Why Being a Commercial Airline Pilot Is a Great Career in the Age of AI

Photo by Gabriele Malaspina on Unsplash

Advancements in artificial intelligence will radically change the landscape of work in the near-future. Many jobs that formerly required human labor are progressively being automated, from finance to transportation.

People entering the workforce may wonder if they will be obsolete and unemployed within a few years of choosing their career. Rather than taking the role of the people in the cockpit, however, AI is more likely to become a useful tool for aspiring commercial airline pilots.

The public's trust is the main factor. Passengers will accept AI for maintenance, route planning, and other behind-the-scenes tasks, but people are unlikely to board a major commercial aircraft with no one at the controls.

Extremely high safety standards are the bedrock of the commercial aviation industry, and when something goes wrong, that comes with great scrutiny from the public, media, and even the government. AI solutions are already assisting pilots with fatigue management, route optimization, and maintenance problem prediction, but everyone intuitively knows that human judgment is essential.

Redundancy is one of the key factors when it comes to safety in today's commercial aviation system. This is why efforts to move from two pilots in the cockpit to a single pilot have stalled. Now imagine if that number was zero pilots! That would represent a fundamental shift in the way that authorities, airlines, and passengers perceive aviation safety.

Because of this, commercial aviation differs from many other industries that are seeing rapid automation. Although AI might change how pilots work, the public simply won’t accept a completely automated passenger flight for quite some time. It is more likely that people will collaborate with increasingly advanced technology in the emerging model.

That is encouraging for those who are thinking about a career in aviation. Even while the cockpit of the future may be more automated, expertise, discretion, and accountability will still be necessary. Being an airline pilot will always be a very human job since the world is still a long way from embracing zero-pilot commercial aircraft.