OK, I will bite,I have read this thread with much interest!
Chock Chucker, I believe your assertion to be flawed on a number of counts, but he main one being NEED.
just because something is POSSIBLE, it doesnt make it PROBABLE.
Von Braun launched the first practical liquid fuelled rockets in 1942, but it was 1957 before the USSR put a satellite in orbit, and then only for political reasons, and it was still another 12 years before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, and even then because the Cold War was at its height. If there was a NEED, there would have been bases on the Moon by about 1975, but here we are in 2013, and the only permanent presence we have in space is about 300 miles up on the ISS.
Chuck Yeager went supersonic in October 1947, and supersonic transports became possible in 1968 with the first flight of the Tu-144, and later with Concorde, which became operational in 1976 until 2003. Now we have no SSTs flying anywhere....why? no longer a viable NEED!
Economics drives everything in Aviation these days, the bean counter is King!
is there a NEED for pilotless airliners? Pilot error? why would a ground based "pilot" be any less likely to make an error than one or two in a cockpit on board?Could a ground based pilot have made the right decision to the A320 that ditched in the Hudson River, or would they have got the Sioux City United Airlines DC-10 to a survivable crash landing?
Weight saving? lets say 2 pilots weighing 120 kilos each...avionic weight might save around 100 kilos on them, so not much of a payload saving weight!
Economics? now I accept that pilots are well paid! But what are you going to pay the ground based Pilot? minimum wage? those guys might sit on there backsides a lot of the time, but its too late to wish you had a crew onboard when something goes wrong!
the current price of JET A1 is what makes or breaks an airline these days, not the pilots salary!
If there were such savings to be made, then you can bet your retirement pension on either Boeing or Airbus to be at least discussing such a concept as pilotless airliners with the major players by now...but as far as i know, no such discussions are taking place....its unlikely that even if an airline said yes to such a proposal, that any such aircraft would be carrying passengers any time before 2030 at the earliest...
Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) have been flown operationally by the Military for over 40 years, the USAF were using them in Vietnam! Yet nobody has even suggested they were used to carry people until you mentioned it a few days ago...ask yourself why this is!
Military RPVs are used to save a humans life in difficult situations, and also can remain on station for much longer than an expensive manned fighter...
Civil air transport is a world away from these criteria, even before factoring in such mundane things as health and safety!
In short, if there was a valid case for it, some Accountant in an office somewhere would be making the right noises.....the silence is deafening!