I would argue that you're better off following your passion.
Yes, you can get a job in IT or some other mind numbingly boring office based job and earn a better living from it, you'll also get more time at home with your friends and family.
However, trying to summon the motivation to get out of bed in the morning to go to said job could be a chore in itself.
We probably spend more time at work than anywhere else so why not enjoy it !
I've spent most of my working life in aviation as an engineer, yes the hours can be terrible and some of the salaries have probably been lower than I could have earned working in McDonalds but I wouldn't change a thing. I've traveled the world, met some fantastic people and most importantly after more than 25 years I still enjoy my job. You can't put a price on that !

Well, as someone above wrote - want to be a pilot?
Go, study STEM and make flying your hobby. Sometime around her '20 she'll decide and having STEM under her belt gives her freedom.
AI flying? I doubt this is what may impact pilot's profession. I would rather afraid Greta and her followers. Worst case - you can get a pilot's job in Asia, I doubt they care about Greta and her fears.

&

Thanks for the input!
 

That landing robot is rubbish.

pulls one reverser , one at a time, long time after touchdown. Didn’t seem to actually be flying it either ?

Elephant in the room
 

Robots, AI, single pilots (PTF possibly even sitting in some warehouse in a dismal industrial estate in the back of beyond) is all very well (well, is it?). But would the public, even the sweaty t-shirt brigade, actually even buy a ticket for such a Russian-roulette type of escapade? I doubt it¬
Just my tuppence worth.
Prober

AI boll**cks
 

AI is a total fantasy, yeah we can make computers that win at chess or that game go, (which is actually a really simple game with many millions of sequences), but put it In perspective. - These computers win because they were programed solely for winning these games only. Yes a great feat of engineering and programming skill but let's look at the big picture, it can't adapt and play any other game and would totally suck at asteroids or tetris and in fact could not even learn these games as they haven't been programed to do so. It would be impossible for a programmer to write a flight logic program that covers free thought for every possible flight scenario that the human brain can interpret and act upon in a matter of seconds. And a computer can still only learn what it's been told to learn, it can't step out of line like a human brain can and learn and adapt infinitely, logically and at tangents a computer can only dream of. AI will only be a reality when a mushy blob of a brain is hooked up to a computer. Not gonna happen for a long time. Don't confuse complex and lengthy computer programming with actual or artificial intelligence. But a computer that can fly from A To B is no problem even for today, just don't expect it to deal with something the programer has forgotten to program in which is where a human pilot always has the advantage.
But flying is great fun and although being a pilot seems to get worse from a financial and lifestyle point of view as time passes, it's still a good career choice for those willing to sacrifice. Might be paid the same as the average earner in 2050 but will never will be a average job. I'd still say yes.

At the time I write this post, the thread ahead is about the FAA realizing that pilot's manual flying skills are eroding. A reality I observe in some pilot with whom I have flown. That will be the challenge for new pilots, the standard has been set high, by pilots of past generations, whose manual flying skills were excellent, as aircraft of those past eras had either no autopilots, or poor autopilots, so they hand flew a lot, and hand flew instrument approaches, looking at an approach plate on paper, and steam gauge instruments. Most were very skilled flying tailwheel, and if not aerobatics, at least maneuvering, including spins.

Those skills are being shadowed by technology, and the notion that hand flying skills, and instinct won't be as needed - wrong! So the next generation of pilots will have a greater challenge. I built my piloting skills renting a Cessna 150 for $18 per hour - wet. At that cost, I could afford to fly a lot. Then came the 152, at $21 per hour, I still flew lots. Then the 177 Cardinal RG, $55 per hour, 'flew it lots. The Cardinal is no longer available, but that very same (yes, same registration - and paint job :yuk:) 152 is still for rent 41 years later - for $165 per hour! How can a young person afford to pile on the hours of experience building to meet the new pilot expectations? Simulators can help a little, when properly trained, but the basics of solo decision making, and reacting properly to unexpected events in flight are poorly replicated by simulators. Instructors can downplay the importance of these very basic skills, but they're vitally important - and the FAA is noticing! Too many accidents associated with the pilot either being lured by automation, or simply not thinking past it.

So yes, young people should fly, but our aviation community has to realize that skill building to the level we oldtimers think is appropriate won't be anywhere near as easy for the new pilot as is may have been for us. New pilot will have to realize that they face challenges in accumulating experience at the rate many of us did, and they'll have to make the very most of hours in the air, where most of us went up and often aimlessly burned holes in the ski decades ago.

