When will AI make pilots obsolete or less critical?

[BillytheKid]

Hello all,
I’m considering entering flight school, but I’m still on the fence. I’m not yet 20, and I’m trying to assess whether the significant cost of flight training is a sound investment given rapid advances in AI—particularly the prospect of AGI.

We already see autonomous systems in other transportation sectors, and some experts suggest major disruption could occur within the next 5 years, with many saying sooner. With that in mind, I’m hoping to get perspectives from those already in the industry.

My questions are:

Is pursuing flight training still a reasonable long-term career choice given current and projected developments in AI?

Realistically, how far away is AI from becoming a major operational factor in airline cockpits?

Could airlines use advances in AI or automation as leverage in pilot contract negotiations?

More broadly, what do you see as the future of the pilot profession over the next 20–30 years?

Thanks in advance for any insight or experience you’re willing to share.

[cdnavater]

This is what I asked ChatGPT,

Are we closer to single pilot airliners or pilotless than two years ago?

“Short answer: we’re closer to increased automation and pilot-assistance systems than we were two years ago—but we aren’t much closer to commercial airliners flying with just one pilot, and fully pilotless commercial airliners remain a long-term future prospect rather than something imminent

How this compares to two years ago
Progress has been made in automation technology, regulatory study, and prototype autonomous vehicles. However:
Single-pilot commercial passenger flights are not significantly closer to reality than they were two years ago; regulators still haven’t set a timeline.
Fully pilotless commercial airliners (no pilots onboard) remain far off, with most experts and regulatory roadmaps pointing to decades, not years”


Pretty interesting read on advancements and some of the current capabilities but the bottom line is predictions seem to be further into the future than when you asked the same question a little over a year ago.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/featu ... hatgpt.com

Curious, since you’re almost 20 now, what have you been studying in the meantime?

[digits_]

Autonomous airplanes already exist. The technology is there. Next step is to convince governments and the public that it's safe, and possibly optimize the ATC systems to deal with them. I would guess this will take at least 20 years. And we already have 60 year old planes flying around today.

The buzzword "AI" will have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Once you're willing to bet your life that chatgpt will give you 1000 correct answers in a row, we can talk about that again. The current "AI" will not improve much further than what you see today. It will never be in control of an aircraft. Never.

Next generations? Possibly, but also completely unnecessary. You don't need it to control aircraft or make them land. All this already exists.

[cdnavater]

Autonomous airplanes already exist. The technology is there. Next step is to convince governments and the public that it's safe, and possibly optimize the ATC systems to deal with them. I would guess this will take at least 20 years. And we already have 60 year old planes flying around today.

The buzzword "AI" will have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Once you're willing to bet your life that chatgpt will give you 1000 correct answers in a row, we can talk about that again. The current "AI" will not improve much further than what you see today. It will never be in control of an aircraft. Never.

Next generations? Possibly, but also completely unnecessary. You don't need it to control aircraft or make them land. All this already exists.

You should read the article I posted, it seems to imply that AI will be required, the autonomous aircraft can only deal with pre programmed responses, when x happens do y kind of thing.
What will the automation do when the ILS is off the air and solar flares knock out GPS signals, I have had two separate instances this past week where SBAS was not available for the entire flight.
Will it happen, I would say it’s a certainty but widely used with passengers, I think more likely 40 years from now it will be half of the airplanes flying around.
Some carrier will launch with older aircraft and charge a little more for having two pilots and all the 60 year old recently retired will happily pay for that!
Edit;
I should proof read a little better, the article I posted was actually from before the original poster asked this question the first time, I’m going to search more up to date information

[cdnavater]

Found some more recent information, I found this interesting and almost possibly the reason it might never be common.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7590/6/1/3

“with potential 10–15% operational cost savings offset by certification, cybersecurity, and infrastructure expenditures”

In other words no real cost advantage to get rid of the pilots!

[digits_]

Autonomous airplanes already exist. The technology is there. Next step is to convince governments and the public that it's safe, and possibly optimize the ATC systems to deal with them. I would guess this will take at least 20 years. And we already have 60 year old planes flying around today.

