We built avionics, software, mechanisms and a comm system that enables automated operation of the plane from a remote command station. The remote operator has a GUI where they can command the aircraft.
This article goes into a bit more detail about how it works: https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/with-tesla-and-space...
What are your thoughts on this?
It's up to governments to ensure the winners compensate the losers. In the long term, this may be an UBI, but for now it should take the form of retraining and economic adjustment packages (similar to what might occur when tariffs are repealed). This should be funded by a super-profits tax on heavily automated industries.
Either way I agree with the parent comment, this is a public policy question about how to make sure people are able to maintain lucrative lives (education policy, monetary policy, social policy) not a question for the business making an existing task more efficient and expecting them to answer what society wants to do with the freed time.
You don’t need to deal with making sure pilots are all at the right airports. You don’t need to provide them lunch. You don’t need a bunk for them. Pilots are limited in hours of piloting time and sleep requirements, but they can be instantly transferred between planes instead of walking.
The self-flying use case is, at least from a technical standpoint, far more straightforward than self driving, and the cost incentives are pretty huge. Not to mention the fact that some of this tech has already made its way into private aircraft, with Garmin already having a production system in place where non-pilot passengers can simply push a button on an aircraft and it will completely autonomously find a suitable airport to divert to, communicate with ATC, and land -- even taking adverse weather into account.
There is also a lot of regulatory and tech work at the FAA to also try to ulitize drone-like systems to help operate aircraft. The reality is that the vast majority of time that a pilot is in a flight it is quite low-intensity work (if there is any work to do at all). The thought here is that remote pilots could control the machine (or assist a single pilot in the cockpit) during critical phases of flight. The advatange here, of course, is that a remote pilot could do many such flights over a short period of time, whereas the one on board is stuck to the one flight even in moments where he/she has absolutely nothing to do.
Whichever way you slice it, if you think there is some argument for fully or partially autonomous driving, all of those arguments are orders of magnitude more compelling in flying. Timing, of course, is the real question mark.
What does it take to be a remote UAV pilot in a civilian setting? What kind of training or experience are looked for or are required?
I'm sure there are many armchair pilots and RC enthusiasts who have similar questions.