By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

Greg Farris wrote:
Technologically, we're just one step away. As soon as clearances are

Yeah, like the one step Neil Armstrong made.

In reality though, I do not believe the day will ever come when there is
not someone physically on board the aircraft capable of flying it and
landing it safely. There's just no good reason why we would want to do
that.

Exactly. Look at the JetBlue incident last week. A relatively simple
emergency but a whole chain of decisions needed to be made and executed
for the flight to end successfully. Now talk about engine failure, etc.
I agree that a computer can do a great job when everything goes more or
less according to plan, but what about when it doesn't?

Once the airlines get pilots' salaries down to bus driver levels, the

I suspect that if you compute pay on a seat basis (i.e. $salary per
person carried) that you're already there.

-cwk.