Pilot-less Airliners
With all the bitching going on in our industry with numerous threads here about costs, cadetships, more airframes than pilots avail (so the propaganda Dept's say)Co's greedy way of doing business etc without the slightest hint of caring for their most valuable asset, the pilot I though why not look into our crystal balls & envisage a future with Airliners plying the worlds airways 'Pilot-less'
First before we all go off half cocked here saying not way it wasn't that long ago that mankind was staring up at the sky, the birds & wondering about flight itself.
We already have unmanned vehicles, that's common place these days. We have now GPS when it was only a generation or so ago that this amazing development was in it's infancy. CASA are going thru a huge thinking on how to handle the up & coming remote pilot-less drones out there with FPV taking the world by storm in the R/C field ( I know been playing with toy planes for 45 years now!) so like flight itself we had to start somewhere, the 'Wrong Bros' started it all (used just as a starting point as its not clear who started what back then) but where are we going in the next say 2 generations (50 yrs)?
Auto-land is an everyday event somewhere around the globe.
I mean pilots hardly touch the controls, don't touch or the dog will bite you:-)
The biggest question about all this is the one thing that mankind can't control apart from the weather is the cargo itself, the very reason why we have invented these machines in the first place, for us to move about the globe, you, me & our families, that's the hard one here imagine trying to sell that idea (pilot-less plane) as you board the flying machine.
From an Airlines perspective no more pilots, well as we know it, imagine the extra $$$ the CEO's could pillage out of a Co........the mind boggles!:-)
Am sure the airframe makers have been thinking about this for many years as the technology is there but are we ready for it & indeed are we even ready to trust 100% our lives to a machine only?
Idea's, thoughts guys/gals?
Wmk2