I don't think that disagrees with my comment in how I meant it, but perhaps the author of that took what I said a bit out of context from where I see it. Pilots

I don't think that disagrees with my comment in how I meant it, but perhaps the author of that took what I said a bit out of context from where I see it. Pilots are there for the edge cases which are the 1-5% of the time life or death situations, like the ones listed above. I listed the miracle on the hudson as an example of a human performing life saving things a computer would never do. Factually, autopilots are what actually fly the overwhelming flight hours in commercial aviation. The pilot takes off, gets to altitude, sets the heading with the assistance of tech like a VOR[1], sets the autopilot, and then just scans the instrument panels for the duration of the flight. They then take over for the approach and landing. I strongly doubt any commercial pilot would disagree with this (I've got several in my family, but am not one myself). The fact is that the number one cause of aircraft crashes is pilot error. So for the 1-5% where a human would indeed prevent a crash as mentioned in your article, over 50% [2] of the fatal crashes are in fact due to human error. Regarding the last paragraph, I was the pilot on a mission over the Sinjar Mountain[3] range and had my altimeter go haywire and think I was at 20,000ft AGL (above ground level) when I was in fact more like 7500ft AGL. The troubleshooting for a remote plane is exactly the same as any IFR (instrument flight rating aka you can't see outside of the cockpit due to weather) rated plane when you have zero visibility. You trust your instincts and the sensors / instruments. I knew the altimeter was totally full of lies as the plane started descending below the tops of the mountains thereby killing my signal. So I set the camera to "nose" which means straight forward and when I regained communications, I managed to switch it to manual roll ("roll knobs as they call it") and did a turn left as hard as feasible to miss the tip of one of the mountains. Totally ignoring the altimeter, I flew it home with the aid of the camera to gauge rough altitude and safely landed the plane. Do they crash occasionally? Sure. However, none of these were designed with safety critical autopilot and that could certainly be developed with today's software and hardware. That pilot is arguing "computers can't replace me!!!", but in reality if they did, the majority of the crashes[1] that are fatal would not happen in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range [1] http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinjar_Mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinjar_Mountains