Originally Posted by
ShotOne
This at least highlights the idiocy of the muppets who claim "accidents are mostly caused by pilots, let's make it safer by getting rid of them".
In fact every jump in technology has seen a spike in accidents; witness the eye-watering crash rate of early jets!
I think there are two points to mention about your post.
1. You correctly point out that new tech tends to have a spike in accidents. You have not followed the argument through to point out that despite this, new tech such as jets have been well worth the investment and end up saving lives.
2. If you build an aircraft without backups of critical systems like is done with most/all UAVs, then it is no surprise that they will have higher loss rates than manned aircraft which have redundancies.
This is not the fault of the "pilot" merely the simple reality that no back-ups means more losses.
Total electrical failure will crash most manned fighters too....
What exactly do you think a human pilot would have done if he had been sitting in the Reapers to bring them home with the same failure?
If required, it is perfectly possible to build UAVs with the same level of redundancies as manned aircraft. (or more, because a manned fighter is never going to have more than one pilot. With the size of modern computer systems, there is nothing to stop you fitting 2 or 10 "pilots" as backup.)
As with all aircraft, everything is a trade-off.
UAV's give you the option of an
extra trade-off, ie weight against likelihood of aircraft loss without having to worry about body-bags. This is why they tend to be single engine/ no de-ice / single generator / single hyd / singe control run etc
People have been happy up to now to accept the resultant loss rate to gain the payload/loiter time.
These things are a choice, not an inherent issue with UAVs.