Perhaps Carruthers would like to explain to us how his glorious automation would have handled the recent incident with a BA aircraft missing the ground by only a few feet thanks to the crew spotting that the approach aid was giving out an erroneous signal. The human element realised there was something wrong and initiated a go-around. Had the a/c been left to follow the signals using all it's automatics there would have been a lot of bits of aluminium and human remains for the likes of Carruthers to blame on pilot error.
Even allowing for the latest technology used in remotely piloted vehicles and cruise missiles there are regularly 'incidents' where these devices lose the plot and leave a smoking hole in the ground far from any intended arrival point. I am fairly confident that we are secure from being replaced in our jobs by automatics for the forseeable future. I'm also fairly sure we'd see a lot more automation with 2D transportation such as shipping and rail, possibly even road before we see public confidence in the pilotless aircraft. Carruthers speaks from a position of abject ignorance when he states that we are all doomed. Sounds more like the wishfull thinking of a desperate manager who has exhausted all the tricks he was taught at the Harvard School of Business Management to reduce costs.
Like most managers, he knows the price of everything but the value of nothing!
