“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,”
Well, I appreciate you are trying to have a bit of fun around a pretty serious subject and that’s fine by me. But, if you seriously think single piloting isn’t going to happen then I’d say it’s probably time to retire (oh… you have already!).
You conveniently fail to mention that humans are often quite fallible even when there are 2 present trying to resolve a bad situation - and even crash aircraft deliberately. In fact (as I am sure you know) the majority of aviation calamities are caused by human error.
So, one pilot is one thing: what’ll the Luddites be saying when the inevitable happens and a move to removing pilots entirely starts (as is happening with cars)? It is, I’m afraid, only a question of time.
The autopilot (however sophisticated and deeply integrated into aircraft systems) doesn’t know how to handle novel situations, can’t weigh multiple possibilities and decide, and doesn’t care if anyone survives.
Hmmm….
Drifting off topic a bit; philosophy was never really my forté, but if I had to choose one over the other (obviously, both are important) I would say intelligence, based on the logic that if one is not intelligent one is unlikely to eventually also become wise…
“… doesn’t know how to handle novel situations.” Current autopilots may not (though actually I would imagine they can do this to an extent already) but you have only to spend 10 minutes watching a Youtube video of Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ V13 at work to understand how far autonomous vehicle control systems have come.
The key question is, are these systems better on average than a human driver. The moment the answer becomes ‘yes’, even if it is only very marginal, lives could start to be saved. I’d actually say FSD V13 is better than the average human driver, already, actually.
People get so hung up on the one-in-a-million ‘Oh, but what if…’ scenario, when in reality it is extremely common day-to-day silly mistakes that human drivers make that cause the vast majority of serious collisions. From what I have seen, FSD version 13 would be preventing at least half of current accidents already. And so, isn’t it logical to accept the one-in-a-million fatality for the sake of 10 or 100 day-to-day ones?
The aviation industry is better than most at applying logic to problems rather than being swayed by emotion (let alone hysteria). For example, the design ‘safety factor’ (ie 'how many times stronger than just ‘in theory’ does a component need to be just to be on the safe side?) for aircraft is very small compared to pretty much any other field of engineering (rockets, maybe?). It has to be because otherwise aircraft would be too heavy to be profitable to operate. If the same safety record of cars was applied to aircraft, the aviation industry would have failed decades ago!
Like I said before, it is only a question of when, not if.
For many years I managed a lot of programmers and I’m a programmer myself. All this automation in the aircraft is run by sensors feeding data to programs like the ones that my folks wrote. I also took software engineering graduate courses in software safety. Software is great for relieving a pilot of complex or tedious tasks but it remains a tool for the pilot. There is no way for software to react to every possible emergency situation. If a single pilot gets ill or incapacitated (or dies) in flight, then another pilot is needed. Having two sets of eyes and brains to figure out aircraft system problems is better than one set. In addition to the software there’s a network of sensors that feed data to the aircraft computers. These sensors can malfunction and feed bad data to the computers (737 MAX). Pilots are mobile troubleshooters in that situation - something aircraft hardware and software are not. Someday the progress in AI might make up the difference but that’s not today. We all know that having a single point of failure in an aircraft is not a good thing. The same goes for a single pilot in an airliner.
Everybody focuses so much on the number of pilots on the flight deck, and whether we go from two to one before we go to none. But I believe there’s another step in the process. The aviator’s equivalent of Work-From-Home. Remote piloting. This is how the military operates their “unmanned” surveillance aircraft. I think there is always a need for a human in the control loop, especially to handle situations that are new or novel or require adaptive thinking. But I am not convinced that there is an absolute need for that human to be physically on the flight deck, provided the datalink connection from the control station to the aircraft is extremely robust. Also, in this way, the humans (yes, most likely plural) in the control station could probably be operating a great number of aircraft, most of which are in stable cruise flight most of the time, and don’t require minute-to-minute attention.
Flew most of my (airline) life long haul. Classroom style education during ab initio or type conversions don’t come even close to the things I have learned during these flight hours from experienced colleagues, ‘hangar’ talking for hours on end and also keeping both of us awake as an extra benefit. Later transferring my knowledge to the younger generations. That transfer of experience will die with single pilot.
We were allowed to make “NASA” naps, so I have experience flying 4 holers “solo”. But NOT during the crossing of the ITCZ… Or overflying the Andes, Himalayas, or Tibet…(from W to E…).
