Airbus + Cathay working on Single Pilot during Cruise with A350
 

https://www.reuters.com/business/aer...ul-2021-06-16/

Airbus and Cathay will start tests on having only one pilot in the cockpit during Cruise on A350. Target a launch date of 2025.

Think AF447. Relaxed cruise and iced up probes but only one junior guy in the cockpit to deal with it now?

Iced up probes aren’t a problem in the 350. But I take your point.

What a load of old pony. Where exactly is the benefit? I pity the poor sod who finds themselves alone with a rapid decompression over high terrain in the middle of the night. Some things work just fine as they are. The wheel is another great example.

Take some broken cockpit window.

Its a simple calculation at the end of the day. If the safety engineers can show that the aircraft can safely be flown in cruise with only one pilot, and all failures can be handled by that one pilot, there's no reason from a technical stand point why this project isn't feasible. I think that most of the opposition will come from the human factors side of things. That's the purpose of the next few years of testing. Ie. To prove that its doable.

What happens if something happens to the one pilot??

Those are the sort of things safety engineers and risk management processes need to address. Once they can successfully show that they have a method of dealing with that and then the other issues then the soulless and cold world of aviation regulation might allow it.

At the end of the day aviation only exists because the parties involved have proved that they can mitigate the risks involved with it to make it acceptable to the traveling public. There's no reason why they couldn't do it again.

Remember, the aviation community was in arms when the flight engineer was replaced by computers.

Single pilot for cruise. "For how long at a time?" is the question. Are they implying the other one gets to nod off during that time? What if one needs to answer a call (from nature)?

Good luck Cathay/Airbus but all that's going to happen is that pilots involved in the trial will simply report how tired/exposed/compromised they felt. I can save you 5 years of research now.

Less Hair

Actually, not having a second officer there would have prevented the accident. First of all he would not have pulled on the stick and second of all the captain would have been able to take his seat much more quickly...

scr1

The flight management system will do its job until the other pilot wakes up before landing.

I don’t see the big savings in this kind of operation, but if you could reduce the cockpit to a single pilot cockpit then I see it would mean a lot in savings. But to have a single pilot cockpit in passenger flights, would mean that the A/C automation level would be able to do everything by itself from Thrust Levers is advanced on take off until it reaches taxi speed after landing, due to incapacitation of the pilot on board at the most critical point of the flight phase. And then you can ask yourself if the pilot is relevant at all.

Safety engineers risk assessing 😂 That’ll be fine then.
The aircraft would have to be safe with no pilots at the controls at least for a short period of time to allow for a pee break, nose bleed,vomit etc.

Why still use two engines then? One will do.

So what happened to the procedures put in place after the GermanWings incident?

So what alternative do you propose?

I think we should carefully consider the facts and benefits here.

OK I’ve done that. No. Stupid cost saving initiative

Does they will count the time of resting pilot sleep and cut accordingly his salary ?

Not sure why so many people are opposing this.

Perhaps we can improve safety even further by reducing to only one manager instead

Actually I think Cathay may have been down this route before. An ex colleague of mine was hired when a junior FO on the 747 fleet as a Cruise pilot to acilitate crew rest.

Anyhow, thin end & Wedge come to mind. "Smart Motorways", "Automatic self driving cars. All cr@p ideas but they further someone's agenda

Humans and computers. Never trust your life to a single one of either, until they are infallible
Computers and humans. Neither are infallible.

What happens when the flying pilot needs to take a leak? Train one of the flight attendants to monitor the instruments?

Remind me again at what altitude must a single pilot be wearing and using oxygen ?
No tea for you while you are wearing the mask so probably no need for bathroom breaks . Just like the Astronauts of old you will be given special disposable undergarments .

I'm not sure I see much benefit. Clearly the main object is to save money, so let's apply some simple maths. I don't know exactly how much the overheads are on a single pilot, so let's base it on £100k salary + £100k training and other overheads for argument's sake:

£200k ÷ 750 hours = £266/hour
For argument's sake, let's say the aircraft has 266 passengers and they're all paying equally to the pilots salary. That's £1/hour.

So we're looking at saving £10 per passenger for a 10 hour flight.

Now when you weigh that up against the development costs and potential for unforeseen risks, issues etc. is it really worth it? Now I'm aware that every cost saving improvement is accumulative but at the thought of what sounds like reduced redundancy, saving a tenner wouldn't really cut it for me.

Edit: I didn't make it clear that the assumption would be that any savings would be passed onto the passenger. However, I suppose not all the savings need to be passed on and some of it becomes profit...

Look! A350 has done 500 tests of ATTOL i.e. Autonomous Taxi Take Off and Landing in which pilots didn't do anything except engine start. A350 manages AF447 situation automatically, it does emergency descent without any action from pilot, it does auto TCAS. So it's not what everyone is talking about. It's difficult to digest but it's the march of technology. Many things we use today were unimaginable 30 years ago.

