Considering being an airline pilot...

Considering being an airline pilot. Would I get unemployed in future as technological process in transportation increases? (like Super Maglev becomes mainstream etc)

Also what are your thoughts on airline pilot as a job in general?

Do not become an airline pilot.

Automation has already surpassed the ability of human pilots, and will continue to push down wages until they get rid of pilots altogether, leaving you with a massive training debt, and no way to pay it off.

I think Airline companies are still going to hire a pilot just for extra safety. You can't 100% rely on automation in a job like this.

You guys are retarded, go watch the freakonomics podcast about pilots they won't be automated anytime soon

Keep telling yourself that, It'll be commonplace within a decade if suicidal pilots keep crashing 100s of people into the floor. As to 100% replacement, that doesn't need to happen to crush wages; caretakers in the pilot seat don't get paid as much as real pilots did back in the day.

Airline pilot is already a shit job.

Why?

We won't even have cars fully automated in a decade you frothing at the mouth downie, do you even understand how much more difficult flying a plane is? And the last airline fatality in the US was like 6 years ago

Long hours
High stress
Airline mergers all the time create job uncertainty

There's a good documentary about it, but I can't think of the name. In it, multiple airline pilots only made 30k starting out and they had to get second jobs and said you don't make the big bucks until you've been with an airline for over 10 years.

Wow, you really know nothing about this. Cars are many times more difficult to automate. Right now, provided an aircraft is certified for autoland you can fly it completely using autopilot alone, not counting takeoff. And takeoff isnt difficult either, just not worth to automate. The only reason airplanes still have human pilots is that people would be afraid to fly them (which is a bullshit reason taking into account all the accidents caused by human error).

This. You need to get a ton of hours now, and the pay still isn't rising. Pilots got fucked over hard in the 90's. There's hundreds of other smaller jobs you can do that pay decent, of you really want to fly

Stay well away from this career. I know several pilots, they all think the job had degraded severely and has no future.

automating cars is a harder nut to crack that planes. cars are almost completely human operated at present because the degree of human judgement and various obstacles would be handled poorly by AI (encounters with other cars, road incidents, complex routes etc)

on the other hand, planes are already highly automated because their only goal is to get in the air and get back down again, from and to areas that are designed for that, with few potential speedbumps (interrupted landings etc).

many airline pilots fly helicopters in their downtime because it feels like flying, just like operating a car feels like driving. piloting planes is about communication, timing and operation of the control systems, all of which could be done better by computers.

link to the podcast?

It's a dying profession.

And the worst thing is there are so many young guys who are passionate about making a living flying, there will always be more supply than demand.

I know regional pilots flying small jets making $16/hour.

Don't do it.

If you want to fly, get a helicopter commercial license. It will set you back $100k so you better have something lined up.

Besides, commercial airline flying sucks ass. You just punch buttons and monitor systems that do your flying for you.

Planes are already decades ahead in terms of automation. Since the 1980s basically, airliners could perform virtually every part of the flight, including LANDING, automatically.

Most of the fatalities in the airline world are a result of pilots doing stupid shit and interfering with the automation and interpreting the automation poorly.

Believe me, a pilot is only needed to monitor that the systems are OK.

>You can't 100% rely on automation in a job like this
Yes you can

like what are all the buttons even for? all you really need is a steering wheel and a joystick amd obviously a lever for the landing gear and headlights. probably so many planes crash because of how many unnecessary buttons confusing the drivers.

he shouldn't consider being an airline pilot unless he's already well off, or making money is a priority, or unless he manages to become a military pilot first.

>Automation has already surpassed the ability of human pilots

Pilot jobs aren't going away anytime soon. For the most part flying is already automated. Pilots are there mostly for system monitoring, and to take control when shit hits the fan. For a single piston aircraft full automation is feasible, but for not for a machine as complex as a commercial jet. There's just too many variables to take into consideration.

