I guess you missed the word "Technically" in my comment.
No I didn't - but I didn't realize that use of the word 'technically' absolved you of discussing
today's aircraft,
today's airport and airspace infrastructure, and
today's operational reality. If you want to talk about the future and where it should logically go with the technology that's currently available, that's fine (and I'd agree with you, I bet). But I figured we were talking about what we can do right now, with the equipment we have today. And even technically, in today's aircraft, an autopilot can't get an airplane from one airport to another without significant levels of pilot intervention. Perhaps where we differ is in the word 'significant', but I'll get to that later.
I'm also sorry that you took my post strongly - I thought 'misinformed' would actually be better than the word 'wrong', because it's possible that someone can come to this conclusion by being fed some very realistic but incomplete information from myriad of sources - be it the news media, a show on Discovery, Popular Science - you name it. Ask around - I tend to not take myself too seriously, and I certainly don't mean to offend. If I responded too harshly, I apologize.
These are incorrect statements which one is directly clarified in the following sentence regarding the rarity of using ILS. Planes do fly themselves - e.g. Autopilot.
To be fair, he didn't say an ILS is a rarity - rather an ILS to minimums low enough to warrant an autoland is. An ILS and autoland are two different things. To me (and I'm guessing to him too), it's purely semantics about who or what is doing the flying. An autopilot requires a great deal of human interaction to get it to do what you want it to do. As he said,
more interaction with the airplane is required to do an autoland than to simply land the plane manually. You seem to think that if the humans aren't physically in direct command of the control surfaces of the aircraft, the plane is flying itself. I'll agree that in the literal sense the autopilot is the one flying, but for the purposes of a discussion about whether the pilots need to be there at all, I don't see it as relevant, since all the autopilot is doing is responding from commands sent to the Flight Director by the pilots to begin with.
So coming full circle, how much interaction do you think pilots have with the airplane (on a routine flight, outside of talking to ATC) once the plane has taken off? This was the crux of my 'misinformed' comment. Based on your initial post, it's probably more than you realize (you're right that it's far less in cruise, although not non-existent). Or not, and we simply disagree on what's 'significant'.
However, I can't think of a single big carrier that doesn't spend the entire cruise-phase with autopilot on.
You can't think of one because from a regulatory standpoint, the autopilot
must be engaged anytime the aircraft is being operated in RVSM airspace (in the States, from FL290-FL410). For airline pilots, cruise tends to fall in that range.
Look man, the last thing I want to do is sit in a hotel room and get into a pissing match with someone. I'm sorry if I came across too strong - but do me a favor and re-read your initial post from the perspective of someone that feeds himself and his family via a job that you think is completely irrelevant (I'm not an airline pilot, but from an operational standpoint, I'm essentially the same). I can look at myself in the mirror every morning because of what I put into this job, and to have someone take my professional existence and reduce it to taxiing a plane to a runway, pushing the levers forward, and pressing a button - it's prone to evoke a response that's perhaps not as measured as it should be.
You state that, technically, pilots are unnecessary. In the event of, let's say, a diversion and medical emergency due to a serious fight breaking out in the cabin, how exactly would the autopilot handle that situation?
In today's aircraft, it wouldn't. You can't just stick an airport into the computer and tell the autopilot to land there. It needs to be told all the little details involved in getting the airplane safely on the ground - fixes to fly to, headings, altitudes, vertical descent rates, airspeeds, the approach to fly, etc. The medical emergency actually uncomplicates things because it gives the pilots freedom to select all these attributes without ATC interference - but regardless the decisions have to be made by the pilots, and the autopilot has to be told how to execute them. Looking back to the two Northwest pilots that overflew Minneapolis in their Airbus - once the autopilot stopped receiving instructions from the crew, it simply flew along at its last commanded heading and altitude, and would have happily done so until the airplane ran out of fuel and crashed.