Two pilots

Ahhh, what the safety engineers call the 'No change option'. D'you know, I remember the days when aircraft carried two pilots and a flight engineer and a navigator. And they flew by DR and sights unless they had the luxury of a locator along the route. Why did they change all that?

From the article

It seems that Airbus engineers have got the hubris bug just as Boeing’s did with the MAX.

I'm surprised Cathay of all companies have chosen to be the first one to roll this dice

When the negative publicity comes - which it will, because we'll make sure that it will - their carefully built up image as one of the safest airlines will be seriously jeopardized.

If they lose even a few thousand nervous pax per year across the network as a consequence, then all of the alleged cost savings will be gone, and they'll have nothing to show for it but a damaged reputation.

If / when an incident happens while single pilot, they risk getting their image absolutely trashed on the same scale that happened to Malaysian, or worse

Very little to gain and everything to lose IMO

That’s a good development which paves the way to unmanned cockpit and therefore an improvement of the flight safety.

So, if they are going to use two pilots for TO and LDG, where are the savings? I’d quite like to be able to go back for a kip on a 2-crew flight but it’s not reducing the crew complement overall. There’d have to be a serious rewrite of FTLs before there was a commercial advantage...?

There are some Aviation authorities that don’t count rest time toward FTL. So could potentially work the slaves longer. But I think this is mostly aimed at flights with augmented crews. So could go from 3 or 4 to two.

Two is the minimum required for redundancy. You can have number two remotely connected sit on the ground but it will be not the same quality in decision making.This is why it would degrade flight safety. Look at extreme military drone crash rates and the reasons for it.

Plenty of accountants love the idea - it’s us pilots that oppose it.

This is all about 2 flight crew being reduced to 1 for the cruise not 4 to three or three to two.
When a workable solution to the pilot at the controls being able to have a pee etc is formulated I’ll be all ears.

Beaker

Not taking a position on this pro or con, just pointing out the potential cost benefits:
It takes roughly 4 full time pilots/seat to crew an aircraft - at ~£200k/year that's over a million dollars per aircraft per pilot. That's a recurring cost - so ~$25 million per aircraft over the life of the aircraft (more when you factor in benefits into the salary).
Developing the s/w and h/w to automate out a pilot is not recurring (aside from some support costs as the s/w gets periodically updated. Build 1,000 aircraft with the feature that eliminates one pilot and you're talking $25 Billion in savings to the operators. That would pay for a pretty robust development program with plenty left over in the profit column...

40 years ago, while Boeing was developing the 767, the FAA released a study that showed that there was no safety improvement between a 2 crew and a 3 crew flight deck. Boeing had made the 2 crew EICAS equipped flight deck an option with a price tag of a little under $1 million. With one exception, all the launch customers quickly changed their orders to the 2 crew EICAS configuration - at the time they quoted the payback in pay/benefits as less than 2 years.

In short, eliminating crew costs is a big carrot...

135.89 Pilot requirements: Use of oxygen. (a) Unpressurized aircraft. Each pilot of an unpressurized aircraft shall use oxygen continuously when flying—

(1) At altitudes above 10,000 feet through 12,000 feet MSL for that part of the flight at those altitudes that is of more than 30 minutes duration; and

(2) Above 12,000 feet MSL.

(b) Pressurized aircraft. (1) Whenever a pressurized aircraft is operated with the cabin pressure altitude more than 10,000 feet MSL, each pilot shall comply with paragraph (a) of this section.

(2) Whenever a pressurized aircraft is operated at altitudes above 25,000 feet through 35,000 feet MSL, unless each pilot has an approved quick-donning type oxygen mask—

(i) At least one pilot at the controls shall wear, secured and sealed, an oxygen mask that either supplies oxygen at all times or automatically supplies oxygen whenever the cabin pressure altitude exceeds 12,000 feet MSL; and

(ii) During that flight, each other pilot on flight deck duty shall have an oxygen mask, connected to an oxygen supply, located so as to allow immediate placing of the mask on the pilot's face sealed and secured for use.

(3) Whenever a pressurized aircraft is operated at altitudes above 35,000 feet MSL, at least one pilot at the controls shall wear, secured and sealed, an oxygen mask required by paragraph (b)(2)(i) of this section.

(4) If one pilot leaves a pilot duty station of an aircraft when operating at altitudes above 25,000 feet MSL, the remaining pilot at the controls shall put on and use an approved oxygen mask until the other pilot returns to the pilot duty station of the aircraft.

There's world outside of FAA as well, not to mention that I can guarantee you the compliance with this rule is much less than 100%.

No doubt, Airbus will try to convince them that given the existence of auto emergency descent donning the mask is unnecessary. But in any case the unions in the US would never sign off on this anyway