By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotlessplanes.

Greg Farris wrote:


I notice that this thread is cross posted to different newsgroups. Perhaps
you are contributing from alt.rec.metaphysics or something :-)

You are hung up on the idea of autonomous operation, when that wasn't the
point at all. Flying airliners without pilots does not imply that they have
to fly themselves without human intervention. To most of us, it means they
are controlled from the ground, with a level of human supervision and
intervention scaled to the complexity of the task. This means, as you say,
the pilot is not physically in the airplane. It also means that one 'pilot'
(human or otherwise) can manage several airliners, and moreover manage
conflict between them better than any one pilot in any one airplane could
do.

To you, if I understand you correctly, this doesn't pass muster, because it
is not true autonomous operation. the planes are not making any decisions
by themselves, or very few. This, however, was not the point of the initial
thread, which was only concerned with removing costly, error-prone pilots
from airliners.


So you want to remove error prone pilot from the aircraft and put him on
the ground in charge of several aircrafts?