Makes sense. Instead of two people not doing a hell of a lot of work, it's reduced to one.
There is one sense in which that is correct, though not necessarily in the way it may have been intended by the author.
It can be excruciatingly difficult to stay awake never mind alert in the hours around one’s circadian low. Combine that with darkness, low activity and previously disrupted sleep patterns typical of LH flying due to massive time zone changes and ‘awake’ can be an elusive state. Indeed many LH aircraft have an EICAS message for “PILOT RESPONSE” which changes to an audible alert if no response is forthcoming. The danger of BOTH pilots falling asleep is well recognised. Ask me how I know! Managed rest (where one pilot sleeps in the seat for brief periods whilst the other minds the shop before alternating) is a strategy for mitigating that risk.
So in truth aircraft occasionally already fly with no conscious pilot at the controls. If you’re already comfortable with that whilst sleeping yourself in that same aluminium tube travelling at one mile every six seconds, then clearly you won’t have nightmares.
However the big danger is called sleep inertia. Nobody transitions immediately from unconscious to fully alert. There’s a fuzzy no-man’s land lasting some minutes in between. So if the tired single pilot is woken by an alert/alarm/emergency from a slumber he’s been fighting against for much of the night, chances are his actions/choices in those crucial seconds could well be sub-optimal. That’s not usually desirable.
All for the sake of a few quid, to knock literally pennies (in a business costing millions!) off the price of a ticket and/or increase management’s bonus!
The pilots at the front of these aircraft are not robots. They frequently make mistakes. Those mistakes often happen because the pink squidgy skin covered lump of meat they inhabit has evolved over millennia to wake when the sun comes up, sleep when the sun goes down, and run when startled or scared.
That lump of flesh and electrical impulses doesn’t respond well to being told to stay awake NOW, then go to sleep NOW!
But accountants/management don’t much like that idea. (Of course if they make a mistake, they enjoy the luxury of screwing it up, chucking it in the bin and starting again!! Not usually so for our pilots.)
Before I spent half my life doing it, I used to think the secret to LH must be the ability to stay awake. But I soon realised that was totally wrong. The only secret is to be able to fall asleep whenever the opportunity arises. Otherwise LH will eat you up and spit you out!