Damn, he had such a beautiful, dark and straight style. How did he come to these curves he draws today? Especially about ears.

@Spiritus Arcane
 
Yeah, the drivers said they were just paid to hand them off to ponies in suits and not ask questions and that was the way it was for thousands of years.
 
The drivers were still jerks but it was clear from the way they acted that they did not know that the ponies were not being exiled. Like at one point, one of them said it was good that Aurora’s wings were broken so she wouldn’t fly back to Cloudsdale.
 
Something about the pegasi in this verse is that they are very prideful. They rejected anyone that didn’t pass the test even before their was a Rainbow Factory. So, that’s probably why there are no family members looking for them.
 
Celestia used to make the rainbows but lost the ability after vanishing Nightmare Moon. At first, unicorns made artificial spectra but it was inferior to the real thing. Rainbows are important, you know.

@KentuckyFriedScootaloo  
Then my ire falls on this ‘verse’s Celestia too then, since she’s apparently approved the supposed mass deportation of her subjects for shitty reasons. Also, it’s been a while since I actually read Rainbow Factory, but was the drivers not knowing what was going on actually said in story, or at least in this tumblr?
 
Finally, supposing you’re right and no one directly working for the Factory actually knows what happens to failures, how did none of the ‘exiled’ failure’s parents/siblings/friends who didn’t know the truth ever try to contact/find them? It just seems to me that it’s far fetched that the Factory could keep the fact that they’re systematically murdering enough of a chunk of the pegasai population every year to make spectra without the rest of the population being in on it…

@Spiritus Arcane
 
Those who fail the test are carried away in a carriage never to be seen again. It’s speculated that they are banished to a far away land and never allowed to return but what really happens is that they are transferred to another carriage which then brings them back to the Rainbow Factory.
 
Not even the ones who operate the first carriage are aware of this.
 
If I remember correctly, Fluttershy was a flight school dropout and that’s why she never took the test. Rainbow Dash was picked up after she performed the Sonic Rainboom.

@KentuckyFriedScootaloo  
Yes, because killing the equivalent of high school graduates makes it so much better.
 
Also, the whole “making pegasai ‘failures’ into rainbows” thing can’t be that big a secret, at least among pegasai, since, as you pointed out, not everyone works at the factory…yet the test seems to be mandatory for all pegasai (which makes one wonder how Fluttershy is alive in this universe…assuming she is), meaning statistically a good chunk of the non-factory pegasai population has to be in on the ‘secret’ since otherwise you’d think word would have gotten back to Celestia about a constant stream of missing teens.
 
So, yeah TLDR; basically the majority of pegasai, not just the ones that work for the factory, have to be in on it for the secret to have been kept for so long.

@Spiritus Arcane
 
Cloudsdale is a city. Most are unaware of what goes in the Rainbow Factory. Families and foals live in Cloudsdale.
 
In previous posts you refer to Factory Scootaloo and the other factory workers as “foal killers” but those who take the test are adults not foals.

Again, ‘innocent’ doesn’t exactly apply to a society that willingly participates in the mass murder of their own children.