Wheels up and others.
Please do me the courtesy of bothering to read my links.
No, drones do not need a pilot.
Some currently are remotely piloted and some are fully autonomous and some are in between, ie a mouse click pilot.
I am talking about autonomous airliners.
You talk about drone crashes in the USA as if they are somehow proof that autonomous airliners can't be done, yet the article makes clear that most if not all of the accidents are pilot error or mechanical failure.
Pilot error is irrelevant for obvious reasons, and since the current crop of reaper/predator etc are single engined they are hardly relevant and will obviously have a failure rate closer to a Cessna than a Boeing.
You state that automation is currently moving the other way with increased training of pilots.
Surely you realise this is to deal with a weakness of pilots, not automation! Humans are very poor at dealing with situations we have not regularly practised, such as emergencies or even manual thrust etc. the current state of automation is very difficult for humans. We are expected to let automation carry out nearly all the work yet deal with the situation if the automation finds the going tough. Automation that is decades old in capability. A couple of sims per year will never make us good. Barely competent at best.
You mention having to protect the ILS everywhere.
Why on earth do you think an autonomous airliner would need an ILS at all to land in IMC? The systems required to land without have existed for decades. ILS would be a nice backup to the GPS/INS/Doppler/IR/radar/ etc etc etc that the system would be continuously monitoring for its solution.
You mention TCAS
Why on earth do you think that a human could be better than the autopilot at following TCAS RAs?
As it is now, it tells you what to fly and you try to fly it. Exactly like flight director, and in exactly the same way it would be more accurate itself.
You ask who would bother to develop An autonomous airliner and I have already posted a link to a major manufacturer doing just that!
You mention weather avoidance and say it is near impossible yet if you had bothered to read the link....
http://www.baesystems.com/innovation...3D152hotkppk_4
Various people keep saying that the cost of the pilots is small.
Not true.
First let's start with the pay. Let's say 20 pilots per aircraft. Each of these needs to be paid, recruited, trained(requiring simulators)
That is the small fry though. The real cost is the huge chunk of the airframe required to house them and give them the info they need.
Remove the entire cockpit and all those heavy controls and screens and armoured doors etc and you get a couple of tons of extra freight every flight and a few rows of 1st class seats every flight. That adds up to a huge amount of cash.
Mentioning flights where automation failed and so did the pilots is hardly helping your case. As tdracer says, those systems are designed to hand control back to a pilot in the (incorrect!)expectation that they will be capable of sorting the problem.
Parabellum
You are talking about a remote controlled airliner.
That is not what people are trying to construct. Autonomous means just that.
Incidentally, you mention terrorists overrunning a control centre. In what way is that different from them overrunning ATC now and giving out bad instructions to cause a crash?
TCAS and EGPWS would be the current final defence against such an event now, and similar for an autonomous aircraft.
Harryw
It is not surprising that an aircraft designed to have humans involved requires human intervention.
The level of automation tech on board current airliners is Stone Age.
I hate to prick your bubble, but "lots and lots of simulator training" is not how I would describe the pitifully small amount of annual sim time given to pilots, and it is mostly just "pushing buttons"