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In the abstract yes but in practice the economic (ratio of cost of pilot to pax miles) and safety context of aviation mean fully autonomous flying has to be extremely robust before it has actual utility in industry.


In practice, you're also currently very reliant on infrastructure that is definitely not as solid as you want (eg: ILS and GPS can be interfered with quite nastily).

ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.


Commercial pilots are also extremely good at dealing with edge cases you wouldn't design an autonomous system for no matter how solid the infrastructure, like deciding the Hudson river is a good place to ditch

And their cost relative to other operational costs is so low there isn't even any pushback on regulations regarding there being two of them.


Pilot cost isn't low. The airline industry is very much looking for ways to reduce crews, whether that's going to single pilot operations (long term) or reduced crew operations (short term).

RCO is very much "pushback on regulations".




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