So, the commercial pilot's days are numbered...?

[Andy_RR]

...according to flightglobal.com (http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/widebody-freighters-could-be-piloted-remotely-within-15-years-369439/)


Civil freight aircraft will be flown by either a single pilot on board with a remote co-pilot on the ground, or no on-board crew at all within 10 to 15 years, delegates of the ATC Global conference in Amsterdam were told.


I guess this means further downward pressure on wages and salaries in aviation? Like every other industry on earth, expensive-to-run things get engineered out of the system.

Where do the PPRuNers think aviating will be in 20-30 years?

[Howard Hughes]

Said IT Wizards will operate the aircraft from Manilla, Bombay, or more likely off shoring will have moved to Africa by then...:(

[an3_bolt]

.....until the server goes down or the backhoe digs up the cable out the front.......:ok:

[Azzure]

I also hear of a company advertising UAV's for use in survey and aerial photography at mine sites.

[Andy_RR]

I also hear of a company advertising UAV's for use in survey and aerial photography at mine sites.

I'm guessing that's the field that the commercialization of UAVs / UAS's will cut its teeth. Leaps and bounds in cost savings and accuracy available with the right technology.

[Oktas8]

I'm 38. I think that I might be out of work by retirement age.

Not that there'll be no piloted aircraft, but the number of piloted aircraft will be < the number of pilots looking for work.

Just look at how many USAF pilot graduates are monitoring UAVs in Wherever-istan.

[Nulli Secundus]

This reality has been brewing for quite some time. I recall an ABC interview with an ATC officer back around 10 years ago. The ATC guy was adamant pilots will become redundant as in his view he proffered words to the effect "we tell them what path to take now from the ground, why couldn't pilots be removed altogether".
Also, isn't Rio Tinto trialing driverless trucks in one of their open cut mines right now? The news report showed and described footage of trucks which will all be driverless and controlled remotely within 5 odd years!
One would hope the union guys are onto this already.

[BSD]

And when the first hackers break into the system and redirect an airliner for their own mischievous purpose?

[NIK320]

Dual engine failure over New York with a landing in a river...
I doubt the computer could have done that.
It will not happen in commercial aviation, to much at stake if the remote system fails for whatever reason.

[27/09]

This reality has been brewing for quite some time. I recall an ABC interview with an ATC officer back around 10 years ago. The ATC guy was adamant pilots will become redundant as in his view he proffered words to the effect "we tell them what path to take now from the ground, why couldn't pilots be removed altogether".

Actually I see it the other way round. I see ATC functions being automated/computerised to a much greater extent before pilots are removed from the cockpit.

The computers using ADSB type data will work out the flow and issue enroute instructions via telemetry links.

When something goes pear shaped (digger cuts cable etc) it's much easier to put a human at a radio on the ground than it is to teleport someone into the cockpit.

Besides I think it will take a very very long time before the travelling public will be comfortable getting into a pilotless aircraft.

[Oktas8]

I would have thought it would be a very long time before the travelling public would be willing to travel long distances with no legroom, no service and no reputation for safety.

Yet here we are.

[Captain Dart]

Agreed 27/09. Future aircraft will fly around autonomously in a 'soup' of airspace with the aircraft's computers arranging separation and a four-dimensional trajectory via a future form of TCAS and datalink with the other aircraft.

Air Traffic Controllers will be made redundant, maybe those who can afford it going on holiday in Economy class in the back of one of these planes, dreaming of when they used to punch off that 'request position report' uplink, chip those pilots (still up front) about reading back those weather deviation clearances, and pinging them for being one nautical mile off track :}.

Even an ATCO wouldn't get on a future aircraft that didn't have a pilot...would he...?

[Howard Hughes]

Dual engine failure over New York with a landing in a river...
I doubt the computer could have done that.
It will not happen in commercial aviation, to much at stake if the remote system fails for whatever reason.
With the continual de-skilling of the industry, there may come a time when the guy up the front won't be able to achieve this either...:{

[dingle dongle]

