[oska]

I've seen discussion of this issue in the domain of pilots with commercial airlines. The suggestion was made that because so much of flying is now done by autopilot, pilots' ability to react quickly and appropriately in a real emergency when control is handed back to them has significantly declined. And that we may soon go to completely pilotless airliners which are taken over by ground control in case of emergency. (This would also have the side-benefit of significantly reducing the risk of hijacking).

[ghaff]

I doubt it. Pilots are a pretty trivial cost in airline operations and there are a lot of reasons to have a human who is definitively in charge on the aircraft.

[cbhl]

How does this reduce the risk of hijacking? An attacker would just hijack ground control instead.

[jessriedel]

Ground control is much easier to secure. Instead of having to find a needle (hijacker) in a haystack (the millions of random Americans flying each day) with a 90 second search, you can do proper background checks on the small number of people who are allowed to be there.

[CM30]

Until one of those people turns out to be malicious. There is no way to tell what anyone is thinking, or whether they've been spending their time outside of work being slowly corrupted by certain influences.

[jessriedel]

And yet the rate of terrorist hijackings, although tremendously small, is much larger than the rate at which secret service agents betray the president.