Sounds true in a perfect world that we'll lose both pilots and ATC, but the world's not perfect.
We'll always need some man, as someone above mentioned the Hudson River incident. NO computer can pull that off.
ATC runs on rails till the emergency or wild weather hits and the cells are screaming through willy nilly, then no computer can cope, other than the one in man's head.
Yeah lifts had drivers and now they're auto, but they are confined to one path... and sometimes they stop mid floor.
Trains could become driverless as they run on rails but won't, because of the same 'dealing with the unknown in an instant.'
The egg heads come up with wonderful ideas and get marketing to sell them to management who want to be on the cutting edge, be world leaders and claim it was them who introduced the new age world's best practice.
The ATC simulator is just one case. 'Get rid of half the man power in in the training of controllers and be the envy of the world.'
Management were sold a lemon by Slick Sam the salesman and spent three times more money than the airlines spend on three full motion aircraft simulators on a bunch of PCs, big screens and A COMPUTER PROGRAMME. It's pathetic.
After complaints from trainees, management came back with the gem, "It's no worse than the old simulator!"
That one was over fifteen years old and in today's technological explosion should be a dinosaur. Think back to the mobile phone of fifteen tears ago and what's in your pocket now!
The new sim promised to be the bee's knees.
It is more complicated, doesn't actually do many functions it's supposed to (We're gunna fix that") but the cost of tweeking the computer programme is astronomical so doesn't happen. It needs people to madly click on mouse buttons up to ten clicks to get round the problem of the sim not doing what it is supposed to with the one click, promiced.
It's a bloody joke, same as all the ideas of the industry's getting rid of pilots and ATCers.
To put it in perspective. Most pros have heard muggins the private pilot or RAA pilot who reckon HE could land the big jet if the pilots died.
He's a pilot! Learned how to fly. Done hundreds of hours flying the big jets on flight sim AND has had a go at flying the 737 sim the public gets to pay to have a go in AND he landed it perfectly.
He's also the guy who reckons '178 seconds to losin' it' is bulldust. He's got five hours under the hood in his bug smasher and could keep her under control if he flew INADVERTENTLY into cloud.
We know how well they'd do.
Them that don't do it, have fnny ideas ... their bum has never been in the seat when it's real and someone's gunna die if he doesn't get it right first go.
Reset buttons ... none in the real world.