Aerospace giants have been accused of putting profits ahead of safety as officials consider cutting the minimum number of pilots required on commercial flight decks from two to one.
The move, which is currently being evaluated by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), would weaken standards to the “lowest common denominator”, the world’s largest union of airline pilots has warned.
“This threat is not something that is 10, 15, 20 years away,” Capt James Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents more than 78,000 pilots in the US and Canada, said. “It’s something that, quietly, Airbus, has been working on. It’s not what they are marketing it to be.
“The US has the safest aviation record in the world. We need to improve the standard for everybody, not just go to the lowest common denominator.”
As a professional pilot. I don’t think there’s any future in single pilot ops. Realistically the only time you need two pilots in a modern airliner is when shit’s fucked sideways, which is exactly the time the single pilot in this situation needs to work. Normal ops are easy. You could automate that no problem, what is hard is automating whatever combination of failures and weather the engineers never thought of.
Maybe in cargo, where the stakes are lower, it’ll happen. But in passenger ops, I think we’ll go from 2 pilots to no pilots before we go to one pilot.