Merlin Labs proposes entirely autonomous planes

I suspect that if one uses 3 separate computers and voting the chances of a serious crash can be reduced far below the chance of communications failure. But I agree about human pilots likely being marginalized or eliminated eventually.

Isn’t there a science fiction story including pilotless vehicles on a bridge over the Strait of Gibraltar and the difficulties of getting passengers to accept that they were actually safer that way?
 
TonyG said:
A different, but very related topic was/is the idea that drones would revolutionize aerial operations (like ag/spraying, surveying, etc.) I've done a bit of work for a major aerospace company essentially "auditing" studies done to look at drones in these roles - and every single one of them was fraught with assumptions that favored drone operations (and deviated from the real world) and penalized manned operations After adjusting for these, the drone ops almost always "lost" the cost-effectiveness comparison with manned ops.
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Very interesting point about the cost-effectiveness. Perhaps for things that humans enjoy doing, you can get them to be cheaper than the required equipment to perform at the same level, even waiving the costs of the risks involved. This would seem to apply when risk to others is not a factor.
 
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