A cargo plane flew 50 miles with no pilot onboard using a semi-automated system. An aviation expert says the technology could address the pilot shortage.

A decade ago, my pilot friend informed me that after 4 years of college, starting pay was $18,000 a year. After a year of experience suddenly you're making 4 times that. Not a lot of people can afford to make that measley income for a year. It's not a sustainable way to recruit talent.

Then there's the issue is being on call when you're the lowest seniority in you're position where they can call you anytime a pilot calls in sick and you have to be at the airport in 30 minutes.

You can make a lot of money, but there's a lot of bullshit to deal with at the start of your career.

Lowering the costs of flight school would help more, making shitty money is one thing. Making shitty money when you dropped 200k to get there is another.

Right? There's no pilot shortage. Like with every other labor shortage it's a wage issue.

I'm pretty sure they don't get paid anywhere near what they're worth. Same old story in the US: anything that's important to society, has to do with people's health, safety, education, and so on.

This is what I expect to happen to truck drivers first. Automating driving still needs help in the last mile conditions but can navigate distances easily. I foresee fleets of automated trucks which are remotely connected to pilot centers where truck "drivers" sit at simulated driving stations and connect from truck to truck as they enter or leave warehouses or transfer stations. Instead of a small percentage of high-stress driving separated with stretches of monotony, it will be 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of high stress operating.

I would bet more in the range of 20 to 30 in any 8 hour shift.

Pilots aren’t paid to manually fly the aircraft from A to B. They’re paid to handle emergencies and abnormal situations. The kind of situations that automated systems are extremely poor at handling.

Thousands of military drones have been remotely piloted for decades. This news isn't as ground breaking as it might seem. Some of these drones are large: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk

I know a military drone isn't the same as a passenger carrying airplane, but for cargo I think the only reason this isn't already a thing is because drones are military tech and most governments don't want that falling into the wrong hands.

That's fine for cargo planes over remote routes.

I'm more worried about it going into another skyscraper.

If you fly commercially then you’re flying in an airplane that flies mostly autonomously. The vast majority of the pilots interaction is during takeoff and landing. The rest of the time it’s pretty much flying itself.

One huge difference between commercial aircraft & cars is that the air traffic is highly regulated. There are specific corridors & altitudes, distances between aircraft that must be maintained, and ground based controllers are monitoring and directing everything. It’s not even remotely like the free for all on the highways.

This isn't about AI and has nothing to do with whatever bullshits Musk is/was up to. They basically integrated drone tech into a Cessna and flew it remotely from a ground base. It's drone tech combined with an autopilot—fairly basic and proven, already utilized in military, agriculture, and hobby industries. Also its for cargo not humans.