Safety Concerns:
the science of ergonomics and human factors was just beginning in the 60's and 70's. I find your appeal (a refrain often made by numbers people) to that era of air mishasp disingenuous.
The numbers actually show me that air travel is quite safe right now, with all of those manned aircraft flying all over the globe daily in their thousands.
We are in the digits to the right of the decimal in terms if incidents, and beyond that in accidents, per flight hour.
Each crash can almost be treated as a special cause, if you are running the numbers as you would in a production environment, even if one bows down at the altar of six sigma.
Enough on the numbers.
Your pilotless personnel transport aircraft is a poor idea for anyone other than a lab rat.
Given the number of Predators that have crashed (an example I am famililar with from personal experiences and knowledge, I am pretty sure there were others), I find your proponency for unmanned personnel transport aircraft baffling.
If you take those Predator crashes and put 228 people in each of them, you'd find a groundswell of opinion against your industry bias proposing unpiloted passenger aircraft.
That human error is a common element of a human undertaking (powered flight) should not come as a surprise.
What surprises me is anyone who will profess by their argument a belief in the culmination of aircraft development into a zero defects, automated personnel transport system*. Those pilotless aircraft will crash too, if you build them, and what is unknown is how often. We'll only know after we count those body bags, won't we?
* = That is the between the lines read I am getting from you.(And some of our other non-pilot participants). It is a proposal that only appears attractive from an idealized bottom line discussion on a spreadsheet.
I have concerns for safety as well, being mostly a passenger these days, and only when I have to be.
I know, having worked with mechanical and electromechanical things since I first repaired a bicycle at age eight, that things manufactured by humans often break, sometimes predictably and sometimes unexpectedly.
You can take your pilotless airliner and park it on the ramp in Hell. I won't pay the fare to travel in one -- ever. (Hell, I barely fly now). Nor will I travel in a bus without a driver.
I don't trust robots.
Why?
I don't trust the people who make them to be free from human error.
See how that works? The machine does what someone tells it to do ... remember our old friend General Protection Fault from Windows 3.11?
Too many dead friends, for reasons both mechanical and human, as well as the ultimate cause in aviation: gravity.
I am not interested in trusting someone with no skin in the game.
Last edited by Lonewolf_50; 17th Aug 2011 at 17:10.