This topic resurfaces every so often, usually with no particular context, but now as a knee-jerk after the horrible and preventable Germanwings incident.

Here is Patrick Smith's (formerly of Salon's Ask the Pilot column) comment from the NYT article:

>>> I'm an airline pilot, air travel blogger and author. This pilotless planes discussion is something that comes up all the time, and it never fails to raise my blood pressure.

One of the main issues is that people greatly misunderstand the capabilities of EXISTING cockpit automation, and have a vastly exaggerated sense of what it can do -- the result of articles similar to this one, which take at face value the claims of researchers, aerospace academics and tech aficionados who often have little sense of the operational realities of commercial flying.

Over and over and over we hear about how "automatic" planes are. Yet in truth flying remains a very hands-on operation subject to tremendous amounts of pilot input. It's perhaps a different KIND of input than in the old days: instead of gripping the steering yoke as would've been the case in the 1930s, you're working the various autoflight components, flight management system, etc. But the automation only does what the pilots TELL it to do: what, when, where and how. The other day I worked a flight up from the Caribbean. We had bad weather the whole way, a holding pattern, and had to fly a low-visibility Cat-2 approach. The cockpit was so busy that after we landed my voice was hoarse. Now imagine somebody dealing with the complexities of such a flight from a room thousands of miles away, with dozens of other planes stacked up.

Patrick Smith Boston