As long as youtube, backed by the best algorithms to date, won't be able to target me with advertisements in my own langage when I'm travelling abroad, I won't believe in an automated aircraft anytime soon.

not just YT; Google search has the same problem. Google is apparently staffed by people who don’t travel. Apple is no better; the notification summary AI stuff switches to whatever language of the country I’m currently in, so I can’t understand my notifications half the time.

This sort of thing comes up every now and then on here and I’m still yet to see a satisfactory answer to 2 problems (and I’m afraid to say it doesn’t surprise me the OP here is a GA pilot and has never spent a day on the line)



1- single pilot monitoring is all well and good if the meatbag is a seasoned captain with 10,000 hours , would you be so confident if it was a 20 something 200 hour just out of flight school cadet (the kind that make up the right hand seat in many jets all over the world as a norm these days)?



And flying as a career in the airlines is about MUCH more than button pushing and flight path monitoring. If you do 2-4 sectors everyday for 4-5 days in a row you’ll be exposed to all kinds of dynamism, decision making and problem solving you will never get in a sim and frankly cannot just accrue overnight. Airlines say they recruit those in the RHS to be ‘future captains’- FUTURE being the operative word.



Things don’t even have to go all that wrong for someone with low hours to start to struggle and shutdown (as someone that has had low hours I know). MEL’d equipment, quick turnarounds, M&B issues, weather enroute, ATC slots, disruptive passengers, FDP concerns, difficult cabin crew, and about 1000 other things you cannot be aware of that you’ll

See on the line but won’t have any awareness of unless you have experience.

Some airlines don’t even let their FOs taxi the plane given the liability implications! There’s a reason many airlines even today require 1500-2000+ big jet hours for direct entry FOs (forget captains). I wonder what insurance companies have to say about the prospect of having a PIC onboard their $100-300m plane filled with 200-400 passengers who doesn’t even have an unfrozen ATPL


I assume AI or whatever automatic system you are proposing here won’t be making fuel decisions so we can almost certainly expect a huge spike in fuel emergencies (if not much worst outcomes) when the 500 hour ‘Captain’ has taken planned block fuel into some of the weathers and dodgy airspaces airlines fly into.

2- incapacitation, will the automatics be able to recognise this? Will they be able to operate with 0 oversight, coordinate with ATC in the busiest airspaces in the world and land with a safe outcome?

Minor point also (or is it?) who monitors the monitor when the single pilot has to ‘use the facilities’? Some newbie cabin crew? Are they going to redesign entire cabins so there’s a WC on the figure deck?

Or to be more dark there are other scenarios where a single pilot can be a threat should they have bad intentions…..



So sure, a single pilot operation crewed by a flying god in a gleaming no defect brand new jet on a fair weather day going into a major airport *might* be a fine idea but in the real world in a commercial operation flying 100s of real humans?



Realistically if you are going 1 pilot you have to go 0 and we are nowhere near that point and frankly it would be unreasonable to expect a single pilot to do this same amount of work with the same FDPs we have today given that we split roles (PM/PF) as it is.

And we are focusing on a handful of instances not the millions of flights that are pulled off absolutely safely and successfully every single year.

How many pilots would be willing to ‘fly’ on a complex all electric flying machine where they can’t isolate systems and circuits or hard intervene when the automation goes wrong? I for one wouldn’t want to





Would this even be a certifiable commercial product? It would seem one short circuit could potentially end 100s of lives. Bringing in the example of trains as some will do doesn’t work very well here- you can’t just stop and evacuate mid air and secondly the onboard signalling required to run those trains on limited lines as of today (ETCS-2 for example) is a LOT more invasive and robust than VHF or CPLDC is on airliners currently

Things don’t even have to go all that wrong for someone with low hours to start to struggle and shutdown (as someone that has had low hours I know)
It can happen with an experienced pilot too. I was the captain on an F28 Fellowship en-route Guam to Manila. While we were 50 miles on descent and being vectored for the ILS, the approach controller was busy giving rapid fire instructions to several aircraft including us. The copilot who was an experienced pilot was having difficulty understanding the accented speech of the controller. Several times he asked me "what did she say?" When it happened again, he took the headphones from his head and said to me "I can't stand this" and slumped in his seat while I flew the aircraft and did the R/T. He came good before we landed but I had never seen a pilot lose the plot like he did.

