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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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: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.