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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?"
I'm all for cutting waste and luxuries we can do without. But when it comes to safety and personnel this is just going too far.
There are good reasons for having a co-pilot. What he's really saying is that pilots salaries are (in his opinion) excessive, and he thinks he sees a cheap way out by eliminating the "unnecessary" backup pilot.
Which will work great until that pilot has a coronary at 35,000 feet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah, because getting rid of the back-up pilot is such a wonderful idea. How about I eliminate Ryanair as an airline I'll travel on?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
This jerk gets publicity for his cheap-ass airline by making outrageous threats, most of which are unlawful in any case. Not long ago it was pay toilets in the plane. Then it was standing room only, no seats, with harnesses to hold you in place. It's just a way of getting print space in newspapers that emphasizes how low his fares are.
He is, in short, a troll. Buy some advertising and STFU.
I piss off bigots.
He gets free publicity from the newspapers by announcing these outrageous ideas. None of them ever come to pass, but the column inches he gets could cost millions if he had to pay for them.
I piss off bigots.
Part of the job of a pilot is to keep an eye on all the automation. The problem is that its very difficult to stay alert for long periods of time waiting for a very rare failure. Two pilots tend to keep each other awake and alert. (Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop - but that is such a rare event that it made the national news).
Humans and automation tend to fail in very different ways - humans are much better at dealing with unexpected situations, automation is much better at doing repetitive jobs without mistakes.
Having a second pilot probably adds about $1/hour per passenger seat (including all overhead etc) - at the moment I think its still a good deal.
You've never seen a passenger throw a hissy fit, have you? Or start screaming? The FAs may be useless until the shit hits the fan, and then there aren't enough of them. They aren't there to serve drinks; they are there to keep the passengers in line.
I have 2 pilots in my family; it's hard, stressful work that takes a toll on their families and their own health.
Eliminating more staff is not the way to go. Do you really want the cheapest, least experienced person at the helm and in the cabin? That's fine when the weather is fine. Try it in a typhoon, when the plane is bucking, the passengers are puking and screaming, and then tell me they can eliminate staff.
You have heard of 3D? Well, trains and ships and automibiles lack it. They travel on a flat service. Planes don't.
What happens to a train whose engines stops Nothing.
What happens to a ship whose engines stop? Nothing.
What happens to a car whose engines stop? Nothing.
What happens to a plane whose engines stops? It crashes into the ground.
The difference and one that should really be obvious is that with ground based vehicles, if something goes wrong, you got more time and the only safety procedure that must be performed is to bring the vehicle to a stop. Stop an aircraft in a mid air and it won't be there for long.
Even terrorists know this. That is why ships and trains have rarely been hijacked. There is no urgency.
With aircraft you don't time to instruct a crew member on how to turn the ship. You cannot rely on a deathman's handle to make an aircraft safe. Oh, you forgot about that little device didn't you. Wonder how come you forgot to mention the REAL reason brake men could be removed, the simply switch that in the event of a disaster happening to the driver, the train coming to an automatic stop.
Wonder why you left this device out? Because it would ruin your entire idiotic rant of "X works in situation Y, so it will work in situation Z"?
There are a LOT of accidents where the existence of the co-pilot saved the day. many you don't even hear about. like the regular occurance of a pilot getting a heart attack. And oh gosh, that is OFTEN the cause of SMALL aircrafti with SINGLE pilots crashing. That is why if you fly passengers, you need two pilots.
The moment someone can come up with a system that can land a plane safely no matter what, THEN the pilots can be replaced. But no such system exists. No, automated landing systems do not count. They work in perfect conditions, that can cease to be simply because an airport is repairing its systems. Unless airports start to be forced by law to have their automated systems on 24/7, aircraft can't rely on it. Especially not if such systems aren't even allowed to be used in less then ideal circumstances.
But really, comparing a train with a deadman's switch whose breaks are designed to bring the vehicle to a complete stop if anything happens to an aircraft... bit silly don't you think?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let's not forget his charging passengers for using the plane's toilets:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7914542.stm
People! RyanAir's CEO makes these crazy suggestions for the news coverage! He has no intention of going through with any of these mad schemes. He just does it because he believes any publicity is good publicity.
And judging by RyanAir's share price on the London and Dublin stock exchange since last week when this was first announced, it's a plan that has some merit...
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
The CEO of RyanAir ... wants to make sure nobody wants to fly RyanAir.
This is just ludicrous. The biggest plane I have ever seen flown with no co-pilot was a Cessna 402. I was ok with this, because *I* was in the copilot seat and I know how to fly GA sized aircraft.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
In other news, pilots suggest eliminating stupid CEO's who don't have a basic understanding of the business they're in..
Out of curiosity: Could some of these tasks and procedures be simplified, perhaps with the help of technology? For instance, exactly what information does the pilot need from/provide to the approach, tower and ground? Couldn't any of this be sent automatically by computers?
