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?"

Comments

Waste

[gilesjuk]

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.

Re:Waste

[Dexter Herbivore]

Unfortunately, no. The way things are going... you'll be arrested for being a terrorist.

Re:Waste

[TheLink]

How about Ryanair elimate their CEO position? That'll save some money too.

I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest that an AI could replace their CEO.

Re:Waste

[paeanblack]

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.

The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.

They too were the "eyes and ears" on the train, served critical safety functions, and acted as a backup engineer. Better technology came along, and they were simply no longer needed. The new air brakes failed less often than the people did. Trains were safer with an automated system being responsible for a task formerly done by a human.

The exact same thing was said in 1911 when someone entered a car into the Indy 500 that carried only one person. It was unsafe; it endangered other drivers. The new technology this time was a rear-view mirror. Now this dangerous technological replacement for a live human being is a standard feature on all cars.

Also in 1911 came the development of automatic helm control for ships. The technology ended up faster, more accurate, and more reliable than a trained, experienced career helmsman. Guess what the major complaint was? Yeah...it was "unsafe"

Re:Waste

[Forge]

How about dumping the flight attendants? On short flights and budget airlines, they hardly serve a purpose. (Unless you were going to follow the suggestion of lowering the educational requirements and removing the uniforms... Ohh... and adding some music, mood lighting and garters designed for holding cash.)

Re:Waste

[sakdoctor]

I would glady pay a few extra bucks to ... not be on the same flight as typical Ryanair customers.

Re:Waste

[ultranova]

I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest the advance of modern technology has made co-pilots possibly unnecessarily redundant.

Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.

Anyway, I think this is a really, really, really stupid idea. You are saving the $10,000-$100,000/year pilot salary and risking the $50-$150 million plane. Even from a corporate sociopath perspective, this is a really dumb idea.

Re:Waste

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:Waste

[dgatwood]

Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically. There was one such case just last June on Continental Airlines, and another in February of 2008.... So yeah, if you're willing to increase the number of large airplane crashes by almost one per year, go ahead and cut out the copilots.

The idea of training a flight attendant to perform a landing in the case of a pilot's death means that you would be trusting a minimally trained "pilot" to land a large jet with several hundred people aboard about once per year. That's absolute insanity. That's not cost cutting. It's homicide.

I know I would stop flying IMMEDIATELY on any airline that even CONSIDERED doing that (which means at this point, I'd base jump off the Empire State Building before I'd fly Ryanair, BTW). If your airline's management is stupid enough to consider that, you almost certainly are cutting corners dangerously in other areas, e.g. maintenance. After all, by that same standard, you don't *need* to inspect all those things with such regularity. Most of the time, the parts won't fail even after twice that time....

Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable. There are ways for technology to reduce the need for a copilot in this day of fly-by-wire aircraft. However, what this guy is suggesting puts him beyond bonkers straight to psychopathic, homicidal maniac. Their CEO shouldn't be leading an airline. He should be locked up in a padded room somewhere so that he can't harm himself or others.

Re:Waste

[jimngo]

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.

Re:Waste

[pehrs]

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.

Re:Waste

[orzetto]

You seem to think that flight attendants only serve the purpose of serving orange juice. They are trained for safety and security purposes, including crashes and hijacking. Have you ever noticed that they are never teens who want to make a few bucks, like those who wait tables at the local pub? Yet, if the companies could save money hiring teens, rest assured they would.

Re:Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Waste

[dkleinsc]

On short flights and budget airlines, they hardly serve a purpose.

... unless something goes wrong. For instance, in the US Air LaGuardia Airport->Hudson River flight, the flight attendants were critical to evacuating the passengers safely. The pilots can't take care of the passengers in those sorts of situations, because they're busy trying to save the plane.

Of course, I should point out that the second option is an excellent idea.

Re:Waste

[hedwards]

It's Ryanair, a lot of these suggestions are never intended to be put into service or even investigated. It's a way of getting free publicity for always looking for ways of cutting costs. And the press falls for it just about every time.

Re:Waste

[dintech]

They are trained for safety and security purposes, including crashes and hijacking.

Maybe so but on Ryanair, they are mostly trained to sell you stuff.

Re:Waste

[feepness]

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.

Re:Waste

[cmdahler]

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.

Re:Waste

[X0563511]

I have a story.

Once upon a time, the Captain had to tinkle. As he shut the cockpit door (which is required to be locked, btw) somehow the door slipped into Uber-Lockdown-Mode (aka guys with forks want in). There is a special trick to opening it like this, and it's only doable from inside. The FO didn't know it.

The moral? He had to chill out with the rest of the passengers and flight crew for the duration while the FO took care of everything.

