Today's Times newspaper carries a substantial opinion piece by Matt Ridley with the subtitle "Irrational fears about pilotless planes must eventually give way to the evidence that they are better and safer".
This isn?t your captain speaking. It?s a robot | The Times
For those who can't get access to the article I'll post the text separately.
Ridley is quite a respected "right wing" journalist and former banker, author of books under his nickname of "the Rational Optimist".
I have sent a response to the Times shown below, this is written for the general readership and almost certainly won't be published......
"Matt Ridley normally makes sense, but he has a peculiar blind spot about automatic systems, especially in aviation. He says events likes Sullenberger's Hudson ditching are rare compared to "human error" catastrophes. But the action of pilots regularly prevents many completely unforeseen "human errors" becoming newsworthy catastrophes. Aircraft are astonishingly complicated physical machines exposed to extremely complicated conditions. Does he think they design, build, certify, and maintain themselves? Every aspect of their existence and operation involves humans on the ground, who are just as fallible as pilots. The 2010 Qantas A380 uncontained engine failure and 2008 BA B777 double engine failure are only two among the most spectacular of a catalogue of "impossible" events, the vast majority of which have never reached Ridley's attention precisely because pilots succeeded in preventing them becoming catastrophic.
It's relatively easy to remove humans in ground transport: in the worst case it just stops and you get out. Try that in an aircraft and see what happens. Ridley might wonder why no airliner has automatic takeoff, which is truly trivial compared to landing. Simple: there's no business case as no-one wants the product liability for the consequences of events that definitely WILL occur but in combinations that were never anticipated.
When Northern Rock so devastatingly crashed into the financial depths, like dozens of other financial institutions, Matt Ridley himself was at the controls. Banking deals only with abstract "stuff" and remains firmly bolted to the ground, and we all know just how wonderful the entire banking system, with its almost unlimited reliance on computers, has been in the last decade.
Pilots are human and they do make mistakes - just like every other group in a highly complex industry. The airline industry needs to do a lot better at balancing the combination of automation and on the spot human intervention. Unfortunately, unlike bankers and journalists, pilots rarely survive when they are unable to correct mistakes, whether their own or someone else's. It's a lot more rational to remove bankers from the financial system than consider airline pilots the biggest danger to the public, and Ridley should check his opinions for reality as he so often advises others to do.