Cav,
As a professional pilot who has gone through the USAF mishap investigation course and served as a flying safety officer for a few years, I will respectfully disagree and state with no reservation whatsoever that you are the one who is badly mistaken.
Taking pilots out of the cockpit will not remove the instances of human error not only because humans are just as involved in the manufacture, maintenance, and operation of UAVs, but also because for every one mishap caused by pilot error, there are COUNTLESS mishaps that are directly prevented by the pilot's actions. You say look at the percentage of mishaps that are caused by the pilot, and I say you need to also look at the percentage of inflight emergencies that were saved by direct human intervention in the cockpit.
The thing is, those stats aren't as easily found. But in my personal experience as a safety officer, I have either investigated or read the safety reports of hundreds of incidents that, had they occurred to unmanned vehicles, would most likely have resulted in total loss of the aircraft.
I am very in favor of cockpit automation and computer assistance to pilots, but those pilots MUST remain in the cockpit because the computer simply can't deal with unusual situations. It is somewhat rare for an inflight emergency to involve a simple failure of one component, and quite often the first warning sign of a failure that an onboard system detects is really just a side effect of a much worse problem.
As an example, there was a recent mishap where a tiny leak in a hydraulic line sprayed hydraulic fluid onto a generator. The fluid caught fire, but the only indication at first was a flickering generator light. Before the crew landed, they had multiple systems failures and a fairly hot fire going in the fuselage, and only the presence of a pilot onboard allowed the plane to make a fast, direct visual approach to an emergency landing. Had there been no pilot on board, even if every decision had been correctly made by a computer or human controller on the ground, the plane would have had to comply with strict instrument approach procedures which would have taken much longer, and the fire would probably have caused a total hydraulic failure or progressed to a fuel or structural fire by then.
So... you're wrong dude, sorry.