The world will need pilots for decades to come, there is no way that automation can replace human pilot skills to the level knowledgeable society will demand in the foreseeable future. A fully glass cockpit Cessna, with up to date database, and everything working properly tried to lure me to fly it across a windmill farm at 700 feet on the Finnish coast. My piloting skills said no, fly around the windmills, not through them! A self driving car, with a safety "driver" aboard still managed to kill a pedestrian! Another self driving car drove over and killed it's owner while it was parking itself! An automated plane is going to handle multiple emergencies, and then make a good forced landing in an open field? I remain to be convinced!

Have kids learn to be pilots! Good hands and feet pilots! Go and fly circuits in the blue Cub in the mist!

The problem with the Clarke quote:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong" is that things that have already been achieved are then given as examples of it's veracity - e.g. predictions made by some about space travel in the late 50's and then the subsequent Moon landings...

Problem is the Clarke quote never gets used in the context of, say, predictions about the use of controlled contained sustained nuclear fusion for domestic power....something that just like full blown AI has often been said to be just "around the corner" for decades...

https://slate.com/technology/2013/01...ess-power.html

Yep..I'm afraid it will only stop when autonomous scheduled passenger Ops actually start happening ( which it will..one day) and then the AI acolytes will be along again to say "told you so"..it's whether the AI acolytes that get to say that have actually been born yet that is the 64,000 dollar question.

Look at it this way: for a lot of commercial pilots, 95% of the job is dealing with the whole gamut of social, business, safety, engineering and random other issues that pop up before, during and after the flight. The actual controlling of the aeroplane is a sideshow which has been mostly automated for the last half-century but is seen by many without insight into the profession as where AI will take over.

I have no doubt that at some time in the future we will have general purpose AI capable of doing all the above at least as well as a human. By that point, that same AI could take over most other human endeavours, so the world may have changed somewhat in the interim.

To answer the OP, as others have pointed out, none of the commercial passenger airliners in production today and none of the planned ones AFAIK have a “no pilot option” available. This will take us 20-30 years on and after that who knows...?

The B-21 might be optionally manned.

The future for air crew will possibly be very more centrally controlled by third party companies and not the airlines - think pilots on demand, under bidding each other for each flight.

Now think of that and paying for their (your) own currency on type/s, or having to accept a "cheap" flight to remain current.

Most airlines would pay a fixed $ per flight hour, for crew to a (reliable) third party. Fixed cost are a bean counters dream - seniority gone in a flash!

Yes, but it doesn’t carry passengers, either! (Or not ones you’d want to meet...)

OT: The B-21 seems to be well along the road towards the future USAF - only one aeroplane, cost $100B, that stays in the hangar because it’s too expensive to risk...

The industry might be of a cyclical nature, but the T&C and decency has been on a steady decline for the last 25-30 years. I fail to understand why any informed parent would want their kids to be pilots now, or in the future.

Interesting timing

The U.S. Navy has jumped into the game by filing a patent for a compact fusion reactor

Ummm...Interesting, I wonder how many patents relating to fusion and fusion related technology have been in the last 60 years? The last piece of the relevant article in Popular Mechanics is suitably non-comital:

(For some idea of the timescale of fusion development the first tokamak went into operation in the early 80's....and we are not just around that particular corner yet..)

Current Airline pilots are not about to lose their careers due to AI, their offspring will IMHO be probably be able to "enjoy" :bored: a full career ...as others have said whether the future T&Cs make it a sensible career path to follow is different matter altogether.

Respectfully your description isn't AI.

AI isn't programmed for the task, it is programmed to learn about it.

When you call your bank and talk to a machine, it wasn't programmed about your accent. It was taught to understand many accents by people with many accents talking to it.

If it doesn't understand your accent we don't examine the programming to determine why, what we can do is let you talk to it and have it learn.

This really isn't the same.

I think the OP's ten year old daughter is more likely to find an enticing and sustaining career designing and training AI systems for flight than sat supervising the use of them on a flight deck.

At the moment, the biggest issue with automation is not 'complete' automation. It may well get there one day, but the software will need to be at the point where it is perfect and the programmers have thought of EVERYTHING, or come up with an AI that can handle EVERYTHING.... That is not negotiable and they've got quite some distance to go until things improve massively, or we could just simply decide to accept airliners biting the dust with a lot more regularity than they do now!

We are a long, long, long way from pilotless airliners and this is certainly not the environment for AI to learn as it goes.......!

There will only ever be the one crash of a pilotless airliner anyway - who in their right mind would set foot on one afterwards???