When all is normal, a single pilot might be able to manage the flight without incident. But the level of safety, and especially the ability to cope with non-normal conditions is greatly reduced. One need only look to the safety level of general aviation. This level of safety must not be accepted for pt 135/121 operations.

Who in their right mind would want to do this job by themselves??

The social aspect (and salary…still, hehe) is to a great deal the reason why I am still in it. The Covid pandemic opened a whole lot of new doors and flying isn’t a given for me anymore. Can’t imagine I am the only one…..

The majority of the flying public only care about price - if its cheap enough, then whether 3,2,1 or 0 up front sadly won't matter.

The majority of the flying public seems to have a fear of flying and will finally pick the option it considers the safest. Imagine electrical fires or similar and then the remote control or AI left having to take over.

If we would want to abandon redundancy as a concept we can go single engine, single generator, single hydraulics and so on. Making aircraft less complex, more lightweight and tickets cheaper? And who would need that costly airport fire brigade?

Whatever it takes to keep labour costs low and falling. Makes you wonder who the government is representing, the people or the corporations? Okay, there's no wondering... it's not the people.

With single pilot ops the officials would be saying something a lot worse.

There is no credible single pilot operation of any large airplane. Without the redundancy of a second pilot, full automation is the only alternative. The first fully automated flight will be the first with a single pilot.

The reason why single pilot ops won’t be around for the foreseeable future is incapacitation. Whilst increased use of automation may make a single pilot airliner a reasonable prospect you then have to make it fully automated in case of that pilot being incapacitated. So you basically need a far greater level of automation nearing AI level. And the bigger problem, you’ll also need uninterrupted and perfectly reliable ground to air communication in case of that incapacitation. There’s enough problems with VHF comms interruptions to prevent that from happening without a massive overhaul of the worldwide communications network.

Basically a minimum of 30 years before the first scheduled single pilot flight happens. Every single aircraft manufacturers are planning is two crew, and they’ll be in operation for at least 25-30 years.

Pilots are their own worst enemies. You will have pilots losing their minds about how cool this plane is that can taxi, take off and fly in cruise by itself then wonder why their conditions are in the gutter. By the time this happens the people they pioneered this will be retired on their fat pensions.

The lawyers and insurers are going to make a lot of money.

"Less pilots can never offer a greater safety margin."

that's clearly not true historically - as the number of people on the flight deck has reduced safety rates have increased - of course it due to better higher tech and more automation enabling a reduction - not the other way round - but no-one would suggest INCREASING the numbers of n the flight deck would they?

And yes the tech occasionally goes wrong - but again probably not as often as humans

“We” are NOT crashing regularly! Safest couple of years in aviation history. But yes, sometimes but very very seldom accidents are caused by pilot error. Much more often accidents are prevented by pilot action! From my own experience as a pilot I wouldn’t putt my family in a pilotless aircraft. I have seen too many automation hick ups for that.

The aircraft in question are already highly autonomous with Auto TCAS and Auto emergency descent. Autonomous taxi trials are underway at Toulouse, and these flights have already been conducted, with the only real pilot input being altering the FCU, and a TCAS and visual lookout. Except as stated through Russian airspace ( when we used it ) due to lack of CPDLC and the PRC, due to terrain and paranoid standards of control that can’t help but interfere all the time. Albeit with a full crew available and rotated through as required. However that is more of a requirement for the entire crew to witness the operation as opposed to fatigue.
As to VHF outages a fair part of the world has CPDLC coverage, satellite enabled. I can’t remember when I last had a prolonged comms outage, even in the Dark Continent.
Incapacitation is a factor. That’ll be down to the regulators and our excellent (!) medicals. Likely to get more stringent and more invasive. A bigger factor is the chance of a “Eurowings” type event and indeed the effect on the mental health of the pilots involved due to isolation etc. That said, carriers in the less enlightened parts of the world have been quite happy to have their crews confined to their hotel rooms on layover with little or no interaction for almost 2 years now, consigned to endless loop rostering, with the only way out to the greater community and your families to spend a further 14, or 21 days locked up in a hotel at the end of the loop. And endless cycles of pointless testing.
So, it is being actively looked at. With the initial aim to reduce crews from 4 to 3, 3 to 2 etc etc. A beancounters wet dream.
Convince yourself that this is 30 years away if you wish.

Military drones seem to have an unusually high cruise phase crash rate. Why is that happening? We should find out before airliners go unmanned.
https://dronewars.net/2019/06/09/acc...drone-crashes/

They still fail to understand the FO is a CP in training...

As long as they don't use tesla software.....

Presumably because there is a huge amount of software and hardware invested in downing drones ?

It's more like restreamed mechanics being unaware of icing and stalls when steep turning in high mountains and such.

Back to the medical data?
I'm sure someone knows what the rate of incapacitation due to medical reasons is. .........

I think it’s not so much the reduced redundancy, although that plays a part, it’s the human interaction with two or more crew members bouncing ideas off each other, generating solutions and monitoring the results. You read about pilot error in accident reports but you don’t read about how good CRM stopped an accident chain before it had a chance to develop.

The automation will have to become better, as we are at the unfortunate time where it’s reliable up to the point where things get really bad, then it dumps the whole mess on the (single) pilot. Much in the way of self-driving vehicles in their current state of evolution. If the sole pilot who is awake is in the toilet when something bad happens (there was an opportunity for a joke there but I resisted it), then the aircraft must be able to cope.

If a non-pilot goes flying in a light aircraft with a qualified pilot, they have to assume the chances of survival are not good if that pilot becomes incapacitated, but do it anyway for fun. Will several hundred commercial travellers see it in the same light?