Airline Pilot Jobs of the Future-home every night, no jetlag

[Panama Jack]

An article, not by some sort of quack, but by FlightGlobal's David Learmount.

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/learm ... -airliner/

When Europe’s SESAR and the USA’s NextGen ATM systems have been fully up and running for a few years, aeroplanes will carry out their own trajectory management and their own traffic separation. The rest of the world is preparing to go down the same path. Pilots’ and controllers’ jobs as they are today will be redundant.

Imagine an airline crewroom in 2030. The airline has, say, 300 aeroplanes, but only about 50 pilots. About ten of these will be on duty in the crewroom at any one time. There they have several cockpit-like interfaces that can link them electronically to any of the fleet that’s airborne at the time. They have ten engine and systems engineers to help them. On the rare occasion that something anomalous occurs on an aeroplane, an alert sounds and all the flight and systems data for that aircraft are made available on the interface in real time, together with a systems diagnostic report. They can intervene as effectively as they could have done in the aircraft.

The aircraft commander will be the Purser – the senior cabin crew member – and the pilot back at base will be the driver.

[Boreas]

On the rare occasion that something anomalous occurs on an aeroplane, an alert sounds and...

...the data link fails.

[slowstream]

On the rare occasion that something anomalous occurs on an aeroplane, an alert sounds and...

...the data link fails.

yeah, because that never happens (lol)!


I've been reading about this future of aviation and my initial thought still remains, good luck selling it to the people who pay the bills, the people stuck in that big old aluminium tube

[Mostly Harmless]

It will be about 20 years from now, but single pilot airliners are coming (with a drone pilot sitting in reserve as described above, just in case something happens to the one pilot). After that, it is pilotless airliners. (History shows, there used to be 5 in the flight deck, then 4, then 3, now 2... the trend is pretty evident)

As for the crowd in the back, they already think that the computers do everything. I don't think the buy in from the public will be that difficult.

[Panama Jack]

Well, in David Learmount's other article he makes a profound statement, one which I completely agree with and which is very much a "here and now reality":

If pilots can no longer fly ordinary visual procedures manually, or fly instrument patterns in IMC manually, the ultimate backup system when all else has failed – the pilot – is no longer a pilot. If that is true, we might as well start automating pilots out of the system now.

This is very much the scenario at many airlines Worldwide. Learmount cites AF447, where the flight crew had a complete disconnect with what their aircraft was doing. The time of day that the accident occured and fatigue likely played a contributing role. In playing the devil's advocate here, wouldn't there be a safety advantage by having "pilots" monitoring the flight from some sort of operational control center, where they were working regular hours, free of circadian dysrithmia and other physiological factors and where you could get 10 people in to help with a problem?

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/learm ... iscussion/

When we look at how much technology has progressed over the last decade or two, I am very much convinced that it is largely a matter of time, technology and reliability to make such a prediction reality. For a middle-aged guy like me, I figure that I may well see it within my lifetime. Many light-rail trains (subways) already don't have a driver on board.

[2.5milefinal]

IMHO within 10 years there will be single pilot airliners and in 20 years UAV type airliners.
Passengers do not care who or what drives the thing through the sky, all they care about is the price.
Most pilots don't like when I talk like this. Its mostly to do with feeling nostalgic about the 'the good old days' but...
Its coming quicker than most pilots want to believe.

[Beefitarian]

It will be just like Safeway here breaking the union. The cashiers used to be permanent staff that could all do their job well, making $18/hour plus benefits in the early 90s. Once the company got rid of the clauses in the contracts they wanted to. They replaced as much staff as they could with part time employees, half the wage without benefits.

Some were ok, some should just have been euthanized. But at least groceries were more expensive. Yay?

Sitting in a windowless room with a pizza, monitoring and flying various planes, wearing my Ray-Bans, sweatpants and a VanHalen 1984 tour T-shirt for $8/hour? I better start working on my CV!

[Rockie]

Drone pilots go home at the end of their shift regardless of what happens to the drone. Don't think for a second that fact will be lost on passengers no matter how cheap their ticket is.

[2.5milefinal]

We shell see how much passengers care...

[The Mole]

Germans will crawl backwards over broken glass for lower fairs- CEO ryanair

[slowstream]

Some interesting perspectives, and respecting all of them but I guess time will tell.

I know based on the time line predictions from a couple of you I will thankfully be retired from flying and doing my greeting work at my local Wallyworld

[Old fella]

And again...... 30+++ yrs ago(I know you are tired of hearing this from me) the same type of stuff was floating about in some fashion. The 1968 flick 2001-A Space Odyssey kinda got the ball rolling, robots/machines were going to be doing it all no need of people. I think there was some type of spaceship in this movie with a Pan-Am logo on it

Well 2001 was 12 yrs ago and guess what, last time I flew about 4 months ago there were guys and gals still up front. I am going flying again in another 3 weeks and I dare say the will be guys/gals up front as well.......

I get off on these type of topics............

[crazy_aviator]

WHY oh WHY do people keep talking about a pilotless commercial airline NEVER WILL HAPPEN !!!

