| > Yes, ditching an airplane that has lost all of its engines is a standard emergency procedure. See my reply to krisoft. You're changing a specific situation into a general one. You can't just say "ditch the plane if you lose power", you have to anticipate every possible variable that may influence whether that is actually the correct course of action, and the manner in which it is carried out. And you have to do that before it ever happens. > What difference does that make? Unanticipated situations are unanticipated situations. We don't have AI. We haven't replicated the ability of a human being to adapt on-the-fly. There is no reason to believe we will in the near future. > Controlled flight into terrain accidents [...] could be entirely eliminated if you took human pilots out of the loop. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that so much more could be done to prevent them even without taking the pilots out of the loop, and yet it's not. That does nothing to give me confidence that the right thing will be done when pilots ARE taken out of the loop. Edit: What it comes down to is this. All you're ultimately doing is completely and irrevocably substituting the unalterable judgement of somebody in a completely different time, place, and circumstance for the adaptable judgement of the person on the plane. When you do that, what you're really saying is "I refuse to give people in a scenario I didn't think about the chance to survive". I can't accept that. |