Remember that plane where the 1st officer locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew the plane into a mountain?
I believe the rule now is that for a pilot to exit the cockpit, a cabin crew member has to be in the cockpit, to prevent this sort of thing.
I know a pilot and he mentioned a similar proposal he saw, he thought that the only reason anyone wanted them was so that they would have one less pilot to pay per flight.
I mean, that much is obvious. If you could do without two pilots it would be very inefficient to have two per flight, but you can’t, so it’s a very stupid idea.
- [Ted Striker]: I flew single engine fighters in the Air Force, but this plane has four engines. It’s an entirely different kind of flying, altogether.
- [Rumack], [Randy]: [together] It’s an entirely different kind of flying.
One of my big takeaways from the Marines (of which there are many) was never do anything without a buddy. There are certainly jobs that are for one person, but a pilot definitely ain’t that.
I don’t have your experience but I have watched a lot of airplane accident/near accident videos on YouTube, so I’m the worst kind of non-expert, and even I can see that having a pilot flying and another pilot monitoring is absolutely essential. It helps prevent either pilot getting overloaded with work and going to pieces, it provides company and a sanity check on every decision and flip of a switch, and there’s no fix for a pilot being incapacitated through sudden illness except having another person there to take over. I wouldn’t want to fly on a plane driven by a single lonely and stressed pilot, and I doubt many pilots would want to be doing long-haul flights all alone every day.
People flying planes?
First put Copilot as the copilot. Then yeet the pilot as well.
3 LLMs duking it out with people in the cargo hold of a winged tin cylinder seems like a genius idea.
Airplanes CAN also fly on a single engine (that is, if it’s a 2 engine one) but that doesn’t mean that it should
Ideas like these always come from people who forgot what were actually doing and what the actual priorities are
The priority is to move people safely from point a to point b. The priority is NOT to make a tiny select few rich people even richer
The priority is to move people safely from point a to point b. The priority is NOT to make a tiny select few rich people even richer
Clearly you haven’t been paying attention for the last 40 years. The priorities for all services and industries have changed.
There’s a reason redundancy is huge in aviation. All of those redundancies are written in the blood of prior accidents. Same thing with signage in the military.
And year, redundancy for the person flying the plane, or at least monitoring the autopilot is probably a good idea, tough shit for the airlines that want to cut costs.
Yeah, if they’d decrease prices then I honestly wouldn’t be that opposed. Flying is very safe, and autopilot is really good. It can even land, though I think this is normally not used if you have a human pilot, but it can do it if it needs to.
We all know that they’d just be cutting employees and probably increase prices though.
How the fuck could one pilot fly all those planes? Is this guy like Santa Claus or something?
Like the electron, there’s only one of him but he pops into each plane so fast it looks like they’re all crewed.
like the borg, or a protoss carrier, using your mind to control all those planes.
I did research on communication systems for exactly this. You need a few more than just one pilot, but the general idea is that only take off and landing are hard so you have pilots on the ground remote piloting the aircraft in these situations. In theory you don’t need pilots at all, but current autoland systems reduce throughput at airports.
and if there’s an emergency? like the pitot tubes go out, or there’s an engine fire, or a loss of cabin pressure, or landing gear malfunction, or stab trim runaway, or loss of communication, or GPS jamming over a hostile area, or TCAS alerts, or fuel contamination, or power failure, or the ground equipment for autoland goes out, or fire in the cargo hold, or slat deployment failure, or a bird strike on takeoff, or loss of hydraulic pressure, or a bad storm cell, or wind shear, or wake turbulence, or tower radio goes out, or a tail strike, or a badly contaminated runway, or a radio problem, or a software bug?
For GPS jamming there is research into alternative ground based location services, I’m currently doing research in that area. Interestingly one major problem there is not GPS jamming in hostile areas, it’s truckers using GPS spoofers for their tracking devices, because apparently that happens and it happens far away from any wars. Loss of communication was what I researched before, i.e. how reliable communication links are. For most of the other things you list a regular pilot can’t do much more than someone remotely operating the aircraft from the ground, the pilot is not going outside to fix an engine mid-flight, or hit the landing gear with a hammer until it works again. For autolanding, the whole idea of remote piloting is to not rely on autoland.
with the landing gear there’s mechanical backups. the pilot can (destructively) manually drop the gear if there’s a failure. same with other backups: on a non-fly by wire aircraft, the pilot can physically move the control surfaces with enough force. even Airbus has a limited mechanical backup (which has been used a couple times! like when all three avionics controllers disagreed and tripped offline.) likewise, even when there’s a total loss of power, the pilot can windmill the engines to start. and since any loss of communication dooms the aircraft, it needs to be extraordinarily reliable - and I’m not sure that level of reliability is physically possible, because the underlying communications links (even ACARS) aren’t rated for it, nor are the backbone routers of the internet.
finally, I think it is human nature that remote pilots will become complacent if their own lives are not at stake, like their passengers’.
