Originally Posted by
RexBanner
From my airline I suspect that a good 40-50% of Captains (bear in mind that’s minimum-the ones that show the obvious signs) would not want to be anywhere near the pointy end of a commercial aircraft with all that responsibility with no First Officer to back them up. The job will totally change and I would suspect that far less pilots are going to want to do the job single handed than the jobs that are saved by single pilot operations. A manning crisis would still result. Not only that but how are you going to train captains of the future in this brave new world?
It might be 40-50% of Captains would not be welcoming this improvement but quitting a highly paid job just because of that? Maybe 5% which is just about the normal attrition rate and scheduled retirement. It could well turn out there will be less new pilots (try to find a flight engineer under 45-50 these days!) but then again it will be matched by new single/no pilot aircraft deliveries.