Automation and AI, in essence, aren't inherently bad. But when I look at what's happened with Google and YouTube, it's clear that the goal was never user comfort—it was all about cutting costs and squeezing out more profit. I never buy into those aviation articles that claim removing pilots is about improving safety. It’s a cost-cutting move, plain and simple, designed to make cheaper aircraft more appealing to airlines. I can already picture them outsourcing the software development to the lowest bidder—probably the same kind of people that clogged lavatories in a neighboring topic. Airlines are insured against accidents and fatalities, but not against bankruptcy. So of course they’ll welcome the idea of a “smart pro cockpit” remotely operated from somewhere like Uttar Pradesh.
Cancer started quietly—by removing a single olive from an in-flight meal. Now, it’s spreading toward removing pilots altogether.

Who are you to decide that?

A fully automatic system has to meet some level of safety. Why would it need to be higher than current part 25 aircraft piloted by qualified crew?

Well there was removing the flight engineer and automating what he used to do. Was that before or after the loss of the olive?

If I remember correctly (MD-11 development and certification) the biggest obstacle was not technical it was the pilot unions. I don't know of any MD-11 accident or incident that was directly attributable to the absence of a flight engineer.

The irony of that development was that Douglas didn't have good documentation on what the flight engineer actually did (normals and abnormals). We had to hire an ex DC-10 flight engineer to help us define how all the system controllers should operate.

I believe the olive legend dates back to the mid-80s, around the time flight engineers were phased out of cockpits. I have nothing against reasonable automation—when it’s implemented in balance with technological progress and not just to save a few pennies for airlines like WizzRyan.

Our so-called "modern computers" are still built on retro tech—essentially counting zeros and ones. Even the much-hyped AI isn't truly "intelligent." It’s just a massive database combined with algorithms that respond to inputs with programmed outputs. It’s nowhere near as flexible as the human brain—and won’t be for a very, very long time.

Now imagine a scenario: engine failure, plus a hijacking, blocked lavatories, and a hypoxic passenger + ground datalink jamming. The outcome? Completely unpredictable and very likely fatal.

And who is going to care except for the close relatives of the deceased? Recent world events have reminded us, if we needed reminding, that human life is not worth very much. There is no shortage of people!

Because you don't know your numbers.
We fly 10^8 flight hours per year, globally.
If we had one crash every 10^7 hours, we would have 10 commercial jetliners down every year.
If we targeted that figure of one crash per 10^7 flight hours, but did not reach it exactly, we would have more crashes than that.
And you can double the figure to account for business jets.

10^-9 is the correct number to target.

It's the number currently targeted, and even with the help of pilots (because they avoid many more crashes than they cause), airplanes still don't quite reach that target.

You just made a mistake.
It's not so bad, it happens.
But mistakes need to be caught. And that's what two pilots do. They catch the manufacturers mistakes, and each other's mistakes.
Ha, sorry.
If you're going to say things like this, this entire discussion is pointless.

You're right, why bother with safety ?
Looking back, I could have handled a boeing 777 with an appropriate level of safety around the 100-hour mark during my pilot training. With the same line training as I had, but skipping all the CPL, MCC, type rating parts.
If human life is not worth so much, all these were useless !
And I wouldn't have crashed it anyway, so all the more useless.

Also, since I wouldn't have required a 100-000$ training, my salary could have been a third of what it is now. And there you have it, instead of pilots costing ~5% of a flight revenue, they would cost 1.5%. That is comparable to the cost of unmanning an aircraft. So no need to remove the pilot if you only care about money, too !

Thanks for clarifying your position.

Dangerous statement. So far the majority of crashes are CFIT. It is also a lot more interesting to look at the crashes they avoided and not question why there was a possible crash. You will find that in many cases the pilot caused the problem as well.

Since you fly a 777, you don't seem to realize you are working a user interface on your flightdeck that rules out already a gigantic pilot job: problem identification. You think you see your aircraft at work, yet you don't seem to realize a lot of the failure processing is done for you and your opinion and actions are already ruled out a lot. One day you will get an EICAS, end up on the ground and read the STAT page thinking "how the hell are these two things connected?". Well, it's a feat of engineering that they kept your life soo simple you never noticed anything in flight and they kept it away from you until safe on the ground, and the procedures you followed worked just fine. That in itself is automation that prevented crashes caused by troubleshooting pilots in the past.

As a former 777 pilot I can't understand how anyone would be against automation yet they accepted to push that checklist button, go for engine out CATIIIB approaches with an alert height, and think how nice the aircraft protects it's pilots interface in case of loss of thrust on both engines. You are free to believe you are still required up there if that is what is needed... it is beautiful feat of the engineers who designed that aircraft to leave you in that dreamworld.

