If the airlines want to save money they should change the number of Flight Attendants per flight requirements. It should be based on passengers/flight hours. I would suggest 1 FA per 100 pax/hour. Drop the FA requirement for under 100 passengers on a flight scheduled under an hour. If a passenger is in need of assistance on these short hops the Co-Pilot can attend to them.
Most flights anymore show the emergency briefing on monitors. Movies are accessed by a phone app and they rarely serve refreshments or snacks on short hops anyway. Longer flights can have an app for ordering/paying for $20 crackers and coffee.
Until an emergency requiring an evacuation! Emergencies are the only reason the FAA has required flight attendants, not serving drinks or collecting trash. The number of flight attendants on an airliner in the US are mandated by the FAA. If an emergency occurs, the first officer has enough things to do in the cockpit supporting the captain dealing with that emergency.
The thought of one pilot in an airliner at this point still makes me feel uncomfortable. However the counter for emergencies is that the automation will handle that better too. The first officer may have much to do, but that’s with current automation. With future automation, it would probably be far less. Air France 447, mentioned by someone else, would be a very good example. And now that there is already one-button automation for landing an airplane from the point of the emergency enroute when there is one incapacitated pilot, it’s obvious that development and evaluation is going to continue.
Matt W., If the airlines and EASA where worried about safety, eliminating the Co-Pilot would be the last thing they should do. By-the-way, I don’t agree with any of the automation replacing personnel stuff. I’m just suggesting if they are looking to gamble with passenger lives start with the Flight Attendants not the Pilots.
On a current news note…, The car coming at you doing 60 mph in the oncoming lane has eliminated the human driver. Quote from today’s news: "The wait is finally over for Tesla owners who paid $10,000, or as of recently $15,000, for the controversial driver-assistance system, also known as “Full Self-Driving.”
Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Thursday morning, “FSD Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option.”
That makes the person sitting in the driver seat equivalent to a Co-Pilot. Since the actual primary driver is the computer.
Maybe when the no pilot cockpit is achieved in Europe they will coincidentally also have no passengers riding in the back of the plane. Just me, but since I retired as a corporate pilot in 2018, I haven’t been on a commercial airliner, and there’s no place I want to go bad enough that would entice me to get on another one.
And how much do you trust the Tesla copilot? Car-to-car monitoring of drivers? See the Tesla copilots inattentive face on your screen? How long does it take to prod such a person awake?
I am pleased at the FAA’s stand and perplexed at Europe’s. Aren’t they supposed to be more advanced than we backward Americans?
Gregg, the Envoy flight took off. The Captain became incapacitated after takeoff. There was a check Captain in the right seat who landed the plane. Unfortunately the left seat pilot passed away.
Kids are building robots with increasing capability. Robot assisted surgeries and diagnosis are reported in numbers that are no longer ‘amazing’. Human pilots have made and continue to make frequent errors on flights – many of which result in accidents. Technology for remote operations and command of very large and capable drones is already in daily use. Gotta face it. Pilots are likely already obsolete, and certainly be the railroad’s firemen on the flight deck soon… if not already unneeded cogs.
With the significantly increasing numbers of pilots and non-pilots succumbing to adverse reactions, clotting and deaths from those clot-shots, single pilot ops is a REALLY bad idea.
I just retired after a long career flying mostly long-haul international routes. I’ve had complete primary display failures in both a 747-400 and a 787, despite the fact that it’s “not supposed to happen”. Both times it required two pilots working as a team, one flying the aircraft manually, while the other was trying to solve the problem. These problems caused loss of autopilot, throttles, all nav displays, navigation and required manually reentering data and an extended recovery time to complete. One pilot could not possibly have done the job. In addition, one occurred at high latitude where there was no satellite coverage for a “ground operator” and was out of all audio communication range. Single pilot operations are just a foolish idea and I hope that pilots world-wide will simply shut the system down if they ever try to force the issue.