Would the costs for short hops be comparable to a commercial airplane ticket? Because it would be awesome to charter small flights from an app to jump to a nearby city.
A couple highlights from the Records section:
> On 24 April 2001, a Global Hawk flew non-stop from Edwards AFB to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Australia, making history by being the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific Ocean. The flight took 22 hours, and set a world record for absolute distance flown by a UAV, 13,219.86 kilometers (8,214.44 mi).[97]
> On 22 March 2008, a Global Hawk set the endurance record for full-scale, operational uncrewed aircraft UAVs by flying for 33.1 hours at altitudes up to 60,000 feet over Edwards AFB.[98]
Unlike Predator/Reaper/etc. drones, the Global Hawk is autonomous, there is no pilot sitting in a faux-cockpit stateside.
To be considered safe, an auto-fly needs to be able to gracefully degrade as the subsystems in which it depends start to fail. Human pilots are trained to handle this by compensating for system failures in a variety of ways, including compensation (eg in a split flap scenario) and disabling (turning off a misbehaving autopilot). Ultimately, a human pilot can always turn off all the automation and fly the plane by looking out the window (or, in poor conditions, using gyro powered “steam” gauges).
In the case that the pilot is disabled, then auto-land is a great option, even though it’s reliant on so many subsystems. But for an always-on auto-fly, the requirement to gracefully degrade, and degrade, and degrade, and still operate at the level of a human pilot using the “Mark 1 eyeball” is a tough one which hasn’t yet been met (as far as I know).
There’s mention in this discussion of fully automated drones. But, those are basically expendable if there’s a serious system failure, since there are no souls on board.
What happens then they do?
I doubt the cost of a pilot's time alone is a big enough factor to meaningfully change the number of people with access to chartered flights.
The other costs (hours of plane time, fuel, ramp fee, parking fees, maintenance) probably dwarf pilot time as a percentage of total cost. And you're either pushing the absolute unreliability of aviation [0] to the customers who are now trapped in a different city, or they're paying even more to the app to have backup plans ready to roll.
[0] Commercial aviation deals at a scale that can absorb flights that don't keep their plan. You go to the counter, get rebooked, and angrily eat some shitty fast food. When something goes wrong on a private flight, you're pacing around on the tarmac at 1 am, 3 states away from home and have to be at work in the morning.
Mandatory bad car analogy: a driver will often prefer a faster response over spending time to check the rear view mirror before slamming the brakes, a computer would never have reasons to do so, they can check without meaningful delay.
(I don't mean to make it sound as I think it's easy to solve, but the basic strategy to solving it is simple :)
And maybe catching/handling them properly would involve more sensors, when people really just want a well-trained human who is able to improvise in the cockpit.
It would be difficult code a machine to find a good landing spot in extremely variable terrain. For instance, I saw a video of a plane safely crash-landing landing on a four-lane highway with traffic. It would be impractical to code something to handle that very rare situation.
Even experience cannot be much of a factor on top of that, as very few pilots will ever experience a scenario like that outside the simulator. My layman's suspicion, honed in the MCAS debates, tells me that the only other thing experience and human "general intelligence and gut feeling" can add to the equation is educated guesswork regarding which data to distrust when things just don't add up consistently due to a malfunction.
> V_1 is the critical engine failure recognition speed or takeoff decision speed. It is the speed above which the takeoff will continue even if an engine fails or another problem occurs, such as a blown tire.[9]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_speeds
The plane has to keep going until V_2 (or V_2_min).
One thing that no doubt helped with Sullenberger was he was a hobby glider pilot where that kind of situation comes up regularly if in a much less dangerous way as gliders are slow and light.
[1] https://lilium.com/newsroom-detail/taking-to-the-skies-fligh...
Bear in mind even in takeoff and landing scenarios, unlike a public roadway, the airplane has pretty exclusive use of the runway as well.
Pilots are very unlikely the primary cost of aircraft trips. Things like jet fuel are probably much more of the cost driver.
The environment has shown quite clearly that we don't want to. We'd probably already have it if we did.
The safety design of aviation relies on having multiple highly competent people in the loop on every flight and exercising their judgement on dozens of things. And that's for the best-case scenario, they also have to be capable of choosing and executing fallback plans when part of the overall system (the plane, air traffic, radio navigation, flying conditions, ground conditions, etc...) degrades or enters an unexpected state.
It's a problem of trust, and regulation, not a technical one.