Originally Posted by
t_cas
If anyone writing these comments had actually sat in the front of a modern jet and flown across the planet…. They would then realize how far away total automation is. Single pilot….. redundancy is there for a reason. Systems fail.
And if you were really involved in medium to long haul aviation at present you would also know that controlled rest has been happening for years now, where one of two pilots sleeps in the cruise with only one awake. So single pilot operations is already a thing in low stress segments of the flight, and Jetstar does it. If an engine was to fail during a pilots sleep, how long do you think it will be before that pilot will be fully awake and 100% on the ball to assist. Airbus is now going a step further and moving the sleeping pilot out of the cockpit to the cabin under project connect, and removing a third pilot required for longer flights. So any of these ideas that pilot suicide/some form of accident is less or more likely because of automation, well, pilots are already flying solo now while the other sleeps.
Now that being said, the whole premise of Project Connect is to design the cockpit for single pilot operations if you read the brief. With sleep detection and alarm systems to wake the single pilot if they should nod off. Presently the Flight Attendant plays the sleep nanny with controlled rest, in-case the single flying pilot also nods off. And I have no doubt that part of the Airbus deal will either require some form of reserve pilot initially or remote control capability. This could be a lower paid grade of assist pilot like bare MCPL trained flight attendants in the flight deck for take of and landing etc... The idea is just that the automation can handle things until someone else can intervene, for now. All these ideas are already being circulated as ways to bridge between two full paid flight crew and a single pilot situation.
With the flight attendant scenario you lose a fully paid co-pilot but obviously pay the new crew position more, but overall there would be a large saving as they would be filling the role of pilot for take off and landing and flight attendant for duties outside that, including evacuation once cockpit actions have been completed. So you have still removed a crew member from the payroll.