I’m sure it’s fascinating research, and may have a place for cargo/repositioning flights, but I can’t see that such a scheme could be made reliable enough to risk human lives.
This is the epitome of could vs should… could a single pilot fly the plane ( given the technical aids available these days and in ideal conditions)… Yes, Should they… absolutely Not… lack of redundancy and too many opportunities for things to go wrong that could be avoided by another set of eyes.
fLyiNg iS tHe SaFesT wAy tO TrAveL
I mean, it is though.
Because of all the redundancy.
Therefore the safest
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Which I am, because pretty much everything leads to death eventually. I’m not a super being that can calculate the number of deaths directly resulting from an airplane flying in a given day.
When the traffic density for planes is the same as the traffic density of cars within say 100 miles of airports, then I’ll take that statistic seriously.
What an odd thing to say… “If conditions would be completely different the statistics would be different, therefore I don’t trust the statistics”. What’s your point exactly?
If the circumstances were similar, not just different.
The fact that’s still true should tell you just how dangerous driving is.
The difference here is that pilots are rigorously trained and go through constant continuing trainings and recertifications, while someone who wants a driver’s license effectively needs to prove they have a pulse and can read at a second grade reading level (at least here in the US). If we actually cared about road safety, we’d raise the bar for a driver’s license.
The MBAs have taken over the world and are enshitifying entire safety critical industries. They’ve been testing how high they can get the stock price/deaths ratio before someone makes them stop. This is why some industries just shouldn’t be driven by profit, and very near the top of that list is aviation safety.
With the FAA overrun with industry goons and Trump appointees, and aircraft design flaws now acceptable as a cost of doing business, we can expect more regulatory cuts and bits of passenger strewn about the landscape.
i was thinking they want an AI to fly the plane eventually.
Whoever decided this should be forced to fly in single pilot planes. Lead by example CEO cunt.
these ceos, will never fly with Plebs, they have thier private jets.
That sounded like an absolutely incredibly stupid idea.
It is, from every perspective except that of capitalists willing to sacrifice a few more lives for greater profit. If passengers really want to survive they can pay more money to travel on a deluxe two-pilot flight. The poors can’t afford it, but what are their lives worth anyway? It’s just the invisible hand of the market setting the truest price for each person to reflect their real value.
But think of the extra profits to be made!
Yes, you just need to keep the higher payouts to more bereaved relatives below the cost savings from making a bunch of pilots unemployed, and Bob’s your uncle. Simple soulless capitalist logic.
Remember not too long ago when the pilot or copilot went to the bathroom and came back to find the other guy unconscious?
Now think about what happens if there’s only one guy.
My mom just told me about British airways flight 5390.
While the aircraft was flying over Didcot, England, an improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame, causing the captain to be partially ejected from the aircraft. He was held in place through the window frame for 20 minutes until the first officer landed at Southampton Airport.
Whoever tried to pass this one pilot thing should be fired.
Then they won’t find an unconscious guy?
Depends on where the plane crashes, but definitely won’t be conscious.
Why not zero pilots?
Hot take, we’ll get zero pilot faster than single pilot.
Agreed
just put people in a launcer, probably icbm without the warhead to the destination.
Well, the zero was a single engine fighter, they would have to train on the newer planes, and also not be dead already
Elon Musk will have it working by next year, honest.
hes 1 step there, his teslas automatically locks on to children and accelerates.
They will virtualize the whole cockpit and leave it to some kid on MS Flight Simulator to fly the plane.
Big Balls. Can’t be punched if you’re at home on the computer.
If a passenger flies the plane, then we won’t be liable! GET BILL ON THE PHONE RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, we’ve had a breakthrough
Thank god for that; even with two pilots there’s plenty of crashes blamed on software (looking at you, Boeing).
Those software bolts
Good software needs good bolts. That’s just science.
