Originally Posted by
Intruder
I, too, remember those days. Tomorrow I will fly my last flight as a 747 Captain.
Unlike you, I would NOT fly in an unpiloted airplane. While you can point to the vast majority of uneventful flights, a significant majority of them were uneventful ONLY because of pilot intervention. The simplest of ATC events - a deviation for other traffic - cannot today be easily accomplished automatically. In the US, we cannot even use CPDLC in 99% of airspace. While ADS-B may make controllers' lives easier, it has no similar benefits for pilots - yet.
The next level of intervention is that for weather avoidance. An autopilot cannot rely on radar returns, because they, too, are not reliable enough for complete confidence. At one end of the spectrum, an autopilot would chase false or spurious returns in circles forever; at the other end it would fly right through an area of visible weather that does not show on the radar.
Finally, there is the [in]ability to deal with non-normal and emergency situations. These are the times when an experienced pilot is most valuable and most needed. Even a 'drone operator' in some control station on the ground would be hard-pressed to analyze some of the situations I have dealt with in the air. Add to that the fact that one of those emergency situations - or a result of some other failure - may be loss of communication with the ground operator!
If you want to risk your Amazon Prime package to a drone, that's fine. It just isn't a reasonable option for passenger airplanes in the foreseeable future.
But the point is that more cases are being reported of the flight crew being unable to recover when automation hands them the bag of bolts. The events you quote are completely true;
for today's automation that was
designed to be an aid to an experienced pilot not a automation that must be obeyed. But now we see airline management insisting that the advice must be obeyed, and pilots who appear less capable when the magenta line is pulled from their grasp. This is leading to a significant change in design specification for avionics systems. They will not chase in circles as you suggest. You are doing the equivalent of comparing car cruise controls from the 1990's to a google self-driving car.
The more manufacturers are hit by litigation due to flight crew misunderstanding/mishandling decision support tools the more those tools become fully capable automation and the role of the flight crew is diminished. Eventually, all that is left is automation and as the beancounters will tell you at every opportunity, automation does not need 401K or pensions.