If you want to argue that autonomous aircraft will never happen, don't you think using a 21st Century aircraft design (such as an A350 or 787) as your baseline would be more representative?

I've never said fully autonomous passenger aircraft are right around the corner - I figure about 50 years - but I have little doubt they will happen. But using a 40 year old design to argue that the technology isn't ready is just silly. Or do you think a 1980's wireless phone is representative of current capabilities?

wtsmg and followers,
'CB reset'; this is not the aircraft as designed.
Are these instances logged, reported to the manufacturer; does the industry learn from these events.

Sometimes things go wrong; then you will be able to know what goes right.
Knowing comes from learning - why do CBs pop.
The future is built on todays knowledge.

Thats still "around the corner" in aviation terms. You seem to have missed the point entirely. The A320 and B737 are still the biggest sellers and they are 40-60 years old in terms of when the design process started. With your example of the A350 and 787 they will still be on the production line by the turn of the century. A 20 year old F/O will be 100 and probably have finished his/her career on a 350 or 787.

Wind the clock forward 20 years into the future.

On telly is an episode of Autonomous Air Crash Investigation (Mayday) narrated by an artificial intelligence powered cliche generator that harvests platitudes from previous episodes to save on hiring a real presenter.

The story is about Juan, a catering truck driver, who in the process of having to reverse his truck out of the way of an autonomous aircraft taxiing to an adjacent gate next to him (out of 12 other empty gates), he accidentally bumps into the wing of the aircraft parked behind him.

Juan, is horrified, as he pulls forward to assess the damage to the aircraft it is looking very serious. At other less modern airports he would radio the control tower and report the situation but this airport has been fully automated and the towers are no longer manned. So he decides to drive back to his base to deal with the problem there.

On his way back to base, Juan notices in his rear view mirror that the aircraft he damaged has pushed itself back and is now taxiing towards the runway for take off. Juan quickly turns around and floors it. Eventually he catches up with the slowly taxiing aircraft and pulls to a stop in front of it. The aircraft detects this and taxis around him. This little game of hopscotch continues until the aircraft lines up at the start of the runway.

Juan has run out options, now desperate to save all those on board he pulls in front of the aircraft on the runway. Juan is now hyperventilating and sweating profusely as a stand-off ensues, however after 4 minutes of this he realises he has appeared to have successfully stopped the damaged aircraft from taking off.

Just as Juan breathes a sigh of relief, both he and the aircraft he saved are wiped out by another aircraft landing in degraded autonomous law mode 4.

In conclusion, we learn that the truck Juan should have been operating on that fateful day has a big red button that sends an alert to the automated tower, but it was stuck in the maintenance yard of an IT workshop that wasn’t releasing it until the annual license fee was paid in full.

There are challenges beyond technical.

Not only ethical and legal
https://www.technologyreview.com/201...ammed-to-kill/ (the paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.03346.pdf)

but also those of morality at production / development: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03...nt-believe-it/ - this one has the corporation not being truthful towards the public about what has actually happened.

The biggest boost for any crewless plane will the price they can charge for the front row seats

It would have probable safely landed at Teterboro.

How would the automated system recognise that it had encountered an emergency situation and not just a system degradation? There is no definition of what an emergency is so how could you program that into the system? The most likely scenario is that the automated pilot would have tried to restart the engines but kept flying in a straight line as it would be programmed to do. By the time it got to the point of EGPWS warnings it would be game over. I think the humans in the flight deck demonstrated their value

Seriously? You don't think the FADEC can sense the engine is running down and not responding? WE SET EICAS "ENG FAIL" MESSAGES FOR THAT EXACT SCENARIO TODAY! It takes less than two seconds, and one second of that is an EICAS global inhibit.
The Sully scenario is actually one of the easier scenarios to program for - and one that a fully automatic system could probably have done better!

