riff_raff, #198; The navigation systems allowed the aircraft to operate more efficiently, but not necessarily more safely.
Yes, I think so. As I have posted earlier in the thread, autonomous flight is, and has been possible for many years.
The argument for autonomous flight has always been the reduction of "human error",
regardless of where that human is/was both physically and in time.
The closer we get to actual technical capability, that argument is beginning to look a bit disingenuous. I think the argument for autonomous flight is largely, (and realistically,
only) an economic one - it's "cheaper" to eliminate front-end flight crews. Given how these things go, (elimination of Nav's & FE's and now elimination of the value of experience), with automation being the exchange, the arguments will persist and we may indeed achieve a drone-like air transport capability. However, the nature of how incidents and accidents unfold as has been discussed in the thread, (
QF32, QF72, riff_raff's example of the EE bay platform - among thousands of other such examples, etc.), make it reasonable to doubt whether human intuition is programmable such that a routine, commercial transport could continuously pass the equivalent of a Turing Test.
But it will definitely be cheaper, although it will be interesting to hear what the insurers have to say.
But that cannot be done in order to achieve reduced risk; that is, a statistically-significant (one stddev) fatal accident rate than the industry has already achieved.