[sanjet]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95gZ9Hn6038

[frozen solid]

I find it ironic that that you humans are so hell-bent on reducing the number of yourselves needed to perform any task by automating everything, and yet seem equally hell-bent on reproducing and increasing your numbers as much as imaginably possible at the same time. A hundred years ago there were 1.6 billion of you and a large percentage were doing something. Soon there will be 7 billion of you and increasing rapidly, with nothing much to do! I don't know if any of you are going to be all that happy once everything is automated. If you can automate a cockpit you can sure as hell automate a boardroom! Look out, office guys, you're next!

On the other hand, I don't get all that worked up about it. They once invented a piano that could play pre-programmed songs very well indeed by reading dots punched in a roll of paper. This astonishing invention did not make it any less impressive for a person to be an actual musician. Let the rolls of paper do the boring stuff, like take a large aeroplane on wheels from a runway to another runway, and pilots can keep doing the fun stuff, like flying floatplanes and helicopters. We'll just have to start charging more for the service!

[2.5milefinal]

A big new European research programme has begun to look at the possibility of a single-pilot flight deck for commercial operations.
The project is called ACROSS (‘Advanced Cockpit for Reduction of StreSs and workload’). Funded by the European Commission and others to the tune of €30 million, it brings together a consortium of 35 industry and research partners, ....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewstib ... one-pilot/

[The Mole]

Helicopter guys are doomed too.



Kmax pilotless


ec145 pilotless

[TheCheez]

As soon as Google's autonomous self driving car gets onto a showroom floor people will warm right up to the same idea in an airplane.

Wouldn't take much to shake that confidence though. I don't buy the 'pilot on the ground' thing. He can put one in as easily from an office as he can on board, and will still be alive to deal with the consequences.

[justwork]

Single pilot, yeah I can see that. Pilot working remote from home in his PJ's at his PC jerking off in cruise... I mean in the "crew room"... I predict not in my life time.

[Mach1]

http://youtu.be/DEtrzdGSXCU

Getting closer every day....

http://youtu.be/w40e1u0T1yg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSIKBliboIo

[fixnfly]

As much as I agree that eventually we will see airliners that do not require pilots in our industry, I doubt it will be in the near future. The current Airbus A350 series and Boeing 787's are built to be flown by two pilots. These airliners are meant to last several decades. Even if Airbus and Boeing started coming out with new aircraft that don't require pilots, it would be several decades before the job of an airline pilot becomes obsolete. There are far too many aircraft to be retired for this idea to become a norm in the next 50 years.

[Beefitarian]

Rats, I guess I'll tell my mom to hold off on putting epaulettes on my T-shirts for now.

[2.5milefinal]

...There are far too many aircraft to be retired for this idea to become a norm in the next 50 years.

A simple retro-fit away from turning them into single pilot machines.

It doesn't matter anyway. The price of gas is going up by the minute. We will all be walking (and riding bikes) in 20 years

[complexintentions]

1. To suggest that the reduction of flight crew from 5, to 4, to 3, to 2, is the same as to 1 or none is to completely misunderstand the whole concept of redundancy.

2. Comparing light rail - which is not only 2-axis motion versus 3, but has it path constrained by tracks - to an aircraft moving at far greater speeds in three axises completely unconstrained, is laughable. Same thing with the Google cars. Not even close.

3. The technology to remotely control any machine has been around for what, 50 years? So what's the hold up? Why aren't they all already being flown remotely?

Oh that's right. It's cheaper to have a warm meatsack sitting in the plane, than it is to have that meatsack performing essentially the same task from the ground but with an incredibly expensive layer of telemetry and the associated technical risk, added to the equation. Sure, airlines would love to have pilotless aircraft. But who's going to pay for it? Proof-of-concept studies are just that: they prove something can be done, not that it's economically viable.

And the argument of all the warm bodies currently flooding our little planet at exponential rates only supports this: labour will only become cheaper in the future. Of course they could have pilotless aircraft, in case you hadn't notices the US Air Force uses them in Pakistan to carry out quite elaborate missions, very effectively. The question is, why would someone with an actual profit motive do so?

In a perverse way it's the fact that pilots are abused labour, that will probably preserve the profession for some time to come.

[Rockie]

For normal aircraft to operate without pilots they would have to be completely free of the requirement for human judgement and decision making. Let's see a small sample of what that might entail:

They would need to fly indefinitely without running out of fuel. They would have to be immune from any weather effects or risk. They would have to takeoff and land vertically without the need to consider takeoff or landing performance. They must be completely immune from mechanical or electronic failures. They must be fire proof. If they are carrying passengers, the passengers must never suffer health issues or misbehave in any way. They must never come into conflict with other aircraft at any time, ergo:

The ATC system would need to be completely automated, and would have to provide real time, full time flight path control to every aircraft in the airspace. And this impressive ATC system would also have to be immune to any kind of failure.

That all might happen in the Star Wars universe, but isn't about to happen here anytime soon.