This is ground control to Passenger Tom

I’m not quite sure how I feel about the coming of the computer-controlled vehicle.

Yes, I do know that most accidents are caused by driver error. But I am equally well aware that systems fail. So what will happen when your car system crashes? Will your car crash, too? Will the on-boards onboard every other car on the road sense that you’ve screeched (metaphorically speaking) to a halt in the middle of the road and drive around you? Will son-of-OnStar guide you to safe harbor on the median strip or in the breakdown lane?

These are the questions I ask myself, now that I have finally gotten over the fact that the only manual over-ride for an electronic window failure is a) open the door or b) smash the glass with a wrench.

But the march of automotive technology time is inevitable.

Just as our grandparents thought the the essence of car driver-ship was cranking the flivver. And our parents coped with the choke and the clutch. Just as my generation, which learned on the push-button automatic, then segued to manual shift so we could drive Beetles, eventually settled for the wonders of the semi-automatic. So the next gen will learn to drive cars that have automated parallel parking (wimps), and eventually commute in the ultimate ‘look, ma, no hands’ vehicles.

So if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, I’ll no doubt be chugging to my funeral in a pre-programmed, automated “smart hearse.”

Still, I am completely unprepared for the pilotless airplane.

Yes, indeed, I know that the military have been using these for quite a while. But drones don’t have passengers.

Yet unmanned commercial aircraft are likely to enter service before people can buy autonomous cars. Modern aircraft are already perfectly capable of automatically taking off, flying to a destination and landing. These tests are trying to establish whether they can do those things safely without a pilot in the cockpit and at the same time comply with the rules of the air. (Source: The Economist)

In its initial stages:

Pilotless aircraft could carry out many jobs at a lower cost than manned aircraft and helicopters—tasks such as traffic monitoring, border patrols, police surveillance and checking power lines.

Ah, no more Joe Green in the ‘BZ traffic-copter. No more breathless in-air, on-air reporter narrating The Flight of O.J. Simpson.

They’ll be on the ground, their bird’s eye view coming from screens, like it does for the rest of us.

They could also operate in conditions that are dangerous for pilots, including monitoring forest fires or nuclear-power accidents. And they could fly extended missions for search and rescue, environmental monitoring or even provide temporary airborne Wi-Fi and mobile-phone services. Some analysts think the global civilian market for unmanned aircraft and services could be worth more than $50 billion by 2020.

Commercial freight services will be the next domino to fall – just think of all those big old UPS and FedEx jumbos sailing around loaded with L.L. Bean Fitness Fleeces and Harry and David grapefruits, a few of the items that cannot – for now – be downloaded.

But as The Economist notes, it will be a while before even the most “penny-pinching, cut-rate airline” will be able to get away with putting passengers on a pilotless aircraft. (I vote Ryanair as the first one to give it a whirl.)

But as The Economist also points out, the day of the co-pilot may be nearing its end. Who even remembers that planes – other than WWII Flying Fortresses – used to come staffed with a flight engineer, a navigator, and a radio engineer?

Space flights, of course, have been ground-controlled for a while. But they represented a pretty good ratio of on the ground operatives to astronauts. (Think of all those guys in white, short-sleeved shirts and pen protectors at NASA.) I can’t imagine there’ll be anything like that for passenger flights. Plus the astronauts were trained pilots who, when needed, could be called on to take over and man the spacecraft if all else failed.

Who’d be on that pilotless flight?

Would Pilot Bob on the ground have a stew – for, presumably, there’ll still be someone onboard to serve drinks and curb unruly passengers – get on the PA and ask if there’s a volunteer to go into the cockpit and have Pilot Bob talk them down? This is ground control to passenger Tom?

Would a airplane-sized parachute deploy and float the plane to ground for a soft landing in a Kansas cornfield (or even a belly flop in the deep blue sea)?

Would the “flotation devices” under the seat be replace with a parachute and we’d all bail out while Pilot Bob – comfy in his white, short-sleeved shirt - hollered for us to abandon ship?

Some of this is being worked out:

A pilotless plane must also be able to act autonomously in an emergency. In the event of an engine failure, for instance, it could use its navigational map to locate a suitable area to put down. But what if this was an open field that happened to be in use for, say, a fair? A forward-looking video camera might show a ground pilot that. But if communications were lost the aircraft would rely on image-recognition software and an infra-red camera to detect the heat given off by people and machines and so decide to try to land elsewhere.

But what if all the systems went into an A-NoKay swoon at the same time?

Wheeeee…..

No, I’m not ready to slip the surly bonds of earth in a plane that doesn’t have a pilot. And probably never will be.

Twas a brave man (or woman), indeed, that 'et the first oyster.