Sounds true in a perfect world that we'll lose both pilots and ATC, but the world's not perfect.
We'll always need some man, as someone above mentioned the Hudson River incident. NO computer can pull that off.
ATC runs on rails till the emergency or wild weather hits and the cells are screaming through willy nilly, then no computer can cope, other than the one in man's head.
Yeah lifts had drivers and now they're auto, but they are confined to one path... and sometimes they stop mid floor.
Trains could become driverless as they run on rails but won't, because of the same 'dealing with the unknown in an instant.'
The egg heads come up with wonderful ideas and get marketing to sell them to management who want to be on the cutting edge, be world leaders and claim it was them who introduced the new age world's best practice.
The ATC simulator is just one case. 'Get rid of half the man power in in the training of controllers and be the envy of the world.'
Management were sold a lemon by Slick Sam the salesman and spent three times more money than the airlines spend on three full motion aircraft simulators on a bunch of PCs, big screens and A COMPUTER PROGRAMME. It's pathetic.
After complaints from trainees, management came back with the gem, "It's no worse than the old simulator!"
That one was over fifteen years old and in today's technological explosion should be a dinosaur. Think back to the mobile phone of fifteen tears ago and what's in your pocket now!
The new sim promised to be the bee's knees.
It is more complicated, doesn't actually do many functions it's supposed to (We're gunna fix that") but the cost of tweeking the computer programme is astronomical so doesn't happen. It needs people to madly click on mouse buttons up to ten clicks to get round the problem of the sim not doing what it is supposed to with the one click, promiced.
It's a bloody joke, same as all the ideas of the industry's getting rid of pilots and ATCers.

To put it in perspective. Most pros have heard muggins the private pilot or RAA pilot who reckon HE could land the big jet if the pilots died.
He's a pilot! Learned how to fly. Done hundreds of hours flying the big jets on flight sim AND has had a go at flying the 737 sim the public gets to pay to have a go in AND he landed it perfectly.
He's also the guy who reckons '178 seconds to losin' it' is bulldust. He's got five hours under the hood in his bug smasher and could keep her under control if he flew INADVERTENTLY into cloud.
We know how well they'd do.
Them that don't do it, have fnny ideas ... their bum has never been in the seat when it's real and someone's gunna die if he doesn't get it right first go.
Reset buttons ... none in the real world.

[Animalclub]

Wasn't it the computer that was going to give us the paperless office???!!! I reckon more trees are chopped down because of the computer.

[Andy_RR]

dingle dongle is sounding a bit defensive there...

FWIW, you have been able to travel on driverless trains for at least a decade on the Docklands Light Rail in East London. I'm sure there are other examples out there too.

edit: thinking about it, there's the inter-terminal trains at Frankfurt and Stansted too...

[The Green Goblin]

We will still be flying 737s and A320s

Qantas will still be flogging 767s up and down the east coast and the 747s will still be doing LA.

[j3pipercub]

Andy RR, are you seriously comparing a train on tracks to an aircraft?

[Howard Hughes]

edit: thinking about it, there's the inter-terminal trains at Frankfurt and Stansted too...
And Dallas!:ok:

[pull-up-terrain]

Also, isn't Rio Tinto trialing driverless trucks in one of their open cut mines right now? The news report showed and described footage of trucks which will all be driverless and controlled remotely within 5 odd years!
One would hope the union guys are onto this already.

Quite a few mines have been. All "new" mine sites in Australia will be driverless. Currently operating minesites cannot replace mining truck drivers with computers. From what i have been told, the mining companies have set up a complex in Orange (NSW) where they will be controlling mining trucks all over Australia and Asia.

But with aircraft, at least the A320 neo, A350, 737x is going to be flown by pilots, so hopefully there will be jobs available until 2040.

[Andy_RR]

Andy RR, are you seriously comparing a train on tracks to an aircraft on a conveyor belt?

No! :}



.........................................

[Falling Leaf]

No matter what technology is available in 20 years, if there is not enough cheap oil left around then the days of commercial aviation are numbered; it will be back to the 70's when only the very wealthy could afford to fly. That inconvenient truth will shape the future more then pilot v non-pilot.

[neville_nobody]

There's not going to be unmanned aircraft in commercial sense in anytime soon.
No insurance company is going to be prepared to take the risk and given that they are still crashing and losing military UAV's I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Aviation unlike trains and trucks cannot just pull over if it all goes pear shaped.

Would also require a complete rewrite of the regs (again:ugh:) and a complete rebuild of all Australian airspace as UAV's would be busting CTA steps all the time.

[Oktas8]

Actually, insurance aside, I think we can look to the military to see future trends. Except for the armaments, most military technology eventually finds its way into civil aircraft. Think retractable gear, CS propellers, pressurisation, VHF R/T, gas turbines, metal alloys, GPS, digital avionics.

What replaced the R/T operator, then the navigator, then the flight engineer? Computers or computerised components. Same as what has (largely) replaced the military's reconaissance pilots.

As for CTA steps, the last light twin I flew was capable of warning me every time I approached CTA, either vertically or horizontally. That was a Diamond DA42. The CEO of Diamond is currently trying to raise interest in his company's next offering, a computerised emergency recovery device for the same twin. Some sort of GPS / AHRS computer coupled to fly-by-wire I believe.

It's coming. Just a question of whether we'll be retired when it does.

[Captain Nomad]

[QUOTEI think we can look to the military to see future trends.QUOTE]

So when we look to the military to see what they send into a dynamic battle environment with air and ground targets, what do they use? Aircraft with pilots.

When we look to the military to see what they are using for troop and cargo transport what do we see? Aircraft with pilots - often with MULTIPLE pilots.

Step on a pilotless aircraft? Over my dead body...

[dingle dongle]

Oh dear, Falling leaf, WRONG!
The CSIRO ran tests on a noxious weed that had taken over the country west of Townsville and Cairns in the cattle country, back in the seventies or early eighties.
I think it was a Madagascan creeper which went mad here.
The milk from it is high in oil.
The CSIRO distilled petrol from it and found that it didn't have the nasties that eat our buildings after they are producesd in exhausts.
Like the sugar mills the waste could be used to power some of the production. They drew a square on the map of the area that could supply Oz with it's petroleum needs. It wasn't quite the 150 miles from TL to CS.
The oil companies banged THAT on the head like they have done to efficient engines.
When we FINALLY get short of ground oil we'll grow it, in the meantime the oil companies are out to get all the profits they can and squeal 'shortage' so we'll continue to buy.
Some people are sick of the oil companies and make their own diesel from old vegetable oil now. That's refined stuff not the full ingredients of plant oil. You can probably get grease from the milk (sap).

Others posting here...Look at the military all you like. THEY have parachutes!
The three dimension of air will need man flying aeroplanes for a bloody long time to come yet.

[lemel]

I think there will always be pilots up the pointy end. No one would be stupid enough to step on an aircraft that is being flown remotely.

If the industry heads in this direction I think we will have single pilot airline flying before anything else... And this is highly unlikely also.

[nomorecatering]

"To put it in perspective. Most pros have heard muggins the private pilot or RAA pilot who reckon HE could land the big jet if the pilots died.
He's a pilot! Learned how to fly. Done hundreds of hours flying the big jets on flight sim AND has had a go at flying the 737 sim the public gets to pay to have a go in AND he landed it perfectly. "

Actually FLYING magazine in the US about 10 years ago sought to answer this question. They took a dozen university aviation program students who had a bare VFR PPL and put them in a 737 level D simulator and a few were able to get it on the ground. A few did crash however if memory serves me right. I will try to dig it up.

[Pontius]

Would also require a complete rewrite of the regs (again) and a complete rebuild of all Australian airspace as UAV's would be busting CTA steps all the time.

That made me laugh. Only in Australia would somebody be concerned about re-writing the regs; I wonder where the view of Oz pilots being anally retentive comes from :) As for CTAs etc, why would you need them? All the pilotless aircraft would be on pre-programmed courses and de-conflicted by an ADSB/GPS/TCAS-type system, so there would be no need for any type of controlled airspace.

I only type this as the Devil's advocate. I, too, don't believe we'll see pilotless aircraft, nor ATCless 'towers' in our lifetimes but, when I'm dust and they eventually come I'm sure the rest of the world will delight at how Australia still has rules and regs, just so we (the future generations) can tell everybody else they're wrong :}

[Nulli Secundus]

It will happen & faster than we can imagine right now. Humans solve problems & if a technology company can demonstrate the huge annual savings in training, accomodation, meals (etc.) of flight crew AND alay the percieved customer safety fears, its a goer. Arguably, 10's if not 100's of millions of dollars saved annually for an airline with 1000 pilots.

Think back 100 years. The flat earth society would have hammered the pioneering airline moguls & their 'high risk' machines. With train & steamship technology 'state of the art' at the time, of course the safety argument won over........ but only for so long. Our world is evolving faster than ever, if business leaders & boards of directors want this concept to be a reality, it will get up.

The challenge is to counter the argument in a better way, that's why I say I hope the union guys have this on their agenda. It won't be a technology argument, it will be a marketing campaign fueled by cost savings.

[27/09]

Our world is evolving faster than ever, if business leaders & boards of directors want this concept to be a reality, it will get up.

The challenge is to counter the argument in a better way, that's why I say I hope the union guys have this on their agenda. It won't be a technology argument, it will be a marketing campaign fueled by cost savings.

So you're saying you'd be quite happy to jump aboard a pilotless aircraft after a slick marketing campaign saying it's quite safe?

Sorry not for me.

Have you checked the accident rate for the military drones? From what I've read it's no different and possibly worse than for manned aircraft in the same circumstances.

[Roller Merlin]

And how many of the punters will gladly hop on board an aircraft, knowing that there is no real human judgment and maturity in the pointy end keeping them alive?

[SgtBundy]

"To put it in perspective. Most pros have heard muggins the private pilot or RAA pilot who reckon HE could land the big jet if the pilots died.
He's a pilot! Learned how to fly. Done hundreds of hours flying the big jets on flight sim AND has had a go at flying the 737 sim the public gets to pay to have a go in AND he landed it perfectly. "

Actually FLYING magazine in the US about 10 years ago sought to answer this question. They took a dozen university aviation program students who had a bare VFR PPL and put them in a 737 level D simulator and a few were able to get it on the ground. A few did crash however if memory serves me right. I will try to dig it up.

Mythbusters covered it in one episode as well. In a simulator they each did one landing without assistance, and another with assistance from ATC. First situation was straight into the ground, and the second I think bent the plane but was considered to have saved it - and these are guys coming from no experience. The major issues seemed to be finding controls and by the time they had a few goes at it they had it somewhat in hand.

I am not saying "RAA muggins" is going to grease it in, but I would think someone who at least understands basic flying concepts, maybe has had a play in one of these flight sims, and has some help from the ground is going to have a lot better chance of a successful outcome compared to joe punter.

[RatsoreA]

I believe James May said it best on an episode of Big Ideas... Why aren't we all flying around in our personal automated cars wearing silver jumpsuits and moon boots?
"Imagine if the car was invented today... Ok, you get this huge heavy box on wheels, and you fill it with volatile liquid and you can drive it anywhere you want and everyone else can have one too! It'd never make it past the safety committee."

Similar with this. That being said, I was was watching something on ABC Fora about a program the US military is developing for flying fighters.

They started out landing a fighter on a carrier, and it crashes, simulated of course, but they then tell the computer to never make the same mistake twice. And then they run it for X times. By the end of it, the computer is landing the jet on the carrier 100% of the time, in all situations, OEInop, in a storm while on fire with the carrier deck pitching about like crazy. Greases it in every time. Was a good story and goes to show how far tech can take you.

I still want someone that has their a$$ to lose as well up the pointy end as well, rather than some guy who clocks out afterwards and goes home to the wife to mutter about crashing another one!

[esa-aardvark]

So when the flight crew are phased out who will pour my G&T,
tuck me up in my lie-flat, and help me out of the emergency exit
when we crash due to a new unfortunate situation ?

[mcgrath50]

Boeing autopilot would seize back control from hijackers (http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-autopilot-would-seize-back-control-from-hijackers-210923/)

[Andy_RR]

So when the flight crew are phased out who will pour my G&T,


Down the back there'll be a coke machine, a microwave and a vending machine full of week-old sandwiches and frozen pies to choose from...

[SgtBundy]

There is no way they would improve the food that much.

[Sassy91]

I can definitely see it now. A Dash-9 Q700 doing a CAT IIIC into NZGS or a B1900Z doing an autoland into Kerikeri. Good times.

Edit: Also another point. With the global population growing why the hell is anyone thinking of removing THOUSANDS of jobs?

[RatsoreA]

There is no way they would improve the food that much.

Funniest. Post. Ever.

[Wally Mk2]

I think we drivers are pretty safe for now.:)

The QF A380 that near fell from the sky when a Roller let go would be a good reason not to have pilot-less planes in the air.
Imagine someone on the ground controlling that craft when it all went bang! Sh1t he/she would say, their doomed but I'm safe 'cause my EBA says all care & no responsibility!:E



Wmk2

[Azzure]

Well some airlines are already charging to sit up the front :E I cant see a shortage of people willing to pay money to monitor the computer.. :ugh:

[Oktas8]

A Dash-9 Q700 ... into NZGS or a B1900Z ... into Kerikeri.

Good point that man about turboprops into Gizzy. Can't see small & remote destinations being computerised, maybe ever. I was thinking more of large long-haul aircraft, already highly computerised and flying to highly procedural-ised airports. If the public uses cars that can self-drive safely & consistently, will they still want humans on the super-jumbo flight decks? I think it's a different perception to the smaller lighter aircraft.

With the global population growing why the hell is anyone thinking of removing THOUSANDS of jobs?

To save money (definitely), and to increase safety (not true today, but perhaps in future). That's how Western society progresses, even if we put "progress" in quotation marks when it's our own jobs at stake!

their doomed but I'm safe 'cause my EBA says all care & no responsibility!

Is that what you would say Wally? I don't look at my EBA to decide how conscientiously I should work. In fact I don't know anyone who works harder to save lives just because they're on board. Think ATCO's and LAME's.

Good discussion :)
O8