Originally Posted by
Nick 1
Pilot shortage ? Hal9000 will take care ...
, Vittadini says that beyond the ATTOL program lies the company’s longer-term ambition to create a reduced-crew aircraft and, ultimately, a fully autonomous aircraft. But she cautions that it will take a long time to reach these targets.
“Let’s not forget it took us 60 years to go from four-crew cockpits to two-crew, so we won’t get there anytime soon,” Vittadini notes. “But yes, it is an ambition and we have planned the steps. So we will go from ATTOL to reduced-crew operations in which we can have single-pilot operations in certain phases of flight such as during cruise.”
The initiative is supported by work on a “Disruptive Cockpit” simulator at the company’s Toulouse headquarters. Developed as part of Europe’s Clean Sky 2 research program, the project is focused on demonstrating new functions, computing resources and communications. These include cockpit procedure automation, pilot-monitoring systems such as eye-tracking, head-worn displays, ground collision avoidance, new navigation sensors, voice-recognition systems for communications with ATC and airline operations, multimodal integration for flight crew interfaces, tactile head-mounted instruments and image-based landing systems.
“The flight deck is accessible; we are testing it with our own test pilots and customers. It’s a journey and a long journey, but safety is first, and we will take it step by step,” Vittadini adds. “We are already testing different bricks of a possible single-pilot operation in our enhanced multicrew cockpit where we study what it would mean in cruise to have the copilot resting in his or her seat and an active captain in the left seat. So we are studying several potential combinations of solutions “
The interesting question is that as this thinking becomes more widely diffused and talked about across the industry, will it influence the decision to take the high degree of financial risk to undertake training with the fear that HAL will be coming to take your future job or your pay?
The industry is put in a bind by this type of research, it may actually exacerbate the problem by generating a self fulfilling prophecy. It's not hard to find examples where technology has had a significant determent to employment and renumeration (Uber and Lyft has decimating the global Taxi industry). As software moves up the "human stack" and eats it, humans may choose not to play.