Whether UAVs are the future or not will depend a lot upon their field of use.
Military Surveillance:
Advantages:
- Due to smaller size and increased simplicity drones are cheaper to purchase and operate than traditional manned platforms.
- They make a smaller target for the enemy.
- They are able to stay aloft longer.
- They remove a human pilot from the line of fire.
- They are expendable (e.g. keeping a drone aloft past bingo fuel to support those on the ground).
- Reduced maintenance and storage costs.
- Theoretically lower manpower costs.
- Drones are well suited to the simple, repetitive, easily programmed routes of surveillance tracks.
Disadvantages:
- Direct human intervention impossible (i.e. increased risk to the vehicle itself, those in the sky around it, and those on ground).
Conclusion: In military surveillance, the advantages of drones far outweigh the disadvantages, especially when the risk to the pilot of a manned system is weighed against the risk of the drone colliding with a manned aircraft or persons on the ground.
Survey Work (aerial survey, herd/crop survey, pipeline, search and rescue, etc.)
Advantages:
- Due to smaller size and increased simplicity drones are cheaper to purchase and operate than traditional manned platforms.
- Reduced maintenance and storage costs.
- Theoretically lower manpower costs.
- Drones are well suited to the simple, repetitive, easily programmed routes of aerial survey tracks.
- No risk to any humans on board the drone.
Disadvantages:
- Direct human intervention impossible (i.e. increased risk to the vehicle itself, those in the sky around it, and those on ground).
Conclusion: While the advantages are fewer than in a military application, using drones for survey work still makes sense. The increased safety of using drones is debatable and will be highly dependent on sensible regulations from the FAA, some form of certification for drone operators, and designing drones to consistently avoid midair collisions and hazards on the ground. I'm confident those will all come with time.
Part 121 Airline
Advantages:
- Theoretically lower manpower costs.
Disadvantages:
- Direct human intervention impossible (i.e. increased risk to the vehicle itself, its passengers, those in the sky around it, and those on ground).
Conclusion: Once you reach Part 121 Airlines nearly all the advantages of an unmanned flight deck evaporate. The size and complexity of such a drone would not decrease because a large tube would still be needed to carry passengers/cargo and part 25 certification would still require multiple redundancies in most on board systems. Therefore, maintenance costs, storage costs, initial costs, and operating costs would not decrease. Furthermore, compared to the previous applications, the disadvantages are increased because the lack of direct human intervention can now harm passengers on board the aircraft. There is a misconception that by removing pilots from the flight deck you can increase safety by removing all human elements (and, therefore, human error). However, this is incorrect on two counts: first, human error is still present within the design of the automation - either errors in the programing or a failure to foresee some dangerous set of circumstances - and, second, human error is still present in the ground operator who must program and monitor the flight. Switching to unmanned airline flight decks simply makes no sense, economically or in terms of safety.
