Drones might be the answer but I think you would have a lot more crashed drones than you now have crashed planes. Because people won't go up when it is crazy to fly because they don't want to die. So, more goods would crash than now.
But, if all cars and trucks are all self driven, and then all planes are all self driven what happens to human beings in all this? (The ones that cannot find new jobs just starve and die). That's basically it.
begin quote from:
FAIRBANKS,
Alaska — Never climb into an airplane cockpit in winter without your
best military-grade arctic boots, rated to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Green, cocky pilots fresh from the lower 48 tend to forget that rule
just …
FAIRBANKS,
Alaska — Never climb into an airplane cockpit in winter without your
best military-grade arctic boots, rated to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Green, cocky pilots fresh from the lower 48 tend to forget that rule
just once. Knowing when not to climb aboard the plane at all is harder,
and comes only with deeper experience.
“If
my gut tells me this is not good, we don’t go,” said Matt Anderson, 55,
who has spent more than 25 years flying small planes across Alaska’s wild, empty and hazardous landscapes.
Generations
of pilots like Mr. Anderson once came north for adventure, and to hone
their skills in small planes, flying the Alaskan bush in the nation’s
most aviation-dependent state. Their derring-do, in turn, helped create
the Alaskan mystique.
But
now a shortage of pilots — global in scope, fueled by the growth of
aviation in Asia and a wave of baby boomer retirements — is rippling
across Alaska with gale force. A state with six times as many pilots per
capita as the rest of the nation, and the need for every one of them to
connect its many far-flung dots on the map, is rewriting the equations
of supply and demand.
Continue reading the main story
Competition
is pushing up salaries, and luring pilots and mechanics to jobs in the
lower 48 states. Airlines are grooming pilots from within, bypassing the
old system that made Alaska a proving ground where a pilot could log
the thousands of hours of flight time needed to qualify for a major
airline job. International freight haulers have also hired away Alaskan
pilots as Anchorage, which has the fourth-busiest air-freight airport in the world in annual tonnage, has become a refueling and crew-change hub for aircraft flying between Asia and North America.
“The
pilot shortage is affecting the whole commercial aviation industry from
the beginning to the end, the small to the large, and I think Alaska is
going to get hit hard,” said Bill Thompson, 47, who left the state in
2015 for a job with a regional airline in Minneapolis.
From
2011 to 2015, Alaska lost about 12 percent of its commercial-pilot work
force, which was in fact slightly less severe than the 16 percent
falloff rate for the nation as a whole, according to federal figures.
But
flying is the lifeblood of commerce, government and society in a state
that is twice the size of Texas and has hundreds of communities beyond
the road system. Gov. Bill Walker jokes that he has three offices: in
Juneau, the capital; in Anchorage, the biggest city; and on a plane
getting back and forth.
Or consider, for example, the small passenger and freight airline called Warbelow’s Air,
based here in Fairbanks in east-central Alaska. The company needs about
nine full-time pilots to meet its weekly schedule, serving tiny towns
north of the Arctic Circle and beyond. But nine pilots these days have
become hard to come by. So this year the company began recruiting Air
National Guard pilots to work part time on their days off, with six
part-timers now adding up to one full-time pilot.
“One pilot out of six, that’s how we fix that problem,” said Greg Probst, Warbelow’s chief pilot.
Matt
Gallagher, a Warbelow’s pilot since 2014, is leaving next spring for a
job in Colorado to be closer to his family, and to seize the chance to
move on to bigger and faster aircraft.
“I
want to fly jets that go 40,000 feet in the air for two hours at a
time,” Mr. Gallagher said. “There are great opportunities for guys like
me.”
That flying small planes in Alaska is a very dangerous line of work is part of the shifting dynamic. From 1990 to 2009, more than a third of all commuter and air taxi crashes
in the nation, and about a fifth of the fatal crashes, occurred in
Alaska, according to federal figures. With only about 730,000 people,
Alaska has less than a quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s population.
The
state’s plane crashes and flat-out disappearances are the stuff of
legend. In 2012, a military transport plane missing since 1952 was found
on a melting glacier. A plane that left Anchorage for Juneau in 1972
carrying two members of Congress, Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana — the House majority leader at the time — and Representative Nick Begich of Alaska, has yet to be found.
Just
this year there have been 91 aircraft accidents or incidents in the
state, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, 13 with
one or more fatalities. Alaska also has most of the nation’s active volcanoes, which can spew corrosive ash into flight paths and engines; Bogoslof, in the Aleutian Islands, erupted just this month.
Those hazards, on top of a worsening pilot shortage, are making some researchers and entrepreneurs see opportunity for pilotless drone aircraft to fill the gap, especially for work that pilots refer to as “the three d’s”: flying jobs that are dirty, dull or dangerous.
The University of Alaska’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, one of six federal drone research centers,
is testing aircraft in arctic conditions, and flying unmanned craft
hundreds of miles out over Arctic waters. Oil companies are starting to
deploy drones to patrol pipelines for leaks or other damage.
Researchers
and pilots say they see a time — sooner or later, depending on when
federal safety regulation might allow it — when mail, medicine or
groceries might be delivered to remote villages by drone.
“Is
it technologically feasible to do it right now? The answer is yes,”
said Nickolas D. Macchiarella, a professor of aeronautical science at
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. “And one of
the first places it could occur is Alaska.”
Ben Kellie, 30, founded a drone company in Anchorage last year, K2 Dronotics
with Nick, 27, his brother. Their father, Mike Kellie, was a
swashbuckling bush pilot of the old school, they said, who arrived in
Alaska with a duffel bag and $500 to his name, wanting only to fly.
Drones, said Ben Kellie, the company’s chief executive and chief
engineer, are the future, and are less likely to produce injuries or
harm if they crash.
“In Alaska, you can fly for hundreds of miles, and if you have issues you’re going to hit tundra, or a spruce tree,” he said.
Carl France once considered the pilot’s life, but decided that the future was pilotless.
“I
decided I’d get bored, flying back and forth from the same place,” said
Mr. France, 30, the chief executive of a drone start-up called Aquilo, which is based in Fairbanks and was founded by engineers from the University of Alaska.
Aquilo
and K2 Dronotics are both focused, at least for now, on commercial data
collection — Aquilo in scientific and industrial applications, K2
Dronotics in remote-area mapping.
Mr.
Anderson and his wife, Loretta Fogg, 55, who is also a commercial
pilot, said the idiosyncrasies of Alaska — the weather, the terrain, the
difficulty in getting help if trouble arises — bred a mentality of
improvisation and intuition about how to keep passengers and oneself
safe.
In
flying small planes, often with fewer than nine passengers — likely as
not to be repeat customers traveling to and from villages — the pilots
get to know people and their lives. With pilots increasingly being drawn
to greener — and warmer — pastures, some of that old hands-on intimacy
and continuity could fade.
“I know families, and I know their kids,” Ms. Anderson said. “Where else are you going to get that?”
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