| I'm a widebody captain, maybe I can add some insight. The handling of the aircraft is a small part of the job. Autoflight systems have been capable of flying and landing since the 1960s. It is a mature technology although it does need to be monitored by humans as equipment failures do occur.
I am confident a system could be developed with sufficient fail safes to remove the requirement for monitoring, and a fully automatically flown aircraft could be built tomorrow although at a higher cost than the current monitored setup. Even if an unmonitored autoflown aircraft was developed, judgement decisions about the operation of the aircraft still need to be taken, and these are best done by a human. Examples of decisions I make: 1. The best fuel consumption maybe achieved at a higher flight level, but I elect to stay low and burn into contingency because I've heard reports of turbulence at the higher level. I judge that I probably won't need the contingency fuel later based on previous experience of the route and destination. So I give my passengers a smooth ride, which helps repeat custom for the airline. 2. I experience radio crackle whilst in cloud and elect to change my routing as I suspect we are near a developing thunderstorm that may soon become active. I have to balance the extra fuel burn of a non-optimal route versus the risks of being caught in a thunderstorm which could destroy the aircraft. I'm not an AI expert, but it seems to me these are value judgements that are best made by a human. So the fully autoflown aircraft will still need a human in the loop at some point. It is possible to remotely site this human, and maybe make efficiency savings by a single human controlling many aircraft but this would require a bulletproof, near realtime datalink.
Again, I'm not an expert in the field, but I would suggest this is, if not technically impossible, then a lot more expensive than the cost of employing human pilots. I imagine this datalink would also be of interest to people with ill intent- no fun when you get the airborne equivalent of a rickroll. TL;DR: A human is required in the loop, not to handle the aircraft but to make decisions. It's cheaper to have them on-board than the cost of a datalink. It's cheaper to have them trained to take manual control than the cost of an autopilot sufficiently fail safe that it can be left unmonitored. |