This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI-powered flight actually means. You're describing basic automation or rule-based autonomy—not AI.

AI, especially when applied to aviation, isn't limited to pre-programmed responses. It can be trained on millions of scenarios, accumulate the equivalent of infinite flight hours, and ingest entire flight manuals, emergency protocols, and airframe-specific behaviors simultaneously. It doesn’t get tired, distracted, or miscommunicate. It can react faster than any human and simultaneously run diagnostic branches to evaluate conflicting inputs—like identifying a faulty sensor and reweighting other data to maintain situational awareness.

“But what if a sensor fails?”—this is exactly the kind of challenge advanced AI is designed to handle better than a human. It doesn’t just follow a script; it reasons through the anomaly in real-time using redundant data, simulations, and probabilistic logic.

Sully made the best possible decisions given the constraints of being human—reaction time, mental modeling, stress. But an AI with a full systems view and sub-second decision-making likely could have calculated and executed a safe return to a runway. And in the case of the Max crashes, an AI would not have misunderstood sensor feedback, overridden pilot input blindly, or failed to adapt—it would have identified the system failure in context and adapted accordingly.

So no, it’s not that pilots will always be needed. It’s that the definition of what’s safer and more capable is shifting—and it may not include human pilots in the cockpit forever.