Originally Posted by
vilas
Inability to execute a well practiced normal go around and crashing there's a study by BEA and ICAO about 54 such accidents including 15 fatal which resulted in 954 deaths. So let's not exaggerate human presence. One Sully or Haynes doesn't make summer. Make no mistake, providing a possible human factor shield for simple, straightforward piloting errors will have a big part in demise of the human from cockpit.
At the moment, i've been flying commercially for 20 years and in that time I've flown thousands of approaches without any incident, but had to intervene twice during an autoland otherwise those probably would have been disastrous.
However, those two events and the fact pilots "saved" the aircraft from a computer error, aren't mentioned in the newspaper, nor this site, nor anywhere.
While humans are flawed, so is technology and there are no indications that will change anytime soon. What is the ratio between incidents happening due to pilot error and incidents prevented due to pilot skill?
But that doesn't really matter, besides the consumers view on pilotless aircraf, it is all a matter of which produces a higher chance of an accident, which is more expensive and who carries that risk?
If a manufacturer can convince an airline and more importantly, an insurer that the chance of an incident is lower with computers i.s.o. humans, there will be pilotless aircraft (again assuming consumers are willing to play along).
The chance will never be zero, not now, not ever.