So to a degree I could live with a few hours alone there, but T/O, departures, approaches and Landing…I see trouble brewing. Listen to R/T tapes any regular day in ORD, LAX or JFK. That’s about a job for ONE guy! Not counting the pilots whose English is not their native tongue.
I agree that, when flying the B747 -2/300 long time ago, I could not fathom we would ever fly this beast with only 2 pilots but the industry did got it done, and when I finally arrived at the LH seat of the -400 I never missed the 3 man’s cockpit.
But this is a complete different case in my view.
And therein lies one of the main problems with that concept - the datalink. Unmanned military drones that are used just for surveillance or human-triggered attacks are one thing, but carrying paying customers is another thing entirely. Lose that datalink and there is no human in the loop (and probably at the same time that a human is very much needed to be in the loop).
It’s not just the transceiver on the aircraft, but also the transceiver on the ground and the signal itself. Even if both ends are robust and secure, the signal itself could be jammed (intentionally or unintentionally). And then there’s also the question of how do you secure the link from unauthorized access - armed guards at every remote control facility?
I am glad this is not some kind of popularity contest, because I will definitely lose out on this one.
Why would airlines want to reduce from two pilots in the cockpit to one? Do you think it might be related to cost? I will offer the first and painfully obvious solution: airline pilots if they REALLY want to keep the safety of a second body in the cockpit should negotiate compensation plans at 50% or so of their current level. Option #2 is even simpler: Let Cojo be a part of the cabin staff - available at any time needed, At one time every stew had to be a fully qualified nurse, so we have already been there. No reason the top position of flight attendant couldn’t have the level of professional qualification required to use the right seat.
I appreciate the humor in the article.
But all joking aside, the flight engineer is a fundamentally different situation. Improvements to computer control and reliability of engines and aircraft systems mean we didn’t need a dedicated person to operate those. And while removing the third crewmember is a slight reduction in redundancy, removing the second eliminates redundancy.
“Improvements to computer control and reliability of engines and aircraft systems mean we didn’t need a dedicated person to operate those.”
Ask the passengers and crew of Swissair 111 about that. Oh, right – you can’t. They all died when the automation that was used to justify the removal of the FE from the DC-10 when it because the MD-11 was destroyed by the fire, leaving 2-person crew too task-saturated to deal with the cascading problems.
And that still doesn’t address the problem of finding unanticipated holes in the automation, as in the Airbus 320 which refused to follow the pilots’ control inputs at the air show at Toulouse, or the Boeing 767 whose engines refused to spool up because the FADEC’s were programmed to avoid the possibility of engine inlet icing – while descending out of 18,000 west of Denver over the 14,000+ Front Range (fortunately, it got warm enough below 16,000 that the engines obligingly finally responded to the thrust lever commands).
Good point - carrying a plane full of passengers is different that operating souless drones that are mostly clear of civil airways and busy airports.
Good point. Autopilots and automation software is dependent on sensor inputs. Faulty inputs likely result in faulty solution–yes pilots can come up with the same faulty solutions, like Air France and Colgan Air. But how many times do pilots correctly analyze faulty sensor inputs and do the right thing. We don’t know but after 50 years of flying, I’d say it’s not unusual.
Questionable - Tesla’s latest autonomous driving software should make us more comfortable with the idea of turning over the airplane to Hal. I might buy this if every plane in the system was being operated by the same software using the same logic tree to make operational decisions – but then we’d have to ban most of GA from flight.
My opinion - I don’t believe the push to total autonomy is justified given that the current manned system has such an incredibly low Part 121 loss rate - .006 per 100,000 hours or one for every 16.3 million flight hours. I suspect that the creation and maintenance of an autonomous system capable of achieving equivalent results will actually be more expensive than maintaining two pilot crews. I’m also not sure we are capable of doing this as long as we maintain a mix of big and small airplanes using the same facilities. Give pilots all the technology and computed help we can afford but, keep them in the cockpit.
Airbus, more so than Boeing, is actively pursuing single-pilot operations, but significant safety concerns from regulators, unions, and passengers make it unlikely to take off anytime soon. Achieving this would require major technological advancements, regulatory changes, public trust—and perhaps even a one-holer fitted with aircraft controls and communication systems to keep things running smoothly.