Single Pilot Operation
 

50 year old captain with the usual stresses and strains of life, mortgage, teen age children, diminishing pension fund etc. checks in for a night departure, weather is flyable but crap, low cloud, gusty wind and rain.

5 knots after V1 he loses an outboard engine, during rotate he has a stress induced heart attack, please describe in some detail how the backup computerised systems will cope, or will they?

Fed Ex and UPS will be the first customers
 

I think the rubric of 'single pilot' is a ruse, the program is obviously aimed at achieving autonomous flight. Moreover, as 'racedo' has pointed out earlier, the cargo lines are obvious initial users, they fly at odd hours and would love to rationalize their operations with fully automated cockpits. So there is a clear path to front line service, beginning with the military, then law enforcement, then cargo and eventually passengers. The technical and ATC obstacles are real, which is why Germany has just been forced into a humiliating cancellation of their planned multi billion Euro Hawk drone program. In this context, this 'single pilot' initiative seems simply an admission that the state of the art is not yet there and therefore taxpayers need to pony up to help close the gap. Obviously pilot unions are asleep at the switch, otherwise they might ask what is the purpose of this investment.

I like BACP's comments - single pilot falling asleep....you could sell tickets for that show.
Fully loaded night IFR in a storm with autopilot disconnect sounds like a good excuse for 2 good pilots.
Would you like some like ice with that Pitot sir?

It's really interesting listening to pilots telling us how important they are. And they are, but the technology is not that far off where planes could fly themselves. The X-47B has already done completely autonomous flights from a carrier. Carrier ops are always touted as being the real thing.

For me the more important aspect is an economic one. Cost cutting is the most important thing for every industry. Less people, more machines. And this is one reason the economy is not recovering. There just aren't that many jobs anymore. Many jobs have been replaced by technology or by cheaper labour in China etc.

So just to take the airline industry, check in by computer, baggage loaded and tracked by machine, plane flown by computer. Same thing in nearly all industries.

Now when we are totally people-efficient, who is going to be earning a salary to be able to fly on the planes with no pilots?

:)

Funded by the European Commission and others to the tune of €30 million

You have to be kidding.

A "standard" V1 eng failure a computer could cope well with. So long as all indications worked correctly i.e. no interpretation / thinking outside the box was required.

You only have to look here at the dangers of single pilot operation where even with a colleague telling him to Go Around he persevered. As a single example it is poor, but think how many like minded pilots have tried to do similar things, but been "rescued" by a lower workload colleague breaking the chain? I've been on both sides of that (being helped, and helping).

Hogger

So the job is easy is it ? What planet do you live on ?

Ejector...
 

...puts finger into the real scandal.

Are we surprised that "the industry" tries to eliminate us ? No.

Am I surprised that "we" (the money is tax money after all) found

Quote: "heavy hitters like Thales, Airbus and Boeing"

to do this ?

IMO this would warrant a strike of ALL pilots in the EU.

Pilots working together to improve their situation??! Just seen some pigs go flying past the window!

Personally I would fly with 1 pilot ops!
I have spent many years flying single pilot ops in the worst possible weather conditions, both night and day!
2 pilot ops on a modern day airliner still makes me laugh, NG you only need captain FO can't steer on the ground anyway.
In the air only one flies or really decision maker.
If you fight for control AB logic locks one out anyway.
Bring it on I personally don't care.

They can save even more if they stop building planes with the not at all necessary dual systems. When the system brakes down, the only 64 year old pilot is probably already incapacitated...:ugh:

Don't remember, but what was the site for buying train tickets again ? :ooh:

This one gets trotted out regularly and usually there's someone who points out that most accidents are pilot error. But as rick.shaw points out in his post this is to ignore the reality that almost every day pilots step in when the automatics and the technology fail to cope. I'm sure every Airbus pilot has a 'What's it doing now?' story. Even the AF447 accident was initiated when the the autopilot disconnected in response to turbulence. So much for the automatics. Certainly the human input compounded the the problem. But I daresay when something similar happens again there will be a different result with the benefit of hindsight.

Actually single pilot would effectively mean no pilot. The old joke about the pilot and dog is close enough to the truth. But I think we're a long way from that. The technology is simply not mature enough, not reliable enough and not intelligent enough.

Agreed, the human "machine" should have done much better but it's worth remembering that automatics couldn't manage a fairly straightforward sensor failure.

Well, not quite actually. The autopilot disconnected due to a loss of air data because of heavy icing clogging up deficient pitot tubes.

I would just love to see someone on the ground handle some of the crap that's been thrown my way in automated airplanes. I wouldn't want my loved ones riding in the back as they tried.

There are several ways of looking at this:

First, "single pilot operations" by the way of flights with a long cruise portion. I can see that happening in 5-10 years, with one guy at the controls and the other taking rest somewhere quiet and comfortable, then swapping over. In some ways on flights of a certain length, it could be argued that it's safer than the present arrangement where both pilots get the opportunity to get tired because most seats and flight decks are not the best places to recuperate in. The autopilot would probably have to be certified not to disconnect, so the remaining aviator could answer a call of nature without undue worry. There would likely be classes of airspace, datalink capabilities, medical and other requirements included in the rules - like a kind of EROPS+.

Second, only one pilot on board. Yes, there are lots of single-pilot commercial operations that go on around the world but most authorities limit them to relatively small aircraft. The accident statistics in that area are not encouraging, possibly partly to do with performance and certification rather than one pilot per se, but it would be a brave regulator who went first to up the limits.

I think there will inevitably be pilotless aircraft at some point in the future. I don't think we need to worry too much as by then anything that was previously done by a human will be much better performed by AI. We'll all be living in total hedonism, dead or stuck in some virtuality (or all three!)

The "automatics" did exactly what they were designed to do. The fault was in the (human) designer who assumed that human pilots would know what to do in an unusual situation.

Why not simply raise ticket prices? The tireless drive to the lowest common denominator never ends well, especially when lives hang in the balance. Not to worry though ... I'm sure the airline CEOs will -always- have a two man flight deck in their executive rides. :mad:

"The tireless drive to the lowest common denominator never ends well,"

Welllll- over 50 years ticket prices have plummeted and safety has rocketed........

Rise of the Xbox generation
 

Yes an old story now, but coming to an (any) industry near you .... KOMATSU: Autonomous Haulage System—Komatsu's Pioneering Technology Deployed at Rio Tinto Mine in Australia


There are already remote UAV flight centres dotted around the world which are using now proven technologies to fly numerous military missions many thousands of miles away. So could it therefore be 'feasible' to some bean counters to ponder substituting the RH seat with something similar? Hell, you could even play CoD with them during the cruise .... :}

Ask the SLF, without fail the ones I have asked say "no way". Seriously though the biggest problem is how do you train a pilot.? Time on type and experience's passed on are the only practical way. I for one would not like to be controlled from a desk in Texas.