increase the salaries to avoid pilote shortage!
 

I understand many students are not interested to invest in the huge cost and difficulty of training when the salaries they could expect later are not that high…Or simply really low…

The airlines are short of pilots ? Well, why don’t they start paying for the training of their own ab initio students ?

And to keep and attract good, rated, experienced Captains and FOs, why don’t they increase their salaries, Terms and Conditions ? They prefer buying new airplanes and watch them idle on the apron ?

About China, why do they make an insanely difficult Medical ? An insanely difficult sim check ? An insanely difficult amount of paperwork to fill ?

There is no shortage of pilots for the airlines that really pay and respect their cockpit crews. And they’re not only national carriers…

Just remember, that an F/O is a trainee Captain. Without the ability for on the job learning, the single crew aircraft will have be designed for 200hr pilots to fly. it has to be. Thus it's not today's Captain's who need to worry, but today's F/Os. They're the future Captains who will be redundant....

Scary, isn't it....

https://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/08/...ower-colorado/

yup its at a place with no tower now but 90,000 movements a year.

At the bottom of the article there was another link to the project. If you navigate through to the project technology page, you get this:
This appears to be a remote version of a tower to save money. All that has happened is the controller is physically somewhere remote to the airfield. This was attempted at Alice Springs in 2011, and abandoned with the camera's removed, not sure what the issue was.

There is a big difference between remote control (as we do right now with most ATC, ie Centre, Approach etc) and automation of the actual ATC function.

a driverless car, train, metro, boat: when there's a problem, a connection failure, they stop! No problem!
A control twr is a fix device...
But as you know an airplane can not stop where it is if everything goes wrong; it always has to fly, and fast, and be steered somewhere. What happens if you lose the remote control?
It happens to me very frequently to lose datalink communication. Not a problem if the pilots are in the cockpit! So it might happen in 40 or 50 years, but in the next 20 years, there will be a pilot shortage! Mostly we start to see a shortage of good pilots!

I mean, in 40 or 50 years, yes, maybe, the technology will allow pilotless planes; but not now.

But yet they make it near impossible to pass their outrageous assessments....well park your planes then, and that goes for other carriers too not just in Asia.

What they also said was someone from a remote station could monitor a number of airports.

Pretty much every technology in aviation started with the military, so if you want to see where civil aviation is going to be in 15 years look at the military now. What I see is the precision strike mission is now being executed by drones. If the technology exists today to acquire and engage a target with a drone operated by a guy 10,000 miles away then it exists to fly and A to B airliner flight. The question is only how long is it going to take for this reality to be adopted by industry.

As for the idea passengers won't fly in a pilot-less airplane, well if the fare is $ 5 cheaper they will jump on.

As a person who has been flying for 40 years, 31 of that commercially I take no joy in this situation but I also accept its inevitability.

AFAIK the military drones are single engine so no control difficulties if the engine fails and no fatalities so no big deal. How long does it take to develop a new airliner from scratch? 15-20 years and one without any pilots on board even longer. So no pilot needs to be worried until Airbus,Boeing,Embraer, Mitsubishi etc have actually committed to producing a pilotless airliner and at least one airline has put cash down for a spot on the production line. Even with the oft quoted "Planes just land themselves" by the less educated amongst us the weather criteria is very limiting. Also AFAIK there is no commercial aircraft capable of an automatic takeoff, one of the two crew has to pull back on whatever constitutes a control column and the other crew member is monitoring what is going on with the aircraft.

It is all possible in theory but the reliability and redundancies required and its integration with ground based infrastructure are a long, long way from being resolved.

I'd happily go fly in China. All I need: free type rating, commuting contract, 180/360 yearly working period, matching 401k with health and travel benefits, a paycheck in USD, and a corporate culture that views an FO as equally important as a CA.

Otherwise, why leave my current regional job in the US?

I think most of you are over-reacting. We're not going to see pilotless commercial aircraft in 20 years. There is an outside chance that we see initial implementation of single pilot aircraft (automation good enough that it can take over and land an otherwise reasonably healthy aircraft it the pilot becomes incapacitated) - but there is no way pilotless will happen in the next twenty years (although I remain convinced it'll happen eventually).
This is simply Boeing throwing out a warning shot that, if nothing is done, we're looking at a pilot shortage. Purely self interest - they can't sell new aircraft if there are not enough pilots available to fly them, and since Asia is where the fastest growth is occurring, it's where the need for new pilots will be the strongest.
This is really nothing new - ~ 40 years ago Boeing (and others) were predicting an acute shortage of engineers by the year 2000. They knew that if qualified engineers were in short supply, they'd have to dramatically increase engineers pay. But by predicting a shortage, and providing financial incentives to STEM education, they were able to encourage lots of young people to go into engineering. As a result, the predicted shortage never occurred and engineer pay (when corrected for inflation) isn't a whole lot different today then it was 40 years ago (basically, good engineers will never go hungry, but are unlikely to ever get rich either - rather it remains basically a solidly middle class occupation).
I expect we'll see something similar happen for commercial pilots...

The capability exists for automatic take off but as there is little benefit, unlike auto land, the technology hasn't been adopted.

Pilot less aircraft would work if nothing went wrong which required a response to an event which hadn't previously been programmed into the artificial intelligence controlling the aircraft and we are a long way from that level at the moment. The first step would be control by a human operator on the ground and even this is still a long way off. Military drones need to be controlled by an operator nearby for take off and landing as the lag in response times is unacceptable. The drone over Afghanistan being piloted by an operator in a base in Nevada needs to be handed over at the end of the mission to someone onsite who bring it back onto the ground.

Airlines would need to station their own pilots at every port they fly into or train and licence local operators to provide coverage. Enroute control could be done from home base as response times aren't as critical in the cruise.

Autonomous jet airliners won't ever happen.
Repeat this over and over.
Cut it out and stick it on your wall. In a frame.
For the oldies among us it doesn't matter anyway. For anyone young enough to be thinking about a career break in China, for example, you will get to see the end of jet airliners.
And you can look at those words, in the frame and say "He was right."

The problem is worst at US airlines. Flight says American will lose 60% of its pilots by 2030, United 57%, Delta 54%

I will be in the cold, cold ground long before any robot can pick its way through the ITCZ safely and with maximum passenger comfort and minimum practical track deviation. Some of those dang CBs just don't show up on radar (visions of a tin man craning toward the windscreen with the cockpit lights turned down). And Manila will still be using HF radio...

Yes, and Australia...