In one scenario, proposed by NASA, the remaining pilot in the cockpit would be supported by a “super dispatcher” on the ground, a trained pilot that could oversee a number of flights at once and even fully control the plane remotely if needed, for example if the cockpit pilot become incapacitated.Īnother option is the “harbor pilot,” also a trained pilot but specializing in a specific airport, who could offer assistance with multiple planes arriving and departing from that airport. Left to right: Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, co-pilot Evert Van Dyke, radio operator John Stannage and navigator J. The four-man crew of the Southern Cross monoplane study a map of their route at Croydon airport in June 1930. “But by doing that,” he continues, “you eliminate certain redundancies and I have a hard time with that, because I fly aeroplanes for a living and even with two pilots in the cockpit things can become extremely busy – to the point of task saturation for both of them.” “Technologically you could argue that in in a lot of cases we’re already there,” says Patrick Smith, an airline pilot flying Boeing 767 aircraft and the author of the popular book and blog “Ask the Pilot.” The latter approach seems more feasible, at least in the short term, because much of what is required to implement it already exists. Another is to offload the same tasks from the cockpit to the ground, with the remaining pilot working as a member of a “distributed crew.” According to the same study, a properly implemented switch could “provide operating cost savings while maintaining a level of safety no less than conventional two-pilot commercial operations.”īut how do you safely get rid of one pilot? One way is to greatly increase automation in the cockpit, devoting more tasks to computers. “The transition from a two-pilot cockpit to a single-pilot cockpit will be significantly more challenging than the transitions from a five-person cockpit to a two-person cockpit,” says a 2014 study on single-pilot operations by NASA, which has done research on the subject for well over a decade. Many smaller and military aircraft are already manned by a single pilot, but for commercial aviation this would mean venturing into a brave new world. Soon, however, things could streamline further, and one of the two remaining pilots – technically the first officer – could soon go, leaving behind only the captain. That has been the norm in commercial aviation for about 30 years. Over the years, technical advances in radio communications, navigation systems and on-board monitoring equipment gradually removed the need for the last three, making it possible to safely fly a passenger plane with just two pilots. If you boarded a passenger plane in 1950 and peeked into the cockpit, you would have seen five people in there (almost certainly men): two pilots, a radio operator, a navigator and a flight engineer.
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