Some years ago our old CEO said by 2023 Atlas planned to start acquiring A-330 freighters, because there were not enough 767s available...

Can lease some 330's from ATSG...they bought 5 a while back.

I do not see A330s in the future. But I do see a large expansion. This is a good time to grab a seniority number

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Airbus on the property eventually, it is about growth and opportunities

This ^^^^^

A330s are quickly becoming the 2nd choice to the A350/A321XLR for the airlines. Conversions happen quick

I’d love to see the 350 on property

Like button pressed!

777-300ERF would be a good move too

I will never understand this..

”I want to fly an airplane that’s so fancy and technologically advanced that it doesn’t even need me in it. But I also deserve to be paid 5x the median household income.”

Personally, I don’t get this

So we should bring back 707s and 727s so we can be worthy of a pay rise?

There’s no stopping technology. It marches on. But computer engineers and doctors are paid top dollar because they have a skill set to accomplish what can’t be accomplished by the average person.

Anyone who doesn’t see the relationship between airplanes that won’t need skilled operators and the inevitable nose-dive in pilot compensation is a fool.

It’s going to happen eventually. I see no reason to be gleeful about it, just because you get to “fly” a shiny jet in the meantime.

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 :D

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

:cool:

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

Atlas can order new build A350F…..

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

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.

I wrote before I read what you posted. I agree.

Fully autonomous is what arguments generally jump into too quickly. As mentioned before by others and myself I would be more concerned about the force reduction measures already in play. Fortunately nothing we have has been originally designed to take out the right seat like the shelved 797 was at least for now, not that a “patch” couldn’t be figured out however unlikely. It will be long haul first 4 to 3 pilots or perhaps directly to 2 with a ground monitored “Otto Pilot” box in the right​​​​​. Definitely a high mountain top to attain fully autonomous, but it’s the journey there which should be the main concern now. Our fleet runs bare minimums on bells and whistles vs the Fred Smith Faction and of course pax carriers always broadcasting/sporting the latest and greatest which always debuts first unless requirement driven. Upgrades haven’t been really at the forefront of ACMI. Replacement is one thing, upgrades are another. Those with less than a decade remaining probably have no worries and those with two may just have a totally new environment to contend with. Wi-Fi is a plus, latest tech with adaptable upgrades or transitioning software is a negative in many cases for our butts in seats. Just spitballing overall, but there will be significant impacts prior to full automation whenever that may ever happen especially here.

Agreed. My theory is that a lot of our discussion is really grounded in tort law. As long as it's expensive to kill or injure Americans there is a baseline level of safety that's driven by insurance companies and financial risk.

In regions where it's less expensive to kill people we see higher accident rates despite having similar equipment and procedures. The incentive to make a shortcut here or there isn't balanced by the potential costs of those same shortcuts. Same for costs due to lapses in oversight.

So liability and law factor here. Perhaps more than technology? I think this is why there are still people in locomotives.

You're assuming that automation is not safer than manned operations. That is perhaps not a correct assumption at least according to an analysis of human error vs. automation errors in aviation accidents. Large jets have been flying completely autonomously for decades. I have shared airspace and conducted tests with their operators and engineers. TCAS combined with control logic and current navigation technology along with a person on the ground to monitor systems equals a very mathematically safe operation. We have hardware limitations with current aircraft, but the technology already exists in robust form, we just need to implement it. I won't speculate on the timeline, but it won't be in the immediate future.

You're missing the largest piece of the puzzle. There is no current datalink technology that would be sufficient for the requirements of autonomous flights. The technology does not exist at the moment. As a matter of fact, it is likely at least a decade away.

I disagree. Google "Global Hawk". Yes, different mission and they don't fly out of LAX, JFK, etc, but they could. The datalink is robust, but nothing special. The technology is there, it just needs to be tweaked for freighter or passenger ops. Certainly single pilot ops is very doable.

Which large jets has been flying autonomously for decades?

Ok, my definition of "large" was relative to small UAVs. It is the Global Hawk, a pretty big jet. But tell me, what about this technology prohibits it from applying to freighters like the 767 etc... The Air Force has flown everything from fighters to Boeing aircraft without any humans aboard, just not in the NAS. The technology is there. It's surprising to me that people don't know this.
Google Boeing 720 remote piloted Edwards AFB

Global Hawk is pretty big. Like you, I shared airspace with UAS for years. There are lots of us here. I have personally watched them fail and bust across boundaries, disrupt stacks of assets working a particular task, etc. I have personally watched manned assets do the same thing, though. So I don't assume UAS or automation is inherently worse; it's inherently different. Crews have strengths and weakness (fatigue and cabin environmental factors, for example) and automation has strengths and weaknesses (Iranian capture of an RQ-170 for example).

I was really trying to speak about liability, economics and politics more than technology, though. That's why I point out that trains still have conductors even though automated trains may be more reliable. If we aren't willing to chance automated trains the limiting factor is law and politics rather than technology. I didn't make my point very well, though.

Ten years ago I was telling everyone we'd see single pilot ops in ten years... So I'm saying it again, just give it ten more years, eventually I'll be right :D

I suspect you’ll see a reduction in augmented crews first. The regulators will probably want two pilots for takeoff and landing for quite some time. One on oceanic tracks while the other sleeps is probably a different story as the automation continues to prove itself.

I was positive we'd see drone-based pizza delivery, Door Dash, etc. by now. The future is weird. Most likely I'm wrong, but discussions about this stuff are actually pretty entertaining over a glass of whiskey or coffee.

I spent over 6 years in the RPA business and very little, if anything, of what we did was autonomous. I missed the hell out of manned aviation and I’m happy to be back in it. I want nothing else to do with the RPA world.


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Watching way to much Jetsons…. paying passengers will never get on a plane without a real person in the cockpit.

Not to take away from the dynamics of trains, as I am sure that they have their own intricacies. Nevertheless, freight trains still have an engineer and a conductor. Nobody has to worry unless one or both are replaced by automation on trains first.

Bandwidth in that is not even in the same planet as what is required for widespread commercial traffic. And their failure rate is several magnitudes worse than what is accepted in commercial aviation.

In fully autonomous flight, a datalink failure (by failure, I'm talking someone taking it over with malicious intent) means catastrophic results and by FAA standards the probability needs to be extremely improbable, meaning not a single failure in the operational life of the system.

There is no such technology available.

Can you guys start a thread on remote vehicles and allow this one to return to the proper subject?

We have drifted a good bit here.

Spot on.

Let’s keep on topic and speculate on how our potential new masters/owners will treat the pilot group and the rest of Atlas employees-

:)

Back on topic.....

It seems that not everyone is happy about this deal.

https://theloadstar.com/unhappy-atla...-push-to-sell/