[jessaustin]

That will be a fair statement once there are any commercial (or general aviation!) passenger flights for which all flight operations take place without human intervention. We don't live in that world yet. Saddling an already risky endeavor with the additional risk of having to invent a completely new class of control software is really too much to ask.

If you think this will be easy, why not just start by outfitting e.g. simple four-passenger Cessnas with your amazing new software that obviates pilots? There's got to be a market there, for something that works. Then when you've got that handled, move up to bigger and faster planes.

[rwmj]

Hence why I said "ground manager dealing with several planes at once".

[jessaustin]

So this is like USAF's drone guys in mobile homes out in the Nevada desert? One notes that they don't handle aircraft with passengers either. Your idea isn't bad in general, and someday it will probably be accomplished in some form, but we're not anywhere close to that yet. Independent joint probabilities multiply, so the last thing a highly speculative aircraft needs is a highly speculative pilot arrangement.