Carruthers,
I've heard rumours (probably malicious).. that you are far more likely to die in a plane crash if you're actually flying on one.
So my suggestion is to ban all forms of flying, thus removing this terrible risk.
Furthermore, to follow it up, i will be removing the stairs in my house, to remove the risk of me falling down them.
We could spend our whole lives quoting statistics.. in the good old days of piston engined airliners. accidents were much more likely due to mechanical causes... the fact that we have made our engines and airframes more reliable hasnt made pilots any less safe.....in fact IMHO opinion, pilots are probably better trained and safer than ever, there is a general culture of safety and teamwork (CRM and the like) and though of course there is the occasional bad egg your idea of removing pilots from aircraft is akin to removing engines to stop an engine failure ever happening....cause as we all know.. no glider has ever crashed due to engine failure.
I will also point out that every single aircrash that ever happened was caused by human error.. whether it be pilot error, bad design by the manufacturer, a missed fault by an engineer, bad programming on an automated flight system, incorrect training given to any of the above, poor ATC.. the list is endless. do you plan to automate everything?
how would your automatics have coped with the Sioux City DC10.. where over a hundred lives were saved by the pilots in a situation that was bordering on the impossible... or the pilot that managed to glide a heavy twinjet after a fuel miscalculation on the ground.....
LP