Like crewless, zero crew. There isn’t even any flight attendants.
Pilots are just an AI Autopilot and flight attendants are all just robots.
I trust autopilot more than a human pilot. This shit has been around and perfected over several decades. It’s not “AI.” Though I may want to take over for landing. I trust myself to be able to land a plane. All those years playing flight sims has to account for something, right?
Ha, fuck no. Airlines already treat pilots like shit and overwork the younger less experienced pilots that fly most of our regional smaller flights. Given their maintenance issues lately, how do you think this pans out? No way in hell am I going to let a machine have 100% control. It would never be able to handle the quick thinking, problem solving, and gut decisions that pilots leverage to bring things in safely when there are problems. Planes already are largely automated, but I’m not sure a regulatory agency would ever be comfortable removing pilots from the cockpit. The day they do is the end of my flying days.
It’s coming. You won’t be able to stop it.
The thing is they aren’t going to jump to this quickly. The first thing you’ll see are single pilot ops, largely augmented with automation.
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.
This will take decades.
Then they’ll have a robot in the cockpit with googly eyes so kids like it, just like those robots at the grocery store.
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.
Maybe in like… two centuries.
No, for fear mostly of fellow passengers more than distrust of the technology.
Private flight though? Maybe, I’ll consider that
Nope.