>Wow, you really know nothing about this. Cars are many times more difficult to automate.
kek

The only way I see a good earnings future in it is in the Alaskan bush. Pilots always have jobs.

If you don't know a thing about automation, that's fine, but don't go pretending you're some authority on it. Full automation will happen on large commercial planes first, and to a large extent, already has, small planes likely won't for some time as it isn't cost-effective.

Also, cars are wildly more difficult to automate than planes, as it needs good decision making, which computer's aren't good at. You know that an automated car killed someone last week because it ran full speed into a tractor?

>Also what are your thoughts on airline pilot as a job in general?
Fiscally speaking, bad idea.

If you really enjoy flying, maybe go for it but it's still a horrible investment in raw monetary terms.

You can't really. The benefits of having at least one qualified human being in the front come into play when everything goes to shit.

See: United Airlines Flight 232. Such a situation was not envisioned in advance (although JAL-123 happened years before). And computer program created in those circumstances would've almost certainly kept trying to use the ailerons and rudder to right the aircraft as it banked further and further out of control.
A human being was smart enough to realize that they were dead and try using the engines instead, because even though they were never intended to be used in that way it was the last option they had.

Even now, with a computer programmed to manipulate those control surfaces much more effectively than a human ever could (There were experiments into this, I believe as a result of 232.) there would almost always be situations which couldn't be anticipated in advance, or which were anticipated as low likelihood. In those circumstances, human ingenuity comes into play.

That may be true, but most accidents are still caused by pilot error

This

AI already whoops fighter pilot with 100% succesrate

But honestly I dont think it will ever go away. Masses would rather fly with knowing that someone is in the cabin and that alone should be enough to ensue the survival of the profession. Of course this doesnt mean the "perks" wont degrade

That's why you'll see further automation, but never total replacement.

Pretty much why trucking may never be fully automated but combined with the attack on wages and unions in general, you better really like it because pay will be dogshit.

OP should get license and fly in terrain following mode for the Mexican cartels, that's where you make the big bucks.

...

>And computer program created in those circumstances would've almost certainly kept trying to use the ailerons and rudder to right the aircraft as it banked further and further out of control.

This is not true. Any automation system can have failsafes which are really not difficult to implement. For example - aileron movement does not produce roll > use trimmers. Trimmers not producing roll > use engines. It really comes down to ingenuity of testers and programmers and correctly programmed system will surpass human pilot every time, because it does not need several seconds to even minutes to understand a situation.

See airfrance crash over the atlantic - momentary sensor failure left pilots completely dumbfounded and they effectively flew an airworthy plane into the ocean. Now in retrospect a script for this kind of sensor failure is obvious: speed unreliable > maintain nominal cruise power and elevator neutral. Any pilot will tell you "well, duuh!", but the ones flying this plane got confused and relied on their muscle memory instead of logic: airplane going down - pull it the fuck up!

>taking pseudoscientists seriously

Not in my experience. My dad at delta for 8 years now works 1 to 2 weeks a month and makes ~125000$. He also works 2 other jobs which make his total salary go up to ~275000$

>Any automation system can have failsafes which are really not difficult to implement
My point is that thinking at the time wouldn't have thought to implement them because such a failure was presumed so unlikely as for it to be acceptable to make the plane a write-off in the event it occurred. The point was one of "you can't failsafe everything"

>Now in retrospect a script for this kind of sensor failure is obvious: speed unreliable > maintain nominal cruise power and elevator neutral
That's great, but we're still not completely at the stage that a plane with absolutely fucked sensors and can reliably land itself by feel like a pilot could. Especially if the radios stop working too.

There are large numbers of circumstances that were never foreseen in advance, and assumptions made by those on the ground that don't pan out in the air. In nearly all of these circumstances where something has genuinely failed, it's advantageous to have a human there to come up with an ad-hoc solution.

Not making a generalized defence of Krugman, he responded to people throwing this quote around:
>First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

>But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing.