Sink r8

Technical issues are never resolved to the point of having a zero accident rate. In a society that cannot tolerate risk or casualties, a single event involving a UAV will cause massive avoidance, and massive economic losses. It's going to take a long time before people believe the system was sufficiently de-bugged.

At some point the pilot's role will become to... take the blame (preferably posthumously) for any event, so that everyone continues to buy tickets. For this to work, you will have airplanes that barely allow pilot input, but you have to keep appearances up, and pretend the pilot had enough authority to crash the thing in the first place.

While playing that game, you might have to play the game of putting a second pilot in the cockpit, to watch over the first, and because of physiological limitiations of each individual "meat-servo". If one crashes after a fifteen-hour flight, and the "pilot" was asleep, exhausted, or high on speed to stay awake, the hwole thing comes to grind, and people don't buy tickets anymore.

I do agree with many of the non-cheerleading posters: we should be focused elseweher, for example on maintaining high training standards. When we stop riding on the inertia of previous good habits, and we start seeing hull losses again, they're not going to blame training budgets: they're going to argue that we failed, and use that to speed up the development and introduction of our mechanical replacements.

I'm going to go study.