CRJJ

99.9% of the time I agree with you, but not today. Technology and changes to our profession are coming we like it or not, and we ain’t gonna stop that. So in the meantime, lemme have lunch on a fancy tray

TiredSoul

Pretty soon freighters will be double pay, single pilot.
Since Boeing has proven they’re not very good with new technologies and software it will be Airbus that will win the race to single pilot.
All you need really is a dispatcher/flight follower that actually pays attention and a reliable data link.

160to4

“Shiny jet” has always been a syndrome. I do agree; inevitably pilots will have more of a passive role, but there are tons of hoops that have to be taken care of for it to happen.

Time is money in aviation, do we tug every aircraft out onto a runway, before it can do its auto takeoff, with existing technology? What will the departure rate at an airport be if we did? Redesign airports to make it easier? How many airports refused to reinforce a taxiway shoulder for A380 operations?

Cars can’t get it right yet…and that’s 2D motion

HPIC

A350’s will be on property at Atlas in about 20 years….no sooner. They need to be run out on the pax side before they have freighter conversions available…then it will be another 5-8 years before Atlas gets them.

HPIC

Single pilot, double pay?? 😂 Shirley, you can’t be serious!

Single pilot will result in the same or lower pay in the long term. Maybe some 10-20% pay bumps for the initial SP pilots but in the end they will pay the same or less than then current CBA rates because there will be a far lower need for pilots. Experience won’t come into play for a long time. Management already thinks that an ATP holder is qualified and competent to fill any position.

zerozero

There's another reason, besides a specialized skill set, why professional pilots should be paid above average: limited earning years.

Engineers and physicians can all work until they croak while we get forced out of the game.

But your point remains, Shiny Jet Syndrome often gets the better of us. An old chief pilot of mine once told me, whenever new equipment shows up on the property bid THE OLDER STUFF.

JohnnyBekkestad

We don’t even have a tray to eat on, on the FedEx runs

Swakid8

Atlas can order new build A350F…..

BrazilBusDriver

I've always found the argument that robots will replace drivers and pilots curious, despite all the investment in automation - which started in this industry in the 1920s. Now I have a couple of autonomous vehicle industry terms for some of my thoughts: "Unconstrained left turns", ie what most of us in the left-hand drive/drive on the right-hand side of the road part of the world know as run-of-the-mill "left turns", and "edge cases". Linked article is free on apple news, seems to be behind a paywall otherwise.

Long story short, one of the scions of the industry has given up on self-driving cars (too unpredictable of an environment) and is now working on self-driving dump trucks inside mines. Paraphrasing him: "computers are really dumb".

Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - Bloomberg

Elevation

If our jobs were simply to manipulate controls to steer airplanes, we would have been replaceable almost as long as aviation has existed. There were radio control biplanes in the first world war (developed as primitive cruise missiles). Autoland has been around since the L1011. Automatic takeoff has been around for decades too. Experienced people are able to observe things without sensors, adapt, change priorities and control rather than respond to circumstance. There are efforts to mimic these abilities with machine learning, but progress in this regard is much slower than anyone would have thought. We haven't successfully automated workers out of Amazon warehouses. We haven't automated dispatchers out of flight planning. Trains and ships still have people in them. So pilotless airliners seem unlikely within the next twenty years. This isn't to say automation isn't going to reduce seats. We will likely see single-pilot freighters with remote monitoring, perhaps even UAS operators augmenting crews on long-haul flights.

Automation is a threat, but I think flags of convenience and un-checked mergers are a bigger threat. Oligopolies have a lot of control over compensation as well as consumer prices. When there are only three places to work, there isn't a lot of need for them to pay more than the next company.