communications & history (previous major carrier), crew costs are less than 3% of operating costs (that's air vehicle operating costs, not business operating costs) Keep that in mind.

The "everybody knows" crowd, seldom stops to consider the manpower intensive tasks of aviation, and in this case commercial aviation. Think of all the manual tasks that go with pushback, taxi, pilot deferred items, MEL, etc. In an "unmanned" air vehicle, someone in some control room would have to accomplish these tasks, using judgment MEL, FOM, company policy aircraft wx ...., and be able to do this for the entire launch- it would increase GOC staffing considerably to have enough personnel on hand to "solve" what we pilots solve, without adversely effecting the rest of the launch (time is $$- so control room folks bogged down with jet #1, can't address jet #2,3,4,5 problems simultaneously). Think De-ice, turnback (ground or air) and the detection of the causal factors, and decision making to rtb or press.

Then the Achilles heel of drones/uav- Secure and reliable datalinks. From some defense work, we've seen significant issues with the "secure & reliable" aspect, with attrition from both causes. The datalinks are relatively easily compromised. Then take a look at the RF bandwidth for precision tasking and continuous monitor (CM). The satcom data in use by fdx now, is burst transmissions iaw FANS, ADS, and company CM. The leasing of commercial satellite bandwidth would be very expensive, and there is not enough of it for any wide scale operation. Right now, uncle sam leases satcom bandwidth to operate military ventures (too expensive to launch & sustain organic satellites to cover all the requirements). 777 routinely have "SATCOM lost" messages this would obviously be "bad" for an unmanned vehicle. So there would need to be redundant Comm Nav Interrogation (CNI) suites, redundant onboard datalinks, and redundant offboard datalinks, that would conform to all ICAO in all arrival/departure/divert locations. Your unmanned 777 that went from ANC to PVG would be pretty useless going into a place without connectivity, and ground based differential GPS stations.

Then- you have air vehicle reliability- you'd be shocked at the attrition rate of predator drones. We crash quite a few.

Think of all the extra inspections that go along with CAT III approach capability, ETOPS... unmanned will exponentially increase these requirements- from a value sense of protecting the enormous investment required to enable the capability, to the inevitable government regulatory issues.

Unmanned has its place in the ISR role, low density operations, permissive uncomplicated launch & recovery, and a huge ground staff for operations & MX.

The USN had a UAV land on a carrier successfully, but on the next pass it was hook up clean up bingo. The entire flight deck and air ops department was dedicated to its launch & recovery with no other aircraft onboard. It is a very long way before the UAV can integrate into the daily carrier ops with 44 strike fighters, helos, and prop planes moving around simultaneously for cyclic operations. Think MEM on a night launch/recovery, or ORD/LAX/SFO/EWR, with high air & ground traffic density.

There are many more reasons why it will be a long time before pax/cargo planes will be replaced by unmanned. The biggest is the ROI is just not there to make it profitable, even if the bandwidth & connectivity issues were available & ready.

I'll be at Starbucks, on my iPad!

FrontSeat, I was trying to decide if your long post was sarcasm and then I decided I was taking too much time trying to decide. Sipping coffee while dodging monsoons at night in Taiwanese airspace full of Asian air traffic?! Nice.....:rolleyes: And when was the last time a train engineer had to make a stop or go decision at a road crossing? nevermind.....

Olly, you nailed it. It's almost like you have practical experience in what you are talking about.

:eek:
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When the drones, 3D printing and cloning have replaced everybody, nobody will have a job and won't be able to buy anything so drones won't be needed to haul anything! No .....wait!:rolleyes: