UAL Thinking???
 

Along about 1958, or before, if not later, United decided to eliminate Flight Engineers- well they all had to get a commercial pilots license. Do you think that United management thought, or knew, that two-man crews were coming in the future? Is that why they did that?
Bob.

I seriously doubt that UAL had any idea regarding the forth coming 737 or DC9 that appeared on the scene in the mid to late 60's. ALPA on the other hand was demanding 3 pilots on the flight deck of all jet transports and that is how the professional FE's job started it's downhill slide. UAL was probably one of the first operators to hire pilots first and train them for FE duties. There is a lot more to this story but needless to say it was not very pretty.

I believe at the time all commercial aircraft in the USA, over 80,000 lbs max weight, had to have a flight engineer.
This is why the BAC 1-11 series 400 that American Airlines bought was certified at 80,000 lbs MTOW, and thus two crew, rather than the Identical 300 series which was 87,000 lbs MTOW.
The rules must have changed when the Boeing 737 and DC9 came along

Here's a bit of history:

Flying the Line II: Chapter 4

https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Evolutio...rt_Flight_Deck

It varied by airline, but I believe that ALPA wanted all cockpit personnel to be qualified pilots but that F/E did not need to be qualified mechanics. I think that ALPA were happy for F/Es to retrain as pilots and to grandfather existing F/Es who couldn't but that all new entrants had to be pilots. The F/Es were not always happy with this and there were many inter-union disputes. Western airlines sacked all their F/Es sometime in the 60s during one. I believe that one airline (Eastern?) was proposing to employ jets with three pilots plus a F/E to try and keep everyone happy. In Skygods Robert Gandt suggested that all new Pan Am cockpit staff (in the 60s) were pilots but that the F/E contract was negotiated by the FEIA. If you joined as a pilot you could be assigned as a F/E and be paid much more than a navigator (S/O) which has always been pilots under Andre Preister as the F/E scale was much flatter and you were better off with low seniority. Someone may know much more than me. It was suggested that ALPA liked F/Es to be referred to as Second Officers to make it clear that they were certainly not equal to F/Os although another poster has said that qualified F/Es could still be referred to as such. Of course outside North America most airlines thought that having a qualified F/E on board made sense as they could sign an a/c as ready to fly in case of a diversion to a remote airport. It also meant quicker promotion for pilots to captain. Its interesting to look at what happened to F/Es outside N America when glass cockpits arrived and their role did disappear. Fortunately it was generally handled without too much rancour but posters might wish to say more. All of this is based on what I have read rather than actual experience so I'm very happy to be corrected.

I'm told that the reason that BEA did not employ F/Es was that they didn't want a second union involved - I can believe this looking at their industrial relations record.

Once jets arrived the reliability went up (well compared to the vast piston driven behemoths) and so the FE became excess

Leafing through some very old flying magazines you can read the weeping and gnashing of teeth page on page

Which will be repeated when they get rid of the guy in the RH seat in about 10 years................

Back when Boeing was developing the 767 (~1978-82) the feds were doing a big study regarding the safety of two vs. three flight decks. Conventional wisdom was the three were better than two - if nothing else an extra set of eyes monitor gauges and look for other aircraft - so aircraft over a certain size needed three crew. As a result, the baseline 767 design was for three crew - with round dials/gauges and a proper flight engineer station - while the two crew EICAS equipped flight deck was pretty much on the back burner. But the results of the study surprised pretty much everyone - that the two crew was not only as safe as a three crew, it was actually somewhat safer. Basically that the third person tended to add distraction/confusion factors that outweighed the advantages of having another person (I suspect the relative lack of proper CRM at the time played a role in this finding). The airlines that had ordered the 767 took one look at the report, and asked Boeing 'how much to switch to the two crew EICAS flight deck?" (IIRC, it was ~$500,000, which the airlines figured they could save in less than two years by not having a flight engineer). At the time, the first few 767s were already being assembled with the 3 crew flight deck - the very first one to fly (VA001) was left in the 3 crew configuration for first flight, while all the others were converted to 2 crew with EICAS before rollout (VA001 was eventually retrofit to the EICAS configuration after the certification flight test program was finished). There was one or two operators who still wanted a flight engineer station (Ansett comes to mind but don't quote me) so Boeing ginned up a simple FE station, but the rest of the flight deck was still the 2 crew EICAS configuration - the three crew non-EICAS configuration was never delivered.
From the designer point of view, two crew meant we had to pay much more attention to crew workload. For example, throttle stagger - on the 747 classics, no one cared about throttle stagger - some engine intermix configurations could have well over a knob of stagger because you had a FE to constantly tweak the throttles to align EPR or N1. On the 767/757 we had strict limits on the amount of throttle stagger - less than a quarter knob (increased to 1/2 knob for certain fault conditions).

As a professional FE from 1971 to retirement,I worked L1049, B707 and B747 (all models to 300).
Prior to commencing my FE training on B707s, I was a licensed ground engineer on Boeing 707s.

In those days our patterns were up to 18 days away,often to places with no or very limited communications back to main base. I often was called on to make maintenance decisions or "guide" the local engineers to get the show on the road. Often there was a need to point the pilots in the right direction as far as in flight defects and suitable diversions to cover engineering problems. A lot of what we knew was never in writing and my company even ran informal monthly engineering meetings to discuss problems and examine what had happened over the last month. All was very definitely not for recording. And the system worked very well, only to come unstuck when pilot only B767 came into being.I have read all the US documents that lead to the demise of the PFEs in the US and the major flaw in them is that they purely look at what switches were operated by the FE. In my opinion the FE did far more than operate a panel

On one of my last B747 trips I advised a captain on an engineering problem that no one on the ground could give timely advice on. I was later told that acting on my advice saved $750,000 Australian due to the aircraft being very tightly scheduled for the next 2 days with no possible replacement aircraft and no suitable tooling for a repair being available on the station we were departing from.

Another advantage of a non pilot engineer was that we could to a degree give an opinion from a very different perspective. We had a different reporting/disciple structure which I think was mentioned by John Beatty in one of his early CRM texts. While on duty we worked for the captain but our long term discipline was via the Chief FE and that meant in an examination of events ,if we were 'right , there was someone backing us up which wasn't always for the case for pilots.

I find it interesting that in the current B737 Max situation ,that the Indonesian aircraft that subsequently crashed ,managed to survive the 1st day with the problem had a 3rd pilot in the cockpit. I had a stab runaway on a B707 very early in my career and picked it as the runaway started,just because I was sitting facing fwd at the time and saw it run well before the pilots saw it.

Overall in my opinion the US operators removed a huge amount of experience from the flight deck many years too soon. When I retired on the scrapping of a number of our B747s, our Deputy chief Pilot said that the FEs had on average made a major contribution to saving at least 3 hull losses/FE. I would agree with that but my score was about 5. In long haul at least I think that we well and truly earned our pay.
Wunwing

The 737 was always above the FAA's 80,000lb limit so required three crew on the flight deck, which was one reason why it initially sold so poorly in the US with only United buying it. In the rest of the world it was always a two crew aircraft.

Actually a number of airlines purchased the airplane in it earlier years and flew it with the 3 man crew. Western, Aloha, Wien, Frontier, Air Cal, Piedmont to name a few. Later it was flown by these same airlines with the 2 man crews. No question that the crew compliment issue suppressed sales during this time period.

It wasn't just United that was going to the all pilot flight deck in the late 1950's. Delta with the support of ALPA hired pilots and trained them as flight engineers much to the chagrin of the professional flight engineer's union FEIA. During the 1958 FEIA strike at Eastern Delta kept flying and took advantage of Eastern's chronic labor woes once again.

From Flying the Line: The First Half Century of the Airline Pilots Association retired Delta Captain Stewart Hopkins gives this perspective as a former ALPA official:

The full text of Flying the Line is published by ALPA here:

https://www.alpa.org/-/media/ALPA/Fi...ol-1.pdf?la=en

Legacy language in airline contracts to retrain profession flight engineers was around until a little over a decade ago at some carriers I believe. In years past I've been a dues paying member of both ALPA and FEIA.

