I have no doubt that fully autonomous passenger aircraft will be a reality at some time in the future. However, anything involving AI is going to need a fundamental re-think of all the certification processes as we will be replacing systems that have been engineered, tested and sometimes formally proven, with inscrutable black boxes. The “any day now” self-driving car of the last decade shows how non-trivial these kind of problems are, and that’s in something that can just stop if it can’t work out what’s going on and doesn’t have the huge potential for collateral damage that an airliner has...