Pilot's can't handle the complexity of modern airliners. Automation keeps it simple for them. Thank god automation doesn't need praise. The pilot's on the other hand... but as long as they get to keep the stick & rudder game, they can quantify their qualities as pilots. The engineers don't care. They can. For the moment it justs costs too much money to certify, and the rules and regulations would need to be changed. But the hurdles will be jumped one day... when the money and time is right.

Ps: there's a bit of irony in the post... but realize automation is already present in huge amounts, we're not really saving the world with our flying abilties, I would almost say enjoy the last bit of fun we get to have. And enjoy the FDM statistics we fill up ourselves :-).

I'm pretty surprised you say you're a former pilot and yet take as example "think how nice the aircraft protects it's pilots interface in case of loss of thrust on both engines"

In case of loss of thrust on both engines, what will the aircraft do ?
Nothing.
(Yes, I get your point, the aircraft will manage to keep electrical and hydraulic power to be able to fly the plane, yes, but that's the least it can do. It will do nothing for providing a safe trajectory)
It will all boil down to the pilot proficiency.
A very experienced, skilled, and thoughtful pilot might be able to land on a runway touchdown zone.
A normally skilled pilot might be able to target a clear zone and save most passengers if not all.
A substandard pilot won't be able to find a suitable area and everyone will die.

So that's a very bad example to talk about the uselessness of pilots.

Also, if you believe the pilot's job is summed up by "stick and rudder skills" I don't know what you've been doing this whole time. Did you not care about the rest ?

I think you find find that the applicable exposure time is "a flight". Run the numbers again for flights and not flight hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_25.1309-1
The circular provides a rationale for the upper limit for the Average Probability per Flight Hour for Catastrophic Failure Conditions of 1 x 10−9 or "Extremely Improbable"

If I was automation I would gladly ask you to "Hold my beer". Going a bit on a "walk" here, but I hate it when pilots that "credit" that automation is out of the story and it is solely the pilot's credit when he disconnects the autopilot. That is such a ridiculous statement.

Memory items for the relight: you only have to reset the fuel controls and that's it.
RAT activation: a pushbutton but it will come out automatically in case of.
APU activation: a pushbutton but it start automatically in case of.
APU start: full automatic start & monitoring.
Engine start: full automatic start & monitoring.
Your flight instruments will come back. The systems go to work and calculate what you need. There is a banana, FMC's come back, energy circles are there, airports shown on maps... Who calculates that stall speed? Who calculates those flap maneuvering speeds? Is that you or is that automatically presented in front of you?

How can you even claim it is the pilot's stick and rudder work that put the aircraft down when automation took over all systems actions, gives guidance, and still lets you fly through a fully working fly-by-wire system that stabilizes you and keeps you in trimmed for the glide speed?

I have done this excercise in the past on 737 and 777 simulators. The difference is gigantic. By the time you've identified a suitable runway in the 777, you'll probably be scrambling for your oxygen mask in the 737, hoping the FO is not forgetting about his memory items and maybe it's a good time to start your APU... (and don't forget to put it on 'A' bus... yes it's a Classic).

This is not a bullet proof method, but it is what I've used in the simulator so take it for what it's worth and it is only to show you how automation in the background still provides you with a lot of useful info. Hardly any memory items, short NNC, no oxygen masks, instant access to all flight data in front of the pilots and 2 brains ready to tackle the glide... with assistance from all displays. (be mindfull of your 737 FO struggling to get through paper NNC stuff deciding on windmill necessity etc...). Set the MCP to platform altitude, use the banana to position for final intercept, turn vectors give you an indication of your turn to final to establish smoothly, and set airport elevation on the MCP. Once established, put the banana at the end of the runway symbol and check speed. Increasing speed? Increase flaps. Around 500ft, pitch down and put the banana in front of the runway (this is the point we got visual) and look at the speed. Gear down depending on the situation. We touched down easily on the runway. Do you know how much calculation was done by the aircraft? Somebody should confirm this, but I even think at a certain point during the glide you can actually re-engage the autopilot and just use LVL CHG to glide it in with the heading bug up to short final.

What is the difference? Automation. Knowing there is "glide" software, it should be easy to install it. The only issue is, that it is not a certification requirement and if you want to certify it you end up in a different world. The whole "dual engine fail" procedure is based on certification that expects one engine to recover. But the automation is ready.

Don't think you're better off on your own pilot, be careful what you wish for. A little gratitude to technology would be nice.

(PS: I'm an active TRI, nothing "former" here, just not on 777 anymore ;-) and a little sensitive to the automation discussion because I love technology...)

