That’s about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot’s job I’ve ever heard. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn’t just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. It isn’t just a little bit false. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn’t know better, and would allow such a statement to be published, shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times not long ago, you would have read how Boeing pilots spend “just seven minutes” piloting their planes during a typical flight. Airbus pilots, the story continued, spend even less time at the controls.

Confident assertions like these appear in the media all the time, to the point where they’re taken for granted. Reporters, most of whom have limited background knowledge of the topic, have a bad habit of taking at face value the claims of researchers and academics who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the day-to-day operational realities of commercial flying. Cue yet another aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, without a doubt, a pilotless future is just around the corner. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology.

I’d like to see a remotely operated plane perform a high-speed takeoff abort after an engine failure, followed by a brake fire and the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring a diversion over mountainous terrain. I’d like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. The idea of trying to handle any one of these, from a room thousands of miles away, is about the scariest thing I can hardly imagine. Hell, even the simple things. Flying is very organic — complex, fluid, always changing — and decision-making is constant and critical. On any given flight, there are innumerable contingencies, large and small, requiring the attention and visceral appraisal of the crew.

[1] http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/

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

[1] http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinjar_Mountains

1. Pilot sets takeoff conditions (throttles, flaps)

2. Pilot signals deck crew

3. Catapult accelerates the plane off the deck

4. The plane's fly by wire control system pitches the plane for optimal Angle of Attack for the wings (IIRC - 8.1* without flaps).

Once the aggressive acceleration of the catapult is complete, the pilot takes control again and begins flying - this is less than 1 second after catapult release.

Here's an example catapult launch from a USN F-18 pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9D1Ls-_JM

If you look at the stick directly in between the pilot's legs, you'll see him put his right hand on it at ~4.5 seconds. His left hand is on the throttles.

There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.

These edge-cases are uninteresting IMO.

On the contrary, these edge cases are by far the most interesting thing. Not just tabloid-interesting, but in terms of generating usable data.

You can argue that autonomous flight doesn't yet have Nine Nines. I would probably agree. But "Miracle on the Hudson" was just that, and extremely rare situations should not be a standard-bearer for allowing autonomous flight. In the same way that suicidal/homicidal humans shouldn't be the standard-bearer for allowing human flight.