Automation has been taking over cockpits for decades. Flight engineers have all but disappeared and the second officers filling their seats are gone too, along with the high time, well seasoned first officers who were often more experienced than their captains due to mergers and takeovers. These days, it must feel pretty lonely up there on a bad night with a copilot new to the airplane and the game. Automation, now so essential but not always cooperative or fully understood, only adds to the percentage of recent accidents due to confusion over who or what had control of the airplane.The writing is clearly on the wall. According to at least one source, Boeing believes eighty five percent of all accidents are due to pilot error, and there are those who think the sooner the day comes when the AI does the all work and the pilot does all the cross checking, the better.
The flying public are unlikely to accept security guards and night watchmen minding the machinery however, so real pilots will be with us for the foreseeable future.. Despite the shift in perception, away from the status and prestige of airline pilots in previous generations, they need to be a lot smarter in ways we old stick and rudder guys would never have dreamed of. Know your airplane is as important now as it ever was, but training is apparently too expensive and the task is not made any easier when the builders don’t think the pilots are up to it. Until they can design airplanes with pilots completely out of the loop, they need to be completely within it. Right up until the last one out of the cockpit turns out the lights.