The buzzword "AI" will have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Once you're willing to bet your life that chatgpt will give you 1000 correct answers in a row, we can talk about that again. The current "AI" will not improve much further than what you see today. It will never be in control of an aircraft. Never.

Next generations? Possibly, but also completely unnecessary. You don't need it to control aircraft or make them land. All this already exists.

You should read the article I posted, it seems to imply that AI will be required, the autonomous aircraft can only deal with pre programmed responses, when x happens do y kind of thing.
What will the automation do when the ILS is off the air and solar flares knock out GPS signals, I have had two separate instances this past week where SBAS was not available for the entire flight.
Will it happen, I would say it’s a certainty but widely used with passengers, I think more likely 40 years from now it will be half of the airplanes flying around.
Some carrier will launch with older aircraft and charge a little more for having two pilots and all the 60 year old recently retired will happily pay for that!
Edit;
I should proof read a little better, the article I posted was actually from before the original poster asked this question the first time, I’m going to search more up to date information

The amount of inputs in airplane systems is relatively limited. Gps, ils, ins, flight insturments,.. you don't need AI to deal with hypothetical obscure failures. The amount of possible combined failures is limited.

[digits_]

Found some more recent information, I found this interesting and almost possibly the reason it might never be common.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7590/6/1/3

“with potential 10–15% operational cost savings offset by certification, cybersecurity, and infrastructure expenditures”

In other words no real cost advantage to get rid of the pilots!

That sounds absolutely plausible. Pilots can also fly broken planes, autonomous planes likely won't leave the ground unless perfect.

[Flight94]

The fact that the plane you train on will likely be equipped with a carburetor and magnetos should give you an idea as to the speed at which aviation adopts technology.

You'll be ok.

[CGFCK]

Hello,

I’ll offer a perspective that’s probably less comforting than what you’ll hear from people already invested in the profession.. but I think it’s important to be honest, especially given your age and the cost of entry.

1. Is flight training a sound long-term investment given AI and AGI?

If I were under 20 today, I would be very cautious about committing six figures and a decade of my life to a career whose core function—monitoring, decision-making, and system management—is exactly what AI is advancing toward most rapidly.

Aviation is often described as “too complex” or “too safety-critical” for AI. But that same argument was made about driving, surgery, financial markets, and industrial control systems—all of which are already seeing significant automation replacing human roles, not just assisting them.

We already have:
- Driverless taxis operating in dense, chaotic urban environments with unpredictable pedestrians, weather, and human behavior.

- Autonomous cargo operations in mining, shipping ports, and logistics hubs.

- AI copilots in military aviation performing sensor fusion, threat prioritization, and tactical decision-making faster than humans.

Commercial aviation won’t be immune simply because it’s regulated. Regulation historically lags technology—it doesn’t stop it.

2. How far away is AI from being a major operational factor in cockpits?

AI is already a major operational factor—it’s just framed as “automation” today.
The key misunderstanding is assuming progress will be linear. It won’t be.

Once AI systems can:
- perceive (vision, radar, LIDAR equivalents),
- model outcomes probabilistically,
- and improve through self-training and simulation,
progress accelerates non-linearly. That’s the part most people underestimate.

Driverless taxis already operate in environments far more dynamic than cruise flight, approach, or even most abnormal airline scenarios. Yes, aviation has edge cases—but AI excels at edge-case recall once trained at scale.

Within 10 years, it is very realistic to expect:
- Single-pilot airline operations as a baseline
- AI systems performing real-time monitoring, fault diagnosis, and decision support
- Human pilots increasingly acting as system supervisors, not operators
- Once that line is crossed, the long-term trajectory is obvious.

3. Will airlines use AI as leverage in contract negotiations?

Absolutely...and they already are, implicitly.
Corporations don’t need full pilot replacement to gain leverage. They only need reduced staffing requirements,
expanded duty limits “because AI reduces workload,”
or regulatory permission for smaller crews.

