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Ryanair's CEO Suggests Eliminating Co-Pilots
postbigbang writes "Ryanair's miser-in-chief Michael O'Leary now suggests eliminating co-pilots as a way to save money. Will airliners be powered by drones, or is it actually viable to have just a single pilot on passenger planes?"
Ryanair has been coming up with more revolutionary ways to save money:
Let stewardesses land planes:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7981643/Ryanair-boss-says-air-stewardesses-should-be-allowed-to-land-planes-in-an-emergency.html
Let passengers stand:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/5753477/Ryanair-to-make-passengers-stand.html
You're gambling that a pilot, traveling without a co-pilot, never gets sick, injured or dies while flying the plane. I'm sure that's just an isolated incidence ... or maybe not.
Yes it can. An autopilot/autothrottle/autoland system can fly an ILS approach, flare and touchdown. It's called CAT III ILS and isn't new technology. It has been around for a few decades. Both JFK and Heathrow have CAT III ILS approaches.
Well, it is ridiculous.
In the cockpit you have two pilots for a reason. One is PF (Pilot Flying). One is PNF (Pilot Not Flying). The PF is responsible for actually flying the plane. The PNF is responsible for all the checks and offloading to ensure the pilot can take care of the plane. He reads the checklists, handles communication and everything else. And even with this set of checks one of the most common causes of accidents is "Pilot Error". Removing the checking function of the PNF in that situation is beyond insane. It would take us back 30 years in aircraft security and completely ignores the whole CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) concept. You should think of removing the CNF as making a law that all drivers on the road must speak in their mobile phone and fiddle with the radio while driving.
Also, better technology has not made airplanes easier to fly. It has made them safer and more powerful, but not easier. It's like claiming that a modern nuclear powerplant doesn't need any engineers because it's all automatic... Planes are large and very complex machines. More technology means more failure modes.
Frontline: Flying Cheap: "A hard look at the risks that may go with cheap flying."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/
When you start off flying commercial, almost every starts at a regional airline. You may be buying a United or Continental ticket, but it's a seperate airline that codeshares with the big boys. Those co-pilots on those aircraft are making between $18K-28K/year, are only paid from when the cabin door closes until it opens at the destination, and have their schedules dicked with by the airline's scheduling/routing department so that, while technically compliant with labor laws, they're extremely exhausting and some even nap in the cabin. Keep this in mind the next time you shop for your airline ticket based on price.
There's an article, by a commercial pilot, about the myths of jets able to "fly themselves" at http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2009/11/19/askthepilot342 . You have to scroll down a little to get to the meat of it, but there's plenty up there to keep 2 people busy.
He also talks about how busy things can get in an earlier article http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2007/08/31/askthepilot243/index.html .
That's exactly right. People don't understand what a co-pilot is. No airline refers to the second cockpit member as a co-pilot. They are both pilots. One is a Captain and the other is a First Officer--the sole difference being one of seniority, not training or skill. They two typically take turns flying every other leg, and both are required to balance the workload. No transport airplane will be certified for single-pilot operation unless it has been specifically designed for one pilot, and none have. There are good reasons to have two humans up there--to back each other up, and use their combined judgement to handle situations when things are not normal. It's not a matter of technology replacing the pilot's mechanical skills. A computer would have to replace the pilot's mind, and we're not at that point yet. Certainly it's crazy for any Windows IT person to suggest that technology is reliable enough to hold the lives of hundreds in its silicon hands. They of all people should know better.
Commuter pilots in the US have been known to start as low as 19,000/year (less than a manager at Taco Bell, accordign to M. Moore).
Employees are estimated to cost around double what they are paid in various taxes and overhead.
Some people might misunderstand that sentence and interpret that to mean that any autopilot-equipped aircraft is capable of doing this. That is not the case.
First, the avionics aboard many planes in service are not configured from the manufacturer for autoland (e.g. every 737 that American Airlines flies). These can only do "coupled" approaches.
The 737 is delivered from Boeing fully capable of autoland. All modern airplanes these days have at least 2 completely separate autopilots (the 757, 767, and 747-400 have 3 autopilots). However, AA orders their 737s with HUDs (Head Up Display) which are certified by the FAA for the pilot to hand-fly a Cat IIIb approach (700 feet forward visibility, no ceiling). The cost of the HUD quickly pays for itself since the airline does not have to maintain the airplane's autoland certification because the pilots are doing the approaches, not the airplane.
A "coupled" approach simply means that both autopilots are active at the same time, which is normally the case during an autoland; no transport jet's autopilot is certified for a single-autopilot autoland. Coupling the autopilots allows for cross-checking and either fail-passive or fail-operational autoflight. Typically, a two-autopilot airplane like the 737 is certified as fail-passive: a failure of the one autopilot will render the airplane unable to complete the autoland but will not dramatically affect the attitude of the airplane as the pilot takes over. A three-autopilot airplane has both fail-passive and fail-operational characteristics: fail-operational means one autopilot can drop out and the remaining two can still perform the autoland; a second failure is fail-passive and the pilot has to do something.
Second, many smaller planes and older planes are not fully fly-by-wire, so they would require a serious retrofit to make them capable of full autoland.
Fly-by-wire is not a requirement for autoland. Transport-category aircraft have been doing autolands since the 1960s.
If you limit yourself only to fully fly-by-wire planes and limit yourself to major airports, that statement is true. However, the autopilot system in a sizable percentage of aircraft in the air today are NOT capable of autonomous landing.
There are almost no commercial aircraft flying around these days that don't have autoland capabilities. The last of the older generation jet aircraft such as the DC-9 and the 727 are mostly out of major airline passenger service. Any commercial transport jet made after around 1980 has autoland capability by default.
Commercial airlines are already required by law to do a certain percentage of their landings automatically. They just don't tell you...
what you mean is that pilots must remain proficient in Cat 3 and 3a approaches - so they must maintain currency with those procedures by performing one every once in a while. This currency can also be accomplished in a simulator.
Cat 3 and 3a autoland has been around for a long time. (1965)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
Trying to do one of these without a co-pilot is ill-advised (1 set eyes on instruments another looking out for the runway environment) - don't forget about radio calls, communication with home base / fuel management / emergencies / etc. I flew very complex, very large planes - and I can tell you that there is a real good reason for at least two in the cockpit. j
jp
Take it from a pilot: an automatic landing actually gives us MORE work than a normal one. Imagine programming you car's GPS to drive to a destination automatically, only having to constantly monitor whether it's going the right way, not violating any traffic rules, constantly being ready to take over control if the car suddenly swerves off the road because of some malfunction (GPS'es never make mistakes, right?) or another car does something stupid,... Isn't it a lot easier to just have the steering wheel in your hands and drive the car yourself? Well, it's the same in an airplane. Which is why we almost always land manually, except in very bad visibility.