The systems on the 737 MAX have almost zero commonality with the systems in a 737-100/200. Yes, the structure is largely the same, and the flight control cables are still there, but the avionics and particularly the automation are a world different.
I was an aircraft designer for 40 years - the stuff I worked on in 1977 had almost no relationship to what I was doing 40 years later before I retired - I basically had to learn a new job (more than once).
50 years from now, people will be going to the airport in fully autonomous taxi's, over roads where the accident rate has dropped to near zero because they don't let humans drive on most of them. But you'll still have people trying to explain to grieving survivors that they family members are dead because a human pilot decided to commit suicide and took a planeload of passengers with them when they did it, or because a human pilot tried to land at over 200 knots with the wheels up.
You can correct errors in avionics and automatics. We've not had as much luck doing that with the humans that pilot the things.
BTW, while the people in charge at Boeing and Airbus probably hope they are still building 787s and A350s eighty years from now, I rather doubt that will be the case - and if it is about the only thing that'll still be the same is some of the structure.

As far as I am aware the 737 Max still has an overhead panel full of switches and the PM still has to push a little square thingy to check if anything is wrong.

It explains your inherent bias and your disdain of pilots. You might want to pull out a copy of the original Flight of the Phoenix where at the end of the day it was the pilot who saved their bacon.

For the pilot to deal with it and even then it took Airbus a long time to come up with a checklist that covered the Miracle on the Hudson scenario. Years ago I was told that software can't be tested for what can't be assumed.

Oh! For God's sake! Whatever are you blethering on about?
All the tugs will be autonomous $5M Teslas and just as capable as the aeroplane at staying on the black bits with the blue upwards and the brown down...
As for weather delays...well, I'm sure they'll think of something...

I remember the imminent introduction of the A380 required airports around the world having to spend a lot of money to be able to handle it. Get on board or get out of the way was the general consensus. Funny that desert parking lots weren't required to upgrade their facilities because thats where a lot of these things have ended up. So in the future I can't see airports so keen to cough up the dollars required to handle automated aircraft.

I don't have a disdain for pilots - I do have a disdain for the small number of criminally incompetent and suicidal pilots who account for most of the crashes. Each generation of aircraft has gotten incrementally safer (the MAX not withstanding) - if as you suggest the industry was dominated by 50 year old systems the accident rate would be orders of magnitude higher than it is. However the industry is still haunted by the bad pilots - to the point where pilot suicide has become one of the leading causes of fatal accidents and CFIT is the leading cause.
The reason creating a checklist for an all engine power loss is so tricky is because you need to make it so human pilots (who have probably never faced such an emergency) can run through it quickly and effectively - you could make that checklist 10 times longer and an automated system could still run it in a fraction of a second. When both engines ran down, an automated system could evaluate the altitude, airspeed, aircraft weight and configuration and calculate just how far it could glide if the engines don't recover, determine if there are any airfields within that distance - if not determining what open areas of ground or water are within that range - take the appropriate to reach the best potential landing/ditching site, inform ATC, and attempt to restart the engines - all within a second.

What about the criminally incompetent engineers who developed the FT-ADIRU that nearly caused a 777 to self-destruct because of faulty design and software but was saved by the flight crew. What about the criminally incompetent engineers responsible for the 737 MAX which you seem to quietly disregard? Or are all engineers pure of heart and sincere in motive?

And despite this inability of the engineers to foresee and develop such a checklist a competent and experienced crew still got it down in one piece with no loss of life.

At the end of this process what does the automation do then, or is it organising the evacuation as well even assuming the hull hasn't broken up. I suppose you will cover that scenario off with the robotic cabin crew who will be developed in conjunction with the pilotless aircraft.

state of the art zero pilot planes will probably do this a few times Vide Supra.

I'm no Airbus pilot, but wasn't that Airbus working as intended once it entered "flare" mode?

It was something like that, although my knowledge of Airbuses is almost non-existent other than C*

Bad pilots are mostly due to bad training. Training is a cost that needs to be removed, therefore pilots are to be removed from the flight deck.