Will these crew compliment battles be fought again as the feds and the manufacturers explore the concept of single pilot airliners? Will there be an automation clause in future airline contracts to protect pilots who lose their seats to new technology?

It's coming:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/boei...-on-board.html

If you examine the history of tech crew complement from the 60s there were 2 branches of thought on this. The US carriers and those mainly South American carriers that were under the influence of the US went with the 3rd pilot. The European carriers and their field of influence ( their old colonies) kept a Professional Flight Engineer.
I don't think that this reflected anything more than the huge industrial influence of US ALPA.For many 3rd World carriers it also represented the fact that there was an acute shortage of trained ground engineers and those that existed were not available to be trained as PFEs.

Unusually for a Flight Engineer, I spent a few days in Washington with ALPA in the 90s as part of a delegation from Australia and I also have a copy of Flying the Line which was presented to me at that time. At the time I was a senior executive with AIPA which represented both pilots and engineers in Australia, something that ALPA appeared to not be impressed with. During discussions on this subject I found their views totally unrealistic to the situation that many airlines with PFEs faced. We were often a long way from main base with very poor communications. I can only assume from their comments at the time was that they considered that the US PFEs were way less trained than ours on air craft systems knowledge, or that their pilots were way more qualified than ours. My opinion was and is that neither position was true and Industrial muscle had won out over common sense.
Wunwing

Indeed. The initial rule came in the late 1950s when a modification to the DC-6, which were dropping down to secondary operators, was to reconfig the flight deck for two rather than three crew operation. The DC6 was a complex aircraft of its time, and the FAA brought out the rule to stop US operators putting in the mod. The DC6 had an MTOW of about 92,000lb but could still be economical on shorter stages, the sort of work in prospect, at about 85,000.

The One-Eleven 400 was for American Airlines, but a number of other US carriers (Braniff; Mohawk) had already put the previous model One-Eleven 200 into service under the weight limit as well, but these had a lesser fuel capacity and thus range than what American wanted; ironically American then never ran them on the longer flights they could do, and a 200 series would have suited them fine.

The rule was rescinded in the mid-1960s, principally because of the DC9, which offered an initial version that came in just under the limit but was obviously a much easier two-crew aircraft than a four-engine piston DC6. The DC9 immediately progressed to above the old limit. This was a couple of years before the 737 came along, but this aircraft was impacted by a separate issue with United Airlines which was a union matter rather than an FAA requirement, and led to early United 737s having three crew. The DC9 flight deck had no space for a third permanent crew member, whereas the 737, a fuselage and flight deck derivative of the 707, did so.

Southwest Airlines briefly operated the 727-200 during the 1970s. Were these crewed completely by the leasing airline (Braniff ?) or just piloted by SWA pilots converted from the 737 ? If the latter, who or what, occupied the FE station ? This situation seems familiar; I'm sure I've asked the question before.

In the UK, Britannia Airways perhaps faced a similar situation when they had the pair of 707s for a year or two. Third pilot or FE ?

Ansett's initial 767s were specially fitted out for 3-crew, a union issue. They later stopped this, and bought secondhand models that came without, but there must have still been some non-standard difference; when they went bankrupt in the days following 9/11 when airline financing vanished, nobody wanted them and they were the first 767s to go for scrap. Their secondhand standard ones however found new buyers.

The B727s were flown by SWA seniority list pilots; Braniff was an arch enemy. As for the FEs, I'm a bit less certain but think they were SWA mechanics who had the chance to fill that spot. Don't bet the grocery money on that part of the story but that's what I recall. I'm always prepared to stand corrected.

Thankyou, bafanguy.

Wunwing,

I'm with you. In my opinion professional flight engineers were worth their weight in gold. Not only did they understand the innards of the aircraft much better than the pilots, but their indipendant advice was often invaluable.