Had there been only one crew, then it would have been interesting. They have autolanding and autobraking systems. Would you bet your life on them? (nothing being said of how they would be enabled remotely, not currently possible).

Random acts of god/nature/whatever could also seek to relieve your flight of your captain as well. Having the second man not only distributes the workload, but provides some redundancy here. The workload division is a good thing too. Imagine the flight director malfunctioned. There goes your autopilot. Imagine trying to keep the plane pointed forward and on-speed while checking your map chart, dealing with ATC and the radios, and any number of other little things that come up.

Re:Waste

[jp102235]

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

Re:Waste

[AK Marc]

I disagree. The copilot is a redundant system for the pilot. Because they are there, they share the load. But the plane could operate 100% should one of them drop dead. That you have two means it makes sense to train them to double-check the other, but even if the majority of their time is spent on that task, it is irrelevant to their purpose. They are a single redundant pilot. If you remove one, then you can remove the other. If not, then you are changing the job of "pilot" from a redundant to nonredundant system. Such changes are clearly steps back in safety. It's not like the navigator (which has redundancy in its current system, computer primary and paper backup) or radio operator (moving duties around but not actually eliminating any redundancy). Increased automation let the pilots take over both primary and secondary control of those systems without impacting their ability to, well, pilot. But there are primary and backups for both. Eliminating the copilot will eliminate the redundancy in the last human operator. Until there's no need for a pilot, there will be the need for a copilot in a redundant system.

Re:Waste

[Volante3192]

Whenever someone mentions how planes can fly themselves these days, I'm reminded Northwest Flight 188: the one that overshot MSP by 150 miles.

Clearly, if planes can fly themselves, it should have landed on its own and not overshot.

Re:Waste

[michelcolman]

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.

Huh?

[ScrewMaster]

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.

You don't want the best, you want cheap.

[rve]

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

Re:You don't want the best, you want cheap.

[Hazelfield]

Ryanair isn't an airline company. It's a social experiment to see how far people are willing to humiliate themselves for getting cheap tickets.

Slashdot suggests eliminating VPs to reduce cost

[Solandri]

Should an emergency arise, the CEO could ring a bell and a specially trained board member could come in and take over running the company.

More typical wankery from the master thereof.

[EWAdams]

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.

It's actually very smart, if evil.

[EWAdams]

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.

Re:It's actually very smart, if evil.

[jimicus]

Contrary to popular believe, any publicity is NOT good publicity. Anyone willing to even propose such a blatant risk to the lives of their customers isn't a company I will ever do business with.

You'd better tell Ryanair that. They are possibly the only company I've ever met which has turned appalling customer service into an art form of which they are proud.

Old joke

[Anne Honime]

Frankly, I believe that computers make fewer mistakes than humans, so I would in fact prefer a plane with a single (or no) human pilots.

Reminds me :

Q: What is the ideal cockpit crew?
A: A pilot and a dog...the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot in case he tries to touch anything.

Re:Some aircraft are designed to have a crew ...

[joe_frisch]

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.

Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea

[Aquitaine]

Disclaimer: IANACP (I Am Not a Commercial Pilot) but IAAP (I Am A Pilot)

There are probably some flights, in some aircraft, where you could train a flight crew member to do enough to relieve the captain of enough tasks so that (s)he can concentrate on landing the plane. In some cases it isn't that any one part of getting an aircraft from A to B is difficult so much as it's the sheer number of tasks at hand -- between monitoring a zillion instruments and talking to approach, then the tower, then the ground -- that you just need a second person there. Even in a small plane, there are times when having a co-pilot just handle the radio makes things a lot easier.

The actual mechanics of flying an airplane are not especially difficult, but knowing how to handle bad or emergency conditions while keeping cool is. It's easy to get overwhelmed just by the quantity of things you have to keep track of. It's plausible that, on shorter, commuter flights, a computer could do enough of those things so that one person can reasonably fly a plane.

The problem is that, while most pilots are pretty safety-conscious, there is such a huge supply of them that there will always be people willing to fly for these companies under less than ideal conditions. Particularly with the minimum number of hours (in the US, anyway) jumping to 1500 (from something like 200-250, which was indeed too low), you're going to see a lot of young guys with a lot of debt from flight school (where commercial loans are on the order of 12-18% interest) who will take any job just to pay the bills. They just don't get paid very well these days, and airline margins are tiny as it is.

Re:Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea

[vlm]

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?

Re:Pilots on Food Stamps

[TooMuchToDo]

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.

Re:Huh? - Plenty of work to keep both pilots busy

[jdmonin]

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 .