Absolutely. I’m already hearing, “but you’ll have an extra two years at the top of the pay scale” from the Captains. Sure… IF I don’t medical out by then. IF I don’t mind losing out on the time value of money between now and then. But heck… I’d like to be gone by 65, if not before, to enjoy my retirement before I’m too old to get around and do things!
Who wants to step out of the cockpit and into the casket?!

My career has been impacted by:
- Pay for training
- The introduction of regional jets (fewer mainline jobs)
- 9/11 and a half decade furlough
- Age 65 extending that furlough
- The 2008 recession
- The Max grounding
- The global pandemic
- and now age 68?!

Gimme a break. I know they say that timing is everything, but I was 25 when I was hired by my first major. How much better could my timing have been?! I would like to upgrade at my last major sometime before retirement…

No.

The best thing for the industry would be for the regionals to be eliminated.

Your points are management speaking points intended to keep wages down for doing the same job as mainline pilots.

Sounds exactly like my flying career. Good news though, congress is enacting legislation to let 18 year olds drive those big 18 wheelers down the interstate to solve the trucker shortage.

This way when you finally fly your last leg at 68 you can be squashed by some 18 year old TikToking while they are driving a semi as you drive home to your retirement party.

A fitting end to a illustrious flying career!

when they say “no crew” it doesn’t mean crew wasnt assigned to a flight and they just discovered it then. Its a blanket statement for why they’re late. It just means at least one person out of the whole crew is not there at that moment. Maybe scheduling robbed them for another flight. Maybe they were caught up in a thunderstorm on the other side of the country. Maybe they got in late the night before and needed extra rest. Maybe it’s just the flight attendants or one flight attendant. Maybe just the pilots or pilot. When they say “no crew” over the PA they rarely say why there is no crew. 67 or 68 wouldn’t help with the “no crew” situation.

Airlines publish a schedule a few months out and that schedule requires X number of pilots to fly. If an airline publishes a schedule but has less than X pilots. Is the problem a lack of pilots or is it a problem with scheduling too much with too little resources to deliver on the schedule?

WHOA, WHOA WHOA Mister! (...or, Ma'am, you, they, them etc., etc...)
This is not a place for facts, evidence or cogent thoughts.

nobody will. If a system is equally safe with a single pilot as with two, there’s no reason to keep a single pilot because the safety is provided by autonomy, not by the pilot.

there’s a concept called metastability in physics and math (among others) that might be used as a metaphor here. Imagine a graph with risk on the y-axis and number of pilots (decreasing left to right) on the x-axis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta...-stability.svg

There’s no condition in which two pilots plus AI will be less safe than one pilot plus AI. So the get from two pilots plus AI to the “promised land” of removing humans from the loop, you have to go directly to zero pilots. Otherwise you end up on the hill.

To be fair, POTUS only has to press one button (and it's a big one); pilots are responsible for many buttons of all shapes and sizes.

I've said as much before. Hypothetical autonomous-capable airplanes will initially be manned by two pilots and that will have to persist for years while enough operational data is gathered (total SWAG, ten years per type). At that point you could go to zero, but politics and public opininion will almost certainly mandate single pilot for a good while after that. Just in case.

Only thing you might see near/mid term is single-pilot cruise on some long-haul ops. IMO they'd need an FA up front just to call for help and open the door in case the on-duty pilot is incap. Doubt the FAA will go for it but other countries might.

I honestly don't think we will ever see single pilot. Perhaps, NO pilot at all. But never a single pilot. Specially as things are developing with the latest Air China crash. Or how many crashes that have been blamed on a single pilot locking out the other pilot.

That's a legit point. If a single pilot was there as a safety pilot for autonomy, he would need the ability to over-ride the autonomy unilaterally. Same with a ground-based safety pilot.

Maybe they come up with some scheme where the pilot cannot over-ride the automation unless an independent monitor system detects that the automation has allowed the aircraft to depart desired operating parameters (ex too low on GS). Or just keep two pilots until they've worked out all the bugs and have years of experience with full autonomy.