Modern airplanes are mainly driven by the autopilot anyway. From a few moments after takeoff until landing they are running on autopilot. We already trust ourselves to machines.
We do have pilots on the planes able to cope with emergencies, but as the use of UAV's show, these pilots don't actually need to be aboard the aircraft. We could have a small number of emergency pilots sitting on the ground somewhere who could remotely operate the plane. These people would probably be very well trained in handling abnormal situations. We would of course need to make sure that the communication equipment wouldn't fail, but thats probably as much a surmountable engineering problem as other challenges in aircraft design.
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Modern airplanes are mainly driven by the autopilot anyway. From a few moments after takeoff until landing they are running on autopilot. We already trust ourselves to machines.
We do have pilots on the planes able to cope with emergencies, but as the use of UAV's show, these pilots don't actually need to be aboard the aircraft. We could have a small number of emergency pilots sitting on the ground somewhere who could remotely operate the plane. These people would probably be very well trained in handling abnormal situations. We would of course need to make sure that the communication equipment wouldn't fail, but thats probably as much a surmountable engineering problem as other challenges in aircraft design.
You should try changing your address...