chicken6,
if you pull your head out of you arse and have a look at the statistics you will see SPIFR is a dangerous way to go, in comparison to a two crew environment. While the accident rate in NZ is substantially worse than anywhere else in the western world and remains so then surely it is the fault of the safety regulators? They determine training/standards/procedures and safety, the buck stops with them and the stats say they are hopeless. I don't give a rats arse about some glossy magazine CAA spits out, I simply want to be able to stick my kids on an aircraft and know they are as safe as anywhere else, at the moment in New Zealand, they are not.
Companies in the US have figured out long ago that you don't stick employees on SPIFR because there is no pilot monitoring, no margin for error and we all make mistakes. And they can't afford to lose employees. The autopilot on most SPIFR certified aircraft is a joke. They, the paying public, could have paid extra to stick a second qualified pilot on board, and they didn't. There was a considerably higher degree of danger involved (statistics again) and they were obviously happy to accept it.