4 to 3 - still two pilots at the controls.
3 to 2 - still two pilots at the controls.

I dunno about the public embracing single-pilot ops when you have CAL Capts dying on the way to Cancun, JetBlue pilots getting lased in the eyes, and suicidal EgyptAir FOs in the news.

Besides, won't that negate the age 65 thing, ie. one pilot needs to be under 60?

Then again, if the single pilot is only an FO, the company may try to push it through.

 

On a more serious note, folks should check out the all-new A400 from Airbus...4 engine t-prop, extremely efficient, capable of .70 mach, way up in the flightlevels (FL370 I believe). I'm not a huge airbus fan, but this seems like an uber-capable aircraft that burns a heckuva lot less fuel than a jet. Maybe we'll see these in our skies, or something similar, to offset fuel costs.

Seems like a sweet plane.

Airbus A400M Military Transport Aircraft – Air Military Transport at its Finest - Airbus A400M

 

You mean the route structure where some "common folk" flying from Detroit (5 miles from Canada) to Seattle (5 miles from Canada) wind up stuck in Phoenix, Arizona (150 miles from Mexico) with four kids and no money?

 

I'm not in favor of a single-pilot flightdeck for the reasons you've all specified. Personally, I love flying w/ someone else, usually makes the job a lot of fun and less stressful. My only concern is that advancements that we're seeing w/ the military, specifically drone aircraft, will eventually find their way to the flightdecks of commercial airlines. Wasn't GPS started by our military...now we're using GPS. The military gave us the internet (Sorry Al), now we're using the internet.

It's just a hypothetical, but if the military can now launch remotely controlled 24 hr. drone missions in the middle-east, wouldn't it be possible to apply this to commercial aviation? Cost may dictate that this is at least considered/tried in order to allow for much of the American public to continue to afford commercial flying. Again, I'm opposed to the idea, but don't think for a second that there are others who have not given all of this some serious thought.

 

Looks like it can get into and outa some short fields, too.

 

Elevators operate in one dimension...as you add dimensions and complexity the problem becomes more challenging by exponential factors...very LARGE exponents.

Have you noticed that we have barely started to automate trains, and only in very controlled environments like airport terminals?

What about over-the-road vehicles? Not a lot of automation there...and fault tolerance would be easy: pull over to the side and shut down.

Take a look at thecsafety record of military UAV's and unmanned spacecraft...not good by airline standards. It comes up short by many decimal places. Any engineer knows that when it comes to reliability, the first 99% is the easy part...everything to the right of the decimal is monumentally difficult to achieve.

There's no doubt you can build an airplane to fly itself...the hard part is fault tolerance and high reliability. With human pilots you don't NEED a perfect machine...the human can almost always work around the problem.

Even if you solve all the technical problems, you would then have to re-engineer the global airspace system and deal with all the politics and human nature...we're not even getting ADS-B until 2020! Good Luck!

As I've said before, we have plenty of things to worry about, but this isn't one of them.

 

Exactly, I'm really hoping Boeing can pull the rabbit out of the hat w/ regards to the 787 and carbon-fiber barrel fuselages...imagine this aircraft, w/ its prop. based propulsion, mated to a fuselage that is made of light-weight carbon fiber material.

 

Benefits to UAVs in military use:

Reduced Weight - Pilot, bangseat, Oxygen, Survival gear, Instruments and Controls
Reduced Drag - Narrower cross-section
Low Observability - Narrower cross-section (again)
Increased Loiter time - easy shift change back at the trailer while waiting for UBL to poke his head out of the cave
Maneuverability - Flight envelope increased to above 7-9 Gs
PR - No fatalities, no POWs paraded around Hanoi or the Mog on CNN each night
Cost - Half million+ training investment per pilot not at risk of being shot down.

Cross section, maneuverability, loiter time? I don't see these factors having the same impact on the airline business.

Would the companies dump the pilots if they could save a buck? No.

But if another airline did it first? In a heartbeat.

By the way, the civilian tech flying the UAV is probably getting paid a lot more than the USAF 1LT or Capt he's replacing.

 

Boeing will never be able to lighten an aircraft as fast as our passengers (or FAs) are getting heavier.

Did I just type that out loud?!?

 

for a guy like me with turbo props in his blood.... thats a damn pretty airplane..... only problem is its been designed from the get go as a military aircraft..... less standards to meet.... plus the roll on and off capability wastes alot of space in the tail for a pax operation...

That said... Id love to fly something like that....