I thought I would put this here as it deserves some technical discussion. The thread title comes from a Bloomberg article:
"Airbus Looking Forward to a Pilotless Future"
Airbus SE is looking to develop autonomous aircraft and technologies that will allow a single pilot to operate commercial jetliners, helping cut costs for carriers, Chief Technology Officer Paul Eremenko said.“The more disruptive approach is to say maybe we can reduce the crew needs for our future aircraft,” Eremenko told Bloomberg Television’s Yvonne Man in an interview broadcast on Wednesday. “We’re pursuing single-pilot operation as a potential option and a lot of the technologies needed to make that happen has also put us on the path towards unpiloted operation.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...t-in-tech-race
Read the article before continuing.
The bean counters are already convinced, the technical aspects are being solved mainly in military operations and in smaller commercial 'drones' where attrition is more acceptable.
Large military manufacturers have been and are successfully demonstrating multiple in flight refueling and carrier landings - both technically extremely difficult. Similarly, military aircraft manufacturers have demonstrated adaptive flight control systems that can provide apparently normal aircraft handling even after quite dramatic battle damage. Against these simple passenger or cargo flights even with the occasional emergency seem to be relatively straightforward to automation.
So the question is are there technical and/or safety reasons that can be provided that are
insurmountable to plans for what seems to be the decided progression.
I don't believe that the emotional and attitudinal arguments will have much weight against the financial ones. We are in an era of driverless trains and driverless cars - yet I can remember when elevators were considered unsafe without an operator - so I suspect that people could in future accept pilotless passenger aircraft.