Don't be fooled; computers are getting better only because the humans who program them are getting better. But they're still human, and prone to human mistakes and foibles. I know, it's my job to do that, and frankly I sweat buckets over systems that have to be good but not immediately safety critical.
Moral Question
It basically comes down to this: is it moral to risk a backward step in aviation safety for the sake of some financiers' wet dream of an investment? Especially as the aviation industry is so very good these days at
not crashing, having learned from crashes over the past century? There's not a lot of room for improvement in safety, so that's not really a viable justification...
Are we really going to say "let's go through all that again" for the sake of pilotless aircraft?
(Let's not distinguish between cargo and passenger aircraft; people on the ground are just as dead if either crashes into their house. Incidentally one of the costs of UAV testing is finding somewhere where there's no one to crash land on top of...)
I refuse to participate in any effort to develop software for an automated airliner, or car (i.e. something intended to operate constantly in or over a human-dense environment. Most UAVs are operated in sparsely populated areas, so am less concerned about these at the moment). Trains are different; they operate in an environment that is almost entirely under our control if we choose so (i.e. avoid rivers, cliffs, etc). That means that we can write software to control them autonomously; we really can think of almost everything they have to do. They also benefit from being much bigger and heavier that most of the movable things that might get in their way, and they don't go wondering away from their rails very often...
Why it Happens
There's what is called a "conspiracy of optimism" surrounding AI and transport at the moment, and those have a nasty habit of being self perpetuating until some unsuspecting user pays the price of the thing being not as good as it needed to be.
There's a ton of investors out there who are putting huge sums of money into self driving this, self flying that, on a "just in case" basis. It doesn't take much of a sales pitch from a bunch of enthusiastic engineers to convince some very big wallets to splash the cash.
The problems arise when some return on that investment is demanded. The technology is very obviously not up to expectations, and so the autonomous car industry tries to make it a political issue. There are
PR campaigns running; effectively some are seeking to have the "rules of the road" changed to suit the industry; that will be at the expense of all road users.
It is the same with self flying passenger aircraft; the idea of having them is rapidly transforming into a self perpetuating "we must have them", without any
real explanation of why, just like it has with cars. There's lots of dubious justifications...
In the aviation industry we already have rules, engineering standards, etc. for certification of software and hardware for safe flight. These have been very effective at putting aviation safety at a very high level.
The trouble is that I cannot see us ever successfully developing an autonomous pilotless aircraft whilst sticking to the existing rules, certification procedures, etc. It'd would be enormously difficult to do. What I can see happening is various companies, backed by very rich investors, applying pressure to have the rules relaxed to make it easier for their technology to be put into the sky. The rule book is in the way? Burn the rule book. Yet it's these rules that have made the industry as safe as it currently is.
And because we cannot build one that's guaranteed to be 100% reliable the only way we're going to find out if they're worthwhile from a safety point of view is to build lots of them, fly them with paying passengers and let the crash stats build up over decades whilst the elements, terrorists, hackers, maintenance crews and airline management do their worst.
That is, use the paying public as guinea pigs, yet again.
And for all that time we're just one software bug or undreamt of hardware failure or network security issue or hacker away from killing a lot of people. That's for only the sake of what is demonstrably a very marginal improvement for passengers and a very doubtful financial gain for the airlines and manufacturers.
And it might truly be a lot of people who end up dying to prove the point; what if one ATC net got hacked and issued convergent directions to 1000 airborne aircraft at the same instant?
The cost / benefit / risk analysis is poor in my estimation. I wouldn't want to be partly responsible.
Paranoia or History Repeating?
Ok so perhaps I'm being paranoid. But humans are very poor at engaging rationally with the prospect of risks that have huge consequences that are probably fairly unlikely to occur. TEPCO didn't and look where that's got them.
Humans are also very poor at adding risks to the equation in the first place. For example how do you assess the risk of being hacked? Can't do that, so let's not consider it and assume the security will be good enough (that's the usual response). Yet it's 100% guaranteed that hackers will try... Just like it's 100% guaranteed that thieves will hijack driverless lorries.
Vanity
Vanity is a dangerous thing in this business, and it's present in the self driving car industry. To illustrate the "problem" in the self driving car industry, consider the possibility of autonomous cars being "bullied" by humans (they won't drive into me, so I can intimidate it!). When asked on BBC Radio recently (Tech Tent, 10th Nov 2017), an industry personality was deadly serious about solving this problem with laws. Seriously? It becomes illegal for you to act in a way that is interpreted as a danger by someone else's lame brained self driving car? No way! How vain is that, expecting everyone else to be compelled by law to account for the nature of one's own product!!!
Airports and Everyone Else
I don't think the airports would value a self-flying, pilotless autonomous airliner. Want to take some landing aid out of service? Why no you can't, the planes can't land without it. So you'd have to have two, just in case.
The knock on costs to other players are going to be quite large, and that will simply get passed on to the paying passenger; manned aircraft would probably be cheaper to land.