If I understand you correctly, you mean the pilot should be a completely independent object, right? In that case, does it mean I’d need to spawn one extra invisible pilot object for every ship in the scene?
That’s what I was suggesting, yes. And then you’d have a simple script that just causes the ship to follow the agent. There are a few different ways to do this, for example lerping between the two positions.
Is it normal? Not really. But it’s relatively easy to do, and might get you most of the way to what you want.