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.