The one thing American travellers are consistent on is choosing the cheapest flight. Autopiloted flights, at a discount, would sell tickets. That said, I don’t think we there yet technologically.
Pilots just aren’t that expensive, to be honest. Assuming your flight crew is costing $400 per hour combined (on the high side according to some googling) and you have a 6 hour flight with 300 passengers, eliminating the crew only drops prices by $8 per ticket.
The most common commercial plane in America is the Boeing 737 [1]. It seats 100 to 200 passengers [2].
Delta officers and first captains make $320 and $200 thousand, respectively, and fly about 1,000 hours a year [3]. So 520 per hour, between the two of them.
A main-cabin ticket to New York from San Jose, California about 2 months out costs $146. (Its SJC to MSP leg happens to be on a 737.) Flight time is about 6 hours.
Assuming 175 (one-class 737-800 configuration) paying passengers we have about $25,000 in revenues. The captain and first officer’s pay is roughly 12% of that. That’s a lot.
Even that 12% figure only works out to about $17 per ticket. If you offered passengers that discount (clearly communicating that it meant flying totally on autopilot), I'd be absolutely shocked if even 10-20% took the offer. Of course realistically, I feel sure that automated planes would be required to fly with a human backup pilot, so the potential savings are even less.
TBH I think it will take the success of self driving cars, trucks, etc. before the public becomes comfortable with the idea of self flying planes. Ironic since cars are overall the more challenging application, but I guess that's human nature.
The one thing American travellers are consistent on is choosing the cheapest flight. Autopiloted flights, at a discount, would sell tickets. That said, I don’t think we there yet technologically.