Waco, allow me to answer your points.
BEA & BOAC for many years employed hamble cadets with very low hours on aircraft that were considerably more labour intensive and arguably harder to operate aircraft without too many problems (excepting PI perhaps?) for many years.
Highly selective, highly demanding, airline sponsored cadet programs that led to a career position are in no way comparable to the majority of self sponsored pilot training programs found today. "Self sponsored" pilot training programs are not cadet programs in the traditional sense and their quality does not begin to compare. For that reason, I personally refer to them as pseudo cadets- Hamble or KLM graduates they most definitely are not.
Aircraft of yesterday were far more demanding, but cadets were only one small stream of several that met the crew requirements of most airlines. Overall, that meant that the experience levels were much higher then than they are for some carriers today.
"I note with interest that in 2013 Bae will be flying the Mantis project in UK airspace. This I believe to be a remotely operated drone type craft.
Is it not concevable that within say 10 to 15 years, freight and mail may be flown by pilotless aircraft.
Whilst I think there will always be a person at the front of an aircraft. Could passenger aircraft be effectively remotely operated within the working lifetime of some of todays crews ? I think so.....
I am not familiar with your back ground, but you seem (like many) to labour under the delusion that pilots are a hindrance to safety rather than an aid. The hard fact is that professional pilots make decisions every second of every day that prevent hazards from becoming incidents, incidents from becoming accidents and accidents from becoming deadly. These positive actions vastly outweigh the relatively small number of deadly mistakes that occur. Perhaps you would have to be a pilot to appreciate this.
Could these factors not have a considerable effect on T&C's in the not too distant future ?
Perhaps, but unlikely I think. The developmental costs, the huge liability and the complexity of fully automated commercial flying would not out weigh the overall benefits of just properly training crew. I am somewhat incredulous that people even suggest this when I consider the number of serious incidents in which the actions of the crew have prevented total disaster. It`s not possible to engineer away everything that may go wrong. When I was a kid we were all supposed to be floating around in our own personal pods in 2001. Time will tell.
Oh and one other question ? Why do some pilots site examples comparing themselves with Dr's ? A doctor does a 5-7 year degree......and a pilot ?
Pilots come from a wide variety of backgrounds. For myself, two years of initial flight training, four years of aeronautical engineering followed by 16 years of continuous training and evaluation in airline and corporate service. I know the same dedication in any other field would have yielded success, the medical field included. It is not always treated as a profession, but for some operations and some of us, it most definitely is and comparison between professionals is valid.
To be blunt, in my experience, 5-10% of pilot applicants have the right background, intelligence, aptitude and "grit" to be accepted/hired by me (when I was in a position to do so) , the acid test being "would I allow my friends and family to fly with this individual". The fact that other operations have a remarkably higher "success" rate makes them foolhardy, ignorant or stupid in my opinion.