rickair777,

Agreed and the FAA has no standard for certifying the AI F/O. Is the standard 10E-9 or something closer to the standard for live pilots. There will always be one pilot.

If there is any present risk, it’s a large upgauging of many routes and cancellation in secondary markets to address pilot shortages. This will come about when shortages of qualified crews or expense of crews drives economic decisions. Over at airliners.net, posters salivate over opening up New Haven, CT. Thise cities are more likely to lose service than gain it. NYC-Chicago has dozens of flights daily, start putting B777 or a new MoM equipment on the busy periods and carriers can reduce the number of crews, if not the cost. There are routes where frequency has reached an end. I somehow doubt, ten or twenty years from now carriers will be employing many more, likely fewer, crews.

It’s all happpy now, after a long expansion and coming retirements, this combination has played out before, true, at a smaller magnitude.

GF

Entirely probable in the mid-term due to pilot shortage. Airport capacity will also eventually drive up A/C gauge as well... few places where you can build new commercial airports near a big enough population to support one. Had to even expand most existing commercial airports.

Pilotless cockpits are not going to happen any time soon. Technology has advanced a lot in recent years, but not enough yet to warrant such a drastic change. This is due to obvious reasons many have listed earlier.
However, robots/computers have already taken over many of our job related tasks and continue to do so. Eventually it will progress to the point where two airmen will no longer be necessary up front. Any one remember when airliners used to have three pilots on every flight deck? That was not that long ago.
Single pilot airline operations is something we as a pilot group will have to fight against very very soon. Definitely within our lifetime.

There were four on overwater legs-navs left in the early 70s.

GF

Huge difference between FEs and pilots. FE is a highly technical job that can be replaced by a computer. The pilot, mainly the PIC, is vested with a lot more than technical expertise; but with command ability. They make terminal decisions that affect the lives of many. That isn’t going away as easily as FEs anytime soon.

x2. The FE's job was automated, but there's still a human to intervene when necessary.

You might get away with just one human, except for that fact that humans become incapacitated occasionally... number I heard was about six per year in US 121 ops. Six hull losses annually is not going to be acceptable for airline insurance underwriters (or congress), so the airplane would essentially have to be fully autonomous anyway. I think you'll see single pilot ops only as an installed backup during the IOC phase of autonomous airliners... depending on how things go, that single pilot might still have a job for a long time.

Ever had the logic misconfigure a bleed or pack valve? Quick fix, right? An automated airliner would RTF, so a mechanic could manually cycle the pack valve... $$$$$. IFE/Wifi inop? Cycle the breaker, right? Wrong. More happy customers...