Not in dispute. However AC 25.1309 also says -

"1.5.4 Average Probability per Flight Hour.
For the purpose of this AC, this term is the quotient of the number of times the subject failure condition is predicted to occur during the entire operating life of all airplanes of the type divided by the anticipated total operating hours of all airplanes of that type. Please note that the average probability per flight hour is normally calculated as the probability of a failure condition occurring during a typical flight of mean duration divided by that mean duration."

and

"3.2.4 Extremely Improbable Failure Condition.
A failure condition that is not anticipated to occur during the total operational life of all airplanes of a given type."

I agree with 99%, not to say 100% of what you said.
However, this is not a discussion about the need for recognition of aeronautical engineers. It's a discussion about safety.

To each their own job. The engineers' job is to provide a safe airplane. The pilot's job is to operate it safely. One does not go without the other.
And don't believe the flight control laws are crucial for anything. Properly trained pilots don't need them. I'm a flight instructor for PPL and today I figured with two different students (total hours for both combined less than 7) that a beginner can do things like identify the maximum pitch rate in a phugoid. You would think that this type of thing is specific to computers, and I did too, but apparently not.
So of course a competent pilot can fly an airplane without flight directors, autopilots, C* control law, ...

And the job of a pilot is only 1% to fly, hands on, the plane. Most of the job is strategic. I'm surprised to tell you this if you have thousands of hours on the line.
What fuel strategy to define given the currrent situation ? What to decide regarding an abnormal situation, technical or non technical ? How to optimise the turnaround and the workday to maximize revenue for the airline? How to maximize customer satisfaction ? Which equilibrium to define between passenger comfort, safety, fuel economy ?
All these have nothing to do with the hands on flying.
And all these require real intelligence.

You really think pilots are able to take such decisions? You give them a single diversion and they are limited to single option choices because the inflow of information is already too much to handle while having to fly themselves using autopilot. We adapt quickly, yes, but we can only do that when the proces is simple.

(changed my post because I think this example is better):

If you want to look at the future and the problems in decision making, you have to look at space technology and a lot closer to home: modern fighter jets. The F-35 and F-22 are great examples of how 1) the difficult decision process and 2) the quest for maneuverability is totally taken over by automation. The filters and methods of showing information are automated to the max. Old school fighter pilots have always battled, were against the change thinking what they did worked just fine because it was their identity, their job. If I can do it, why do I need anything else? I think it is fair to state they were wrong and without knowing the software, it is pretty fair to state the decision making process is a "linked" endeavour where the pilot's job is better defined as "the last confirmation". Situations where in the past, a lot of pilots would die, don't exist anymore. Thanks to automation the decision making process becomes very simplified and "human able with little chance of error".

The problem is and will always remain the fact that automation is required to be bullet proof. When automation makes 1 mistake, it is used to defend the 100 mistakes made by pilots. I don't think that is safe. A properly trained pilot does not need? Yes he does. It will only take time to make it economically viable as it requires a lot of testing and regulation for each step we take. And of course, commercial aviation has different goals from military aviation. But automation can serve those requirements equally fine.

Software increases the risk exposure in a bunch of ways (largely achievable complexity), but digital computers are far from the only automation found on aircraft in general, software bugs are far from the only design bugs, and even 'old' 'manual' aircraft like the 737 have taken a lot of decisions away from the pilots.

Consider the 737 rudder hardovers - hydraulic valve design failure.

The DC-10 cargo door failures - design error in the latching mechanism meant that the displayed 'door latched' indicator reflected the position of the handle, not the latch. Classic software issue, just the code was metal rods.

Even in railway signalling, with old-school mechanical interlocking so that you physically can't pull the levers to set a conflicting route, someone can just mess up the drawing in a minute way, and miss out an interlock.

The 737 and most other non-FBW large aircraft have hydro-pneumatic 'computers' for elevator/rudder/aileron feel. Landing at landing speed with cruise stick forces would not be ideal.

Almost everything in the last 30 years has FADECs without which the engines simply cannot operate. There is no button that just gives the pilots levers for fuel valve, IGV positions, and low/high-pressure bleed valves. The engine would be uncontrollable. Same goes for the hydromechanical engine controllers in older jet engines. Certainly a pilot is not expected to fire the spark plug in each cylinder at the right time on a piston engine...

Reliability is achieved by good design, multiple channels, and lower-level backup modes. While there is often a button to force the system to a lower level of automation, it is often only that - less automation, or disabling the system entirely and either doing without or relying on the redundancies.

There is no button to force a generator back online if the generator controller thinks the phase sequence, voltage, or frequency is wrong. That died with the end of the flight engineer.