Originally Posted by
1201alarm
Thanks for your examples. I had to think about it for a few days, and now I come to the conclusion that these accidents actually prove my point.
AA587 was 20 years ago! And it was a failure in proper training. No serious training organisation will nowadays advocate what these pilots did. On the contrary, worldwide, UPRT training has been introduced, to teach pilots how to deal with such situations. A similar accident has not happened again and it is hard to imagine it will happen again in any seriously trainig airline.
UPS1354 was a combination of huge fatigue and non precision approach. Such an approach could not be flown by a fully automated airliner with the necessary low failure rate. So to go fully automated you would need an approach with lateral plus vertical guidance, which then would also have been flown successfully by the crew of UPS1354. It is kinda an argument that bites it's own tail. Plus, fatigue awareness is on the rise worldwide, amongst pilots, amongst unions and also amongst employers.
And also the Atlas 767 nose over proves my point: the FO had a history of training problems, he probably would not have made it into a flight deck with proper selection and training standards.
There are nowadays extremely few accidents in properly regulated air traffic systems. We still can improve even amongst them with regard to selection and training. UPRT has been introduced to avoid loss of control accidents, which is good.
Additionally, you completely ignore the thousands of decision pilots take every day to prevent things from escalating.I feel your believe in the reliability and the decision making capability of a complex machine in a complex environment is naive.
On a side note, a single pilot cruise airliner, I would also not exclude anymore. It has the advantage that even on two man red eyes one can sleep, and on longer sectors you do not share rest amongst three guys but amongst two guys, prolonging rest time. So it is not all bad.
But a fully autonomous or single pilot airliner won't happen in the next 30 years.
Thanks for the response, you raise truly valid points. I think we're not far apart in the sense that we agree probably single pilot cruise is imminent. But I'm probably a bit more optimistic on full single pilot ops than you are. (Not sure if autonomous will happen, I do agree there's too many roadblocks still)
Here's an example of a current single pilot operation on the fantastic Pilatus PC24. I don't see why this should not be perfectly possible with larger aircraft of similar vintage.