Imagining a Day When Airliners Are Flown Solo - WSJ.com

 

The future:

SALE!! $9 round-trip SAN-MCO***

*Single Pilot Airliner
*Single Engine Airliner
*Standing Room Only

 

With the pace the FAA moves at it'll be 30 years minimum before its even possible IMO.

 

Waiting for ALPA's release showing support for this issue. Soon to be followed by all the ALPA supporters saying "if ALPA believes it's good for us then it must be and who am I to question it." Wait this would hurt RJ drivers too, nevermind.

 

This discussion about a year ago sums up the problems with single-pilot airliners that rely on an operator on the ground to recover the aircraft in the event of single pilot incapacitation (essentially an unmanned vehicle):

http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/te...airliners.html

You'll never get the level of safety expected from today's airliners without two pilots up front.

And start unmanned transport small, with buses, cars, trains, and other ground-based transportation before graduating to higher-level transport.

 

In a news conference today, ALPO announced it's support for the concept, realizing the future employment opportunities for canines. With a single pilot operation, the FAR's could be amended to allow a canine to sit in the cockpit and keep the pilot awake on international flights and all trans-cons over 6 hours.

While the economic stimulus would not be that significant, anything that increases employment is welcomed, besides it increases market share for ALPO !

G'Dog

 

I made a bet back in 1999 that it will happen and nothing has changed my mind yet. Single Pilot airliners sometime mid 2020's

 

"The obvious stumbling block is what happens if the one and only pilot gets sick?"

Every Cessna driver's wet dream!!

 

And just when I was thinking that once I made the transition to DAL, I'd never have to pee in a bag again...

If this does ever happen, don't ever shake the pilot's hand on the way out the door.

 

Maybe 2120.

A single-pilot airliner will need to be FULLY autonomous because pilots do keel over dead sometimes.

You will need new technology and extra redundancy, which will cost a lot of money to design, build, and maintain. Every nuisance computer message at an outstation will be a no-go item...for real. What is currently a minor nuisance fault will be a divert-to-nearest-suitable.

You need to massively re-engineer ground, approach, and enroute systems. Who is going to get the gubmint off their butts to do THAT??? Who's going to pay for it? The FAA is having a hard time getting nextgen up and running by 2020 and that is nowhere near capable of handling autonomous airliners.

The FAA's standard for 121 safety is that any changes result in equivalent or improved safety. It would be VERY hard to get them to buy off on something like this. And that's to say nothing of public perception and congress.

The DoD has reaped some capability and financial benefits with UAV's because of improved endurance and hardware cost savings because they don't have to meet manned safety requirements. The USAF is in hot water because they lost nearly half of their predators to non-combat accidents in the last ten years. They have also discovered (the hard way) that certain phases of flight cannot safely be conducted via SATCOM due to control response latency...this means line-of-sight between controller and UAV is required for those phases.

Embrear may be considering it, but what airline is going to pay extra money for a capability that regulators will not allow them to use?