I know auto pilot does most of the work but when the things break down then the experts are needed.
By the way , let me ask you a question. I take driverless trains all the time in Sydney. But I don't think I will consider pilotless flight for a travel. You have so much trust in the autopilot technology . Would you ever consider a pilotless flight ?
Like it or not you already are to a certain extent taking pilotless flights, like I said right now the pilot is there to just oversee everything goes smoothly and doing only minutes worth of any actual flying.
You know most of the crashes are classified as CFIT, controlled flight into terrain. or pilot error. More planes crash because pilots F'ed up rather than problem with the plane.
To answer your question with the current state or rather implementation of technology I wouldn't take totally autonomous flights but would be ok with them being controlled from the ground. I believe the technology exists to make totally autonomous flights also possible. Its really not difficult, its mostly automated anyways
when the things break down then the experts are needed.
Things rarely breakdown and pilots are hardly experts, they have trained on some emergency scenarios and rely on their instruments and sensors and if there is an issue they pull up checklists and go through them. Like if one engine fails, they open their manual to that page and then follow the steps on that list, and you know something on more than one occasion the pilots have shut down the one good working engine thinking that engine had the problem and ended up crashing. And if you add another ECU which would on its own run diagnostics and run through the checklists, such scenarios could be also be avoided. Such accidents happen when work loads increase, poor training and then pilots start making mistakes. Many times a pilots stubbornness and ego have also made plane crash, Air Blue in Islamabad and PIA in Karachi. A computer doesn't get stressed or panics and start to make mistakes.
But when things actually do breakdown, there is hardly anything even the pilots can do
But right now that does not make too much financial sense as you can see all major aircraft manufactures Boeing and Airbus struggling just to keep afloat. So just no money in R&D. And getting anything passed by the FAA and ready to put into operations is a long and expensive procedure.
All the R&D in the last 35 to 30 yrs have been how to make more efficient planes so they cost less to run and use less fuel, outside of that no real innovation in the civilian aviation sector. A pilots salary is chump change to the airline specially in the US where they get crap pay. A years pay is worth less than one of their short haul flights.
If there were massive savings to be made by totally getting rid of pilots you'd already be seeing pilotless flights now. Also since the MCAS fiasco with the Boeing 737 Max, public trust is also at a low.
BUT having said that. I would still prefer to have experienced pilots on the flightdeck in rare cases such as the Hudson Bay landing and TACA 110 where the pilots actual skill saved the day and something I doubt a computer controlled aircraft would do, it would always try to make it to the nearest runway, unless it was specifically programmed to abandon standard procedure and try out of the box solution. Probably its possible but again lotta $$$$$
So in the end you have got me confused myself, because sooooo many incidents where pilot F'ed Up big time and ended up costing a lot of lives and if the plane was autonomous it wouldn't have but then again that one in a million time where the pilot actually saved the day by not following SOP and relied on his experience and gut instinct.
So something in the middle needs to be derived. Currently we are sitting somewhere there, but only the flight and landing is fully automated. Maybe in future more self diagnostic and taking required actions on its own capabilities be added and pilots there just seeing everything is going smoothly and intervene only in extreme emergencies
