Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers

John says

I don't think airline pilots will get automated, because the cockpit is already highly automated. The pilots are mostly there to make sure everything is going smoothly and to respond to emergencies.

Sky King (Likely) says

There’s a huge push to do commercial airline/cargo operations with drones. I fly planes for a living and they can just about do everything themselves. They can land and fly by themselves. Haven’t seen a plane do a take off or engine failure but I believe these things can be accomplished with the same technology government MIC drones use now. If it saves airlines money they WILL do it.

Bob says

Many areas of the world still cannot get reliable HF communication. MH370 is the perfect example of GPS positioning is not available world wide.
Even if airliners become unmanned, they will still need to be piloted or managed on the ground.
Although aircraft can auto land, most are limited up to light winds (conditions that fog would be present) UAVs that don’t have these limitations are still piloted, just from a pilot on the ground.

Kevin says

Airliners are already extremely automated, but I don't see it happening any time soon.

Even the most advanced airliners today are designed and built to be flown by two pilots. It would be incredibly hard to fly say, a 737, by yourself... even if you were a qualified airline captain.

The technology is there (in theory) to build a pilot-less plane. But for it to be a money-making endeavor for airlines to consider, you'd have to jump the massive hurdle of public opinion. A lot of people are afraid of flying already, let alone going 38,000 feet in the air at the hands of a robot.

It's not exactly feasible nor is it a money-making idea at the moment.

A(soon to be) pilot (No chance) says

No chance! Yea robots might be better at flying than pilots (sometimes). But because of the way they are right now they can't calculate unnatural situations like: emergencies, failures, volcanic ash etc.

Thought experiment:
the AI is operating the plane normally but suddenly the AI gets notified that an engine is failing but the engine is not failing it's the system which checks if the engine is running is failing! What now? The AI will take steps which you would take if an engine failed but the engine didn't fail.

You see the problem? It is not as easy as it may seem to replace pilots.

Joodi Al Farsi (Could go either way) says

Can people trust a computer to take them 1000 feet above the ground? Technology has already advanced so much, so who knows?

Vince (No chance) says

Think about it. We've had the technology to automate trains and we haven't done so. Why in the world would you expect airliners full of passengers to be automated any time soon?

Fábio Ramos (Small chance) says

No chance