Drone airlines - how long?
Right now we've got military drones targeting 'persons of interest' in certain parts of the world, while in civvy street people are already travelling on automated light rail systems and buying autopilot equipped teslas. Other self driving cars and trucks will soon be on the roads, even delivering your amazon parcel or dominos pizza.
Given the level of automation and computer control in today's cockpit anyway, going the whole automated hog seems a relatively small leap in terms of technology, if not public perception, whereas the cost savings could be huge. The military would probably need to initiate - firstly on cargo, then on transport because they don't have to rely on commercial appeal, but can simply command people to do something. The bean counters would push it through the civvy operators, and if you could pass on enough of those costs in the form of significantly lower ticket prices for unmanned flights vs manned ones, the pax would line themselves up - the current crop of loCo operators being a case in point to the depths to which people subject themselves in pursuit of a bargain.
Appreciate this is somewhat the wrong sort of place to be espousing this sort of thing, but I reckon the change could happen within a generation: we'll soon get to a tipping point, and it could be sooner than we think. Or should it be that automation only happens to unskilled manual roles, not skilled professional, even educated ones such as professional pilots?!?
Uber will remain as popular even when its drivers are automated - it'll probably be more so as the robot won't have any dubious background checks to pass (or fail) on, as long as the price is less than a normal cab. Sure, they'll always be the refuseniks but they're the minority - the same thing will happen in the air. As MOL says of RyanAir, their bookings are full of poeple who swore they'd never fly with them again.