Pilots are not there to fly the aircraft, the autopilot already does that. They are there to command the aircraft, in a pair in case one is incapacitated, making the best decisions for the people on board, and to troubleshoot issues when the worst happens.
No AI or remote pilot is going to help when say... the aircraft loses all power. Or the airport has been taken over in a coup attempt and the pilot has to decide whether to escape or stay https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NcztK6VWadQ
You can bet on major flights having two commercial pilots right up until the day we all get turned into paperclips.
Yes, this is the sane approach, since a jet represents an enormous amount of energy that can be directed anywhere in the world (just about). But that said, there seems to be enormous pressure to allow driverless vehicles, which also direct large amounts of energy directed anywhere in your city. IOW it seems like a matter of time before we say, collectively, screw it, let the computers fly the plane and if loss of power is a catastrophe, so be it.
As far as the extremely unlikely hostage situation goes, if it were AI controlled that would be even less likely attempts from people to hijack an airplane in the first place since there wouldn't be a human element a.k.a. a pilot that they could appeal to their emotion.
I can easily imagine that at some point, pilots are replaced with technicians who are just there to fix redundant AI systems in case of failure.
For things like aircraft pilots, it's both realtime-- which means 'reviewer' per output-- you haven't taken a highly trained pilot out of the loop, even if you relegated them to supervising the computer-- and life critical so merely "so/so" isn't good enough.
