As I said I cannot see this ever happening. For a 50% operating cost saving but not for a 5% saving. Most people would not even notice a 10% or 20% ticket price rise; they vary almost randomly according to every imaginable factor e.g. school holidays. The technology upheaval would be unimaginably enormous. For example you would need remote sensing for wx avoidance etc which doesn’t exist today. And the systems reliability would need to be much better than today because you now have pilots who can execute various fallback procedures when something fails. If you replace them with technology then you need sensors on everything, and in many cases these fail at least as often as the device being monitored.
I know one could make a banal statement like nobody in 1800 would have expected radio communications “therefore” anything is possible, but this is soooo far into the future I just cannot see it happening, when sticking two pilots up front enables everybody to carry on as present. People are cheap, their failures are self healing for the most part, they are self replicating (even without 18-30 Club holidays), some are quite clever, and endless numbers of them want to be pilots.
There are simply bigger fish to fry in air transport.
Same with the Amazon drones. For the peanuts which they pay for delivery services, the saving between that and having a drone do it cannot be worth it.
Patrick wrote:
Both would have a positive influence on the % figure.
Yes. But in total hardly more than 3 or 4 percent. The subsidiaries pay much less for their crews already.
LeSving wrote:
Even so, I don’t believe that the captain would disappear. Someone would have to interact with that AI and the rest of the crew and the passengers.
That could be the purser or any suitably trained member of the cabin crew. All that can really be done is to reboot a system or re-establish a broken communication link. Pilots can’t really do anything else either on a fly-by-wire airplane. Probably for legal reasons in some countries someone on board must be responsible. But that again could be the purser. And all he would have to do to act responsibly is to press the big green “Start” button (the only control on board not accessible via remote link) once boarding is complete and everyone on board has their seat belts fastened. Maybe they give him a big red “Emergency Stop” button as well to either hold the aircraft on the ground or make it squawk “7700” and land at the nearest suitable airport.
LeSving wrote:
It would have to be able to fly from A to B without any further input than what is needed to navigate.
But that would only be the emergency program. Normal operation would be by remotely controlling the flight manaagement computer from the ground. This has been already demonstrated more then a decade ago when the B777 was introduced. IIRC they performed several flights in Australia where the pilots just sat and watched.
Apart from low speed light rail like the DLR, we still don’t even have driverless trains and they literally run on rails and are externally steered. It’s going to be a long time before we see flight-crew less airliners.
Peter wrote:
I know one could make a banal statement like nobody in 1800 would have expected radio communications “therefore” anything is possible, but this is soooo far into the future
I was just going to do that. 
I’m sure the day before the Wright brothers did their first flight, someone somwhere said “I cannot see this ever happening”.
There is going to be some people who do see this happening and who will be dedicating their lives towards making it happen. I disagree that this is as far in the future, when most of the technology puzzle pieces are there already.
How is a computer less capable of interpreting a WX (say, radar) image than a human being for WX avoidance?
And the fail-safe argument IMHO doesn’t work: Statistical evidence has shown that air accidents have decreased drastically with increased automation (compared over the last few decades). The impact of an accident will likely be worse, but the likelihood of an accident happening in a fully automated environment will be less than with human pilots/human error.
Same as with current communication loss scenario. Follow the flight plan.
As I said all fine until something prevents the flight plan being followed. You could follow the flight plan to an airport with a runway out of action due to blockage, land and hit the blockage. The ability to prevent that happening is down to some form of commnication between aircraft and ground so it seems to me that must be guaranteed 100% of the time unlike with cars and boats where (if communication were required) you could fail safe to just stopping. I know I guess you could develop various protocols that in the event of communication failure the computer would have various fail safes like we do as pilot (perhaps even using visual signals) but I suspect at the very least there is a great deal of work to be done on protecting the flight in the event it were solely left to the onboard systmes to run the show.
For the peanuts which they pay for delivery services, the saving between that and having a drone do it cannot be worth it.
I guess it has a lot more to do with the premium people will strangely pay for a same day service. I dont disagree mind you with your cynicism about its future.
Peter wrote:
Also is the cost of the crew a significant % of operating say an Airbus or a Boeing?
Depending on Make/Model the Crew costs are around 5 to 15% of the DOC. The biggest parts of the DOC are depreciation, fuel and fees, followed by maintenance costs. (at least that is what the ILR at RWTH University figured out based on their model). And you can’t eliminate crew costs, because you won’t want to get rid of cabin crew.
I don’t believe a second that we’ll see many pilotless planes in CAT, because you will need an adaptive controller somewhere in the loop (and a pilot will try harder to save the plane if he is in it… ) Freight maybe, that’s an other issue. I can see that airline representatives want to get rid of crew costs, though.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
You could follow the flight plan to an airport with a runway out of action due to blockage, land and hit the blockage. The ability to prevent that happening is down to some form of commnication between aircraft and ground so it seems to me that must be guaranteed 100% …
And how do guarantee that today, with pilots on board, after a loss of radio communication? In good enough weather the tower can flash a red light at the pilots and make them go-around. If they remember the meaning of the light signals… That light signal can easily be picked-up by a camera in an autonomous plane. And in bad weather the landing aircraft will just hit whatever blocks the runway. With and without pilots.
what_next – yes I agree we can possibly think our way around some / many situations, and I did give a simple one, but take the far more complex like 9/11 or a major air traffic systems failure etc followed by a loss of the data link – there is now a complex scenario that I would feel would challenge on board sytems that are having to work automatically – of course I could be wrong, but I still feel it is a much more complicated scenario that driveless cars of captainless ships, and even they are still some way off wide scale adoption.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
…but take the far more complex like 9/11 …
9/11 is one of the strong arguments in favor of pilotless aircraft. The hijackers would have had no means to steer the planes into anything.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
…but I still feel it is a much more complicated scenario that driveless cars of captainless ships,…
I didn’t read an analysis, but I would think that a driverless car is far more complex than a driverless plane. It really needs some kind of artificial intelligence and fast image analysis and some degree of “fuzziness” to cope with the mistakes of human drivers and pedestrians. A plane can be programmed in a comparatively simple way. After all, the first fully automatic flight across the USA using an inertial navigation system and the first full autoland have both taken place more than 50 years ago.
But I don’t really think that the pilotless airliner will come soon. And when it happens, it will be a two-stage process: First there will be single-pilot planes with the remaining pilot performing only monitoring tasks. Only after this operation has achieved a success rate very close to 100% will the remaining pilot disappear.
Patrick wrote:
And the fail-safe argument IMHO doesn’t work: Statistical evidence has shown that air accidents have decreased drastically with increased automation (compared over the last few decades).
Yes, but AFAIK there are no statistics about ‘close shaves’ where pilot intervention saved the day. We only hear about the failures, never about the saves (airlines of course would have much of that info via internal reporting, but it’s not normally made public).
As an aside, I think airlines are so preoccupied with crew cost as it’s one of the few factors they actually have control over. Boeing / Airbus / Embraer, etc set the prices for the airframes, GE and RR for the engines, Mr. Draghi or Mrs Yellen the financing cost and someone in Saudi the cost of fuel. Landing / route charges are set by countries. All of course negotiable to a degree, but really it leaves catering and crew….
