| >it could have an inert atmosphere This would be very costly to implement, and probably very heavy. That being said, inert gases are used in places where arcing is likely (e.g. radar waveguides). >or it could be unpressurized so fires would be much less frequent I really don't think this would have a significant impact on the frequency of fires. Plus, a lot of avionics need particular environmental conditions, in some cases including pressurization. >Also fires happen mostly on freight planes High-power electronics, such as military radars, also pose an increased risk of fire. >freight planes would be probably easier to certify for unmanned flying than passenger planes. If you only cared about the contents of the plane, this would be true. But what happens when a flaming ball of wreckage that used to be an unmanned freight plane plows into a suburban neighborhood, a school, or a downtown skyscraper? >Isn't this what Traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) is for? The pilots already have to do as they are told by TCAS (after the collision over Switzerland). TCAS isn't all it's cracked up to be. First of all, it only works if the other plane has a transponder (there are still plenty of light civil aircraft out there with no transponders). Second, there are different versions out there with different levels of accuracy. The older kind are not very accurate at all, and basically serve only to give the pilot a general idea of where to look in order to spot the traffic and avoid the collision the old-fashioned way. The more accurate kind only works if both aircraft involved have the necessary equipment. As for the collision over Switzerland, the reason for that rule is that the collision happened in part because TCAS and ATC gave conflicting instructions: one told plane A to go up and plane B to go down, the other told plane A to go down and plane B to go up. One crew did what TCAS said, the other did what ATC said, and they both ended up descending. So the reason for this rule isn't that TCAS is a magical panacea for midairs, but rather a way to consistently resolve any future such conflicts between TCAS and ATC. >Surely managing traffic of obedient agents with known limits of performance isn't that hard - if all the planes were unmanned there wouldn't be problems If all the planes were unmanned, then managing traffic would be much easier, but that still leaves other issues, like where a plane ends up when it malfunctions and crashes. It would also require a wholesale changeover that simply isn't plausible. |
Why hasn't it been made mandatory that all aircrafts should have a standardized transponder ? It scares me a bit that, at the end of the day, we rely on pilots avoiding collisions by sight.