They can land by themselves, but the safety envelope demanded by the FAA and industry just means that they don’t. The ability is there if needed in a pinch.

Sure they can land by themselves as long as nothing important breaks on the airplane during the landing sequence. If something does break then the pilot may have to intervene at a moment's notice. The pilots aren't just kicking back, they're actively flying the aircraft even though they aren't directly manipulating the control surfaces and throttles. That's why aircraft carrying paying civilian passengers will continue to need a rated pilot onboard for many years to come.

Yes. And if they aren’t monitoring locally they are monitoring remotely.

But the level of automation right now in aircraft is dangerous: enough that the pilot’s job is really boring, not enough that the pilot isn’t occasionally needed. We all know how that works out in practice.

Remote monitoring is insufficient for passenger carrying flights due to communications latency and reliability problems. It might be tolerable for cargo flights though where risk tolerance is higher.

The excellent safety record of scheduled commercial flights contradicts your claim that the current level of automation is dangerous. We have proof that it works well in practice.

This isn’t my claim, it ia well known problem in the industry. See

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/10/28/bhana

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114262...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/airline-pilots-depend-t...

https://jdasolutions.aero/blog/airbus-announces-a-response-t...

Etc....

If it's such a problem then where are the incidents? This is much ado about (almost) nothing.

The automated systems have made flying safer at the same time creating a new danger that needs to be managed. It isn’t rocket science, like how self driving cars rarely get into accidents and when they do it’s news because the human driver wasn’t paying attention.

The bored pilot problem is only going to get worse as technology marches forward, even if the fatality rate keeps going down.

Bored pilots aren't a problem if passengers are safe. There are many thousands of commercial flights every year so we know the current safety levels aren't a fluke.

On the other hand we don't know yet whether self driving cars will actually be safer. They're only used in very limited times and places so there's no way to do a fair analysis.

Bored pilots are a problem if you are a pilot, or if you want to keep pilots alert and happy. Bored pilots also have already led to more than a few accidents, so the FAA definitely cares.

The aircraft case is a good bit different than the car case IME.

In cruise, there's not much to do in an aircraft and minimal oversight by the pilot is easily accomplished. Then, during the arrival (and during the departure), the workload is quite a bit higher, meaning the job is anything but boring and it's easy for the pilot to remain engaged.

Take off and landing aren’t really that much of a commercial flight, especially for long hauls. And even these aspects are automated more and more these days, it isn’t weird that the pilots are supervising an automated landing...for safety reasons (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland).

The pilot workload and involvement is high during the entire departure process and arrival process, not just the takeoff and landing. Call it surface to 30K feet and letting down out of 30K feet to the surface. Traffic, crossing restrictions, speed restrictions, frequency changes, aircraft power and configuration changes, etc. In cruise in RVSM airspace (where the use of autopilot is mandated anyway), there's not much to hit and everything is nice and orderly and the workload lowest. Full autoland usage is a minority of landings, even in equipped aircraft.