Pilots that I've talked to explain you'd pretty much need Nobel prize quality strong AI. Look at that squall line. Is it going to develop or get weaker? And how does that interact with my judgment of the quality of the plane and the quality of my flying? Meanwhile I see a fresh NOTAM shutting down the escape route to my backup airport... or is it? And trust me, even native English speakers misinterpret NOTAMs (with sometimes very bad consequences). Meanwhile fuel filter #5 is clogged but not enough to replace, while transfer pump 2 is running slow but not bad enough to replace, and the peculiar loading of cargo today means strange weight and balance issues ... should I top up tank 3 and risk running out of gas due to transfer failure or top up tank 2 and burn so much extra fuel due to being out of balance that we might run out of gas ... Or could I try a strange reconfiguration never tried before and pump tank 3 into tank 1 and then tank 1 into tank 2 bypassing all the questionable gear? And how does that interact with the development of the squall line storm meaning higher turbulence at least or maybe needing to divert.
Non-pilots think the work required is simple control system theory, just need a fancier autopilot. Can't you replace that whole paragraph about with a simple linear equation or something?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
When Michael O'Leary starts flying on scheduled, commercial flights with no co-pilot, I'll start doing the same. In the meantime, I'll be sure to avoid Ryanair at all costs, since they sure don't seem to be very concerned with my well being.
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Dublin is well known for its sunny weather and calm beaches. Oh wait, that is Dublin California. The Dublin Airport is about 5 miles from the sea, and the weather is usually windy and rainy. I cannot imagine what flying a 737 in those conditions must be like, certainly will require the full attention of a pilot. As if that weren't enough, the second hub is London Stansted which is around 30 miles from the sea, and even though the weather is slightly better, it is still not a calm Spanish summer. More likely this is yet another O'Leary publicity troll.
Can you teach a flight attendant to land a plane if the captain has a heart attack? Sure. If he/she knows how to program the autopilot, and gets a lot of help from the ground, I don't see why not. Maybe not at the intended destination (not all airports have the necessary equipment for automatic landings), but usually there will be a big airport nearby where the automatic landing can be made. You'll have to train those flight attendants very regularly, of course, because they'll forget how to do it after a month or two (anyone would, without practice, it's a quite a bit more difficult and less intuitive than programming a GPS), but it would be possible.
However, that's not really the point. People seem to think that all a pilot has to do, is fly the airplane (or even easier, make the autopilot fly the airplane) pretty much like a bus driver. If they saw us "work" during cruise flight, they would probably see this suspicion confirmed. However, as a copilot, I quite frequently have to point out minor and sometimes even major mistakes of the captain, that might have resulted in serious incidents. And the same happens in the other direction when I'm flying (both pilots fly just as often). Misunderstood instructions from air traffic control, finger trouble with the autopilot, missing a level off altitude on a procedure, etc... Lots of accidents are blamed on pilot error, imagine what that rate would be if there wasn't a second pilot to catch the first one's mistakes. Times ten would be a conservative estimate.
And then we're just talking about normal operations. We get simulator training every six months, and you should see how high the workload is then. Engine failures, electrical problems, bad weather, lots of checklists to do, judging the situation and the best course of action while one pilot has to manually fly a crippled airplane with a third of the instruments still working... there's absolutely no way you could let just one pilot do this kind of thing safely.
O'Leary is not that stupid. He's just getting free publicity, spreading the word how relentlessly he's cutting costs to keep ticket prices low. And they're not even that low if you miss out on the few promotional tickets that are advertised everywhere. The rest of the passengers often end up spending more than on a real airline.
Yes and no - in most of those case you are asking a very straight forward question that requires a great deal of inputs and is fairly sensitive to small changes in them. It's not really *difficult* in the sense of "how do I do this" but is hard in the sense of "did I get all the options right?". We aren't talking about flying the plane, just answering questions that someone else is asking based on current sensory inputs.
The bigger issue, IMO this is one of the bigger issues in AI in general, is that you require someone to be an expert in AI *and* and expert in flying those craft. You can take the world foremost experts in both and put them together and have them communicate near perfectly and too many things will be left out. Each doesn't really think in the right way to express what they need to with the other person. The time involved for each task is so great that it is nearly impossible to get that individual. Add in the time and money needed to adequately test it (don't forget liability) and it isn't even going to be a profit maker. It's not like this is something that close is good enough either.
Still, I bet that a competent software engineer, a competent pilot, and a competent ground operator could sit together for a few days and work out something that drastically reduces the information load. I would rather assume a bigger reason this doesn't happen is given how little co-pilots are payed reducing their workload isn't worth much. It's not like spending a half a billion on development (and it would certainly cost that much with all the testing and validation they need) and no telling how much to retrofit current systems with the package so a medium payed person can sit and twiddle their thumbs is going to be a high priority.
Even if the co-pilot sits and does nothing you are going to have to have them for redundancy. Further I would be willing to bet there will be a cost in ability of the co-pilots to move that to an automated system. You may reduce the work load but that isn't always a Good Thing.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it