This has happened before in other industries:
- Railroads used automation to eliminate conductors.
- Shipping reduced crews from dozens to a handful.
- Call centers replaced entire departments with AI in under five years.
- Warehousing and logistics replaced union labor with robotics at scale.

From a corporate standpoint, AI is a wet dream scenario: lower labor costs, fewer collective bargaining constraints, and greater operational flexibility. There is no reason to believe airlines are philosophically different.

[digits_]

AI is already a major operational factor—it’s just framed as “automation” today.

No, these are 2 extremely different concepts. With automation X happens and Y will be executed, decided within milli or microseconds.

With (what we refer to today as) AI when X happens, sometimes Y will happen, sometimes Z will happen and sometimes something completely random. And it takes much longer to come up with a solution.

You need 'AI' to recognize patterns and other real life data, such as with driving cars dealing with pedestrians and obstacles. Airplanes are designed to be flown by numbers (IFR procedues). You don't need the pattern recognition, you don't need AI for that.

[5degrees]

Hello,

I’ll offer a perspective that’s probably less comforting than what you’ll hear from people already invested in the profession.. but I think it’s important to be honest, especially given your age and the cost of entry.

1. Is flight training a sound long-term investment given AI and AGI?

If I were under 20 today, I would be very cautious about committing six figures and a decade of my life to a career whose core function—monitoring, decision-making, and system management—is exactly what AI is advancing toward most rapidly.

Aviation is often described as “too complex” or “too safety-critical” for AI. But that same argument was made about driving, surgery, financial markets, and industrial control systems—all of which are already seeing significant automation replacing human roles, not just assisting them.

We already have:
- Driverless taxis operating in dense, chaotic urban environments with unpredictable pedestrians, weather, and human behavior.

- Autonomous cargo operations in mining, shipping ports, and logistics hubs.

- AI copilots in military aviation performing sensor fusion, threat prioritization, and tactical decision-making faster than humans.

Commercial aviation won’t be immune simply because it’s regulated. Regulation historically lags technology—it doesn’t stop it.

2. How far away is AI from being a major operational factor in cockpits?

AI is already a major operational factor—it’s just framed as “automation” today.
The key misunderstanding is assuming progress will be linear. It won’t be.

Once AI systems can:
- perceive (vision, radar, LIDAR equivalents),
- model outcomes probabilistically,
- and improve through self-training and simulation,
progress accelerates non-linearly. That’s the part most people underestimate.

Driverless taxis already operate in environments far more dynamic than cruise flight, approach, or even most abnormal airline scenarios. Yes, aviation has edge cases—but AI excels at edge-case recall once trained at scale.

Within 10 years, it is very realistic to expect:
- Single-pilot airline operations as a baseline
- AI systems performing real-time monitoring, fault diagnosis, and decision support
- Human pilots increasingly acting as system supervisors, not operators
- Once that line is crossed, the long-term trajectory is obvious.

3. Will airlines use AI as leverage in contract negotiations?

Absolutely...and they already are, implicitly.
Corporations don’t need full pilot replacement to gain leverage. They only need reduced staffing requirements,
expanded duty limits “because AI reduces workload,”
or regulatory permission for smaller crews.

This has happened before in other industries:
- Railroads used automation to eliminate conductors.
- Shipping reduced crews from dozens to a handful.
- Call centers replaced entire departments with AI in under five years.
- Warehousing and logistics replaced union labor with robotics at scale.

From a corporate standpoint, AI is a wet dream scenario: lower labor costs, fewer collective bargaining constraints, and greater operational flexibility. There is no reason to believe airlines are philosophically different.

Within 10 years is not a serious timeline. Airlines are currently receiving brand new aircraft with 2 + crews that they're going to retire by 2036 ?Meanwhile AC just retired a 35 year old A320...

I love that corporate wants to eliminate every other role but who's gonna be left to buy anything when no one has any income ?

[Bede]

If it doesn’t happen, it won’t be because of the typical system reliability arguments- it will be because of economics. Pilots are a small fraction of costs. The manufacturers won’t offer this service for free. Can/will they deliver for less than the cost of pilots?