Future Pilots, cockpits and aircrafts?

For commercial aviation, the trend will be ever-increasing automation, and pilots will increasingly be little more than trained attendants, who monitor the computers and take over if an emergency arises that the computer is not programmed to handle. Eventually computer control will become safe enough to make pilots unnecessary, but that is still some time away (because software is very unreliable and there's no way to make it completely reliable in any practical way at present). After that, pilots may still be retained for quite a while "just in case," and to please passengers. Eventually I can imagine an aircraft in which the lead cabin crew member simply presses a START button to leave the gate and fly the flight, with everything else being automated. It's technically conceivable but might not be psychologically palatable, and in any case automation to that extreme degree is still a long distance in the future. The military will probably switch to pilotless aircraft much sooner, particularly for high-performance aircraft that are at high risk of loss (such as fighters).

commercial airlines fly themselves

the cockpit of the future will only have one human as captain. where the copilot used to sit will be a large dog. the captain,s job will be to feed the dog. the dog's job will be to bite the captain if he touches anything. haahahaaaaa. i crack myself up. seriously, 85% of aircraft accidents involve pilot error. not fair to say that if you remove pilots 85% of accidents will not happen but i've seen over forty years of flying that when the human factor is removed from cockpit funtions, flying has gotten safer. navigation, tracking, fuel management, approaches even landings and takeoffs are better handled by black boxes than the best pilot. the complexities of the executive 727 i flew kept me far more busy even with a flight engineer than did the modern technology that only two of us had to handle in gulfstreams. so the answer is yes. if it could be marketed to the flying public, the technology is there now to remove pilots. witness the uav flight from california to australia a year or so ago. it's believed that the f22 will be the last manned fighter. indeed some airlines now prohibit the pilot flying in some situations not related to safety because when they touch the controls it costs the airlines money. we need half the crewmembers in a four engin transport today than we needed in the fifties. gone are the navigators and flight engineers. when the public can be informed, and they will be over the decades, about what technology can do to better their lives, the brainless pilots that now fly them into the ground and out of fuel will be history. and that's too bad for the good guys. glad i got my four decades in.

My husband is a C-17 pilot in the Air Force and right now they have added (and are planning on adding) a lot more UAV pilots. These are the Unmanned Aeriel Vehicles that are flown by remote while the pilot sits on the ground in a room. Yes, in the future these planes will most likely replace fighters. They cost a lot less to make so if one gets shot down the Air Force loses less money, plus they don't lose a pilot. Having said that, there is no possibility that in the immediate future the pilots who fly cargo or people will be replace by a computer. It is very unlikely that anyone would trust a computer to transport important and expensive cargo without have a pilot on there to monitor things. The same goes with people. Lives are at stake when in the air and they would not trust a computer to fly people around. Computers break down or having problems too often for that. The technology will be there, but it would not be something that would happen any time soon. Can't speak for 50 or more years from now, but as far as your immediate plans to become a pilot I wouldn't worry about it. Edit: Do not agree with the guy below me AT ALL. We have talked about this a lot considering this is my husband's future career and Air Force not currently heading this way. Not only that, but a plane is basically a huge computer already, and after seeing how often these things break down and hearing stories from real pilots all the time, there is no way they would trust expensive cargo and human lives with a computer and no pilot any time soon. Yes, most accidents are caused by human error-but what you have to ask yourself is how many would have been caused by computer malfunction and were prevented because humans were there?