Like crewless, zero crew. There isn’t even any flight attendants.
Pilots are just an AI Autopilot and flight attendants are all just robots.
Once that is proven they will reduce responsibilities for the single crew until the plane is fully automated.
Once the fully automated flight is trusted and proven they will remove the single pilot.
There’s a middle step isn’t there? Where there are real human pilots that are sitting at a remote location on the ground somewhere doing the actual flying. We have this with military drone pilots already. I have to imagine it would be far easier to implement this than full AI. You still get 70% of the benefit of “pilotless” flights because you don’t have to get the human geographically to the place the plane is flying.
Wouldn’t lag be an issue, given electronic attenuation, even at speed-of-light? Maybe not since drone pilots manage? Damned interesting thought you have.
Yes to speed-of-light limitations for latency, but again, the military is already doing things while also firing precision weapons from the same platform halfway around the world. My guess is that the systems are mostly autonomous except the humans issue short term commands. Like:
- plane, turn left bearing 180.
- turning left bearing 180, my bearing is 180
[Pedantry Incoming!]
- heading.
“Bearing” is a direction from one specified position (i.e. the airplane) to a specified object. You would tell a pilot that there is an airport bearing 180, or traffic bearing 090. “Bearing” just tells the pilot which way something is.
“Heading” is the direction the nose of the aircraft is pointed. If you want a pilot to fly due south, you will tell them to fly a heading of 180.
(Heading is not necessarily the actual direction of flight: it does not take crosswinds into account. “Course” is the word used to describe the direction the plane is actually going.)
[Pedantry Complete!]
