Originally Posted by
Pugilistic Animus
Gentleman, the point that I am trying to make is there will always be something unforseen in engineering airplanes. A more modern version would that 777 that crashed at LHR due to ice in the fuel/ oil heat exchanger. Would an automated plane retract the flaps to avoid the highway? I think pilots will be needed, at least for the next 4 or 5 decades?
While I am not a pilot or an aviation engineer, I research AI/ML and various autonomous systems. It's highly improbable that in years or even decades we will see fully autonomous commercial aircraft. The issues we currently have in land vehicles is plethora, and the problems of deep-learning and Neural Networks for split decision making with limited learning rates and gradient descent based generalization is way more significant than those outside of AI/ML realize. Some aviation engineers I consult with from time to time concur with PA's general assessment.