Originally Posted by
vilas
When you pit this one against dozens that have crashed in fully serviceable conditions it is not that convincing. Take PK8303 an Airbus or Indian version IX812 a Boeing without pilots those guys would be alive. One Sully cannot make summer.
Fully autonomous passenger aircraft will happen - it's only a matter of time. The only real question is how much time - years, decades? Computing power continues to expand exponentially, the human capabilities not so much.
My personal view is we're still decades away (single pilot - really only there to take action if the automation goes crazy - will happen first). Examples of the humans saving the day with the current aircraft are meaningless - current aircraft are not designed to be autonomous, they are designed to reduce crew workload but to hand the aircraft back to the human(s) if things go south. Commercial aircraft have become incredibly safe and rarely crash - but the percentage of those crashes that can be attributed to either suicidal pilots (e.g. Germanwings) or incomprehensibly bad piloting keeps going up (latest example being PIA 8303).
Fully autonomous cars have proved to be more difficult than expected, but progress is continuing and eventually they well become mainstream - and I foresee a future where human controlled autos will be banned from most roads since they 'unsafe' (I probably won't live to see it, but I expect it will happen). There will come a time when people will start to wonder why they can ride safely to the airport in a fully autonomous taxi - so why do we still let human pilots try to land a perfectly serviceable aircraft at 210 knots with the gear up...