Pilots alarmed over Airbus plans for single-pilot aircraft | Hacker News Reader

Pilots alarmed over Airbus plans for single-pilot aircraft

euractiv.com

21 pointstpmx10 comments

Pilot unions result in overpaid staff, forcing money from the rest of society’s pocket. During any airline downturn, the pilots always come out with minimal salary impact, even after substantial taxpayer bailouts. The press complain about airline executives keeping their million dollar salaries during a bailout, but never mention the thousands of pilots making $500k/year. Getting rid of the leverage of these parasitic taxi drivers would be good for society… except on the flights I’m on. Then I want two.

This seem dangerous as hell. Even with 2 pilots mistakes get made. Also what if the single pilot gets a heart attack or something?

The pilot isn't needed, he's just there as a backup.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/479633-coming-soon-pl...

Don’t think people are ready for pilotless planes.

Computers are good at doing exactly what you tell them to do. But in novel situations that they haven’t been programmed for, they have zero common sense to negotiate the situation.

That said I don’t mind virtual pilots that double check the decisions of human pilots and sound the alarm if something doesn’t match up but otherwise you wouldn’t even know it’s there - kind of like a spell checker; then we have the best of both worlds.

They won't start with passenger planes, first will be cargo flights, then once this is accepted as normal, it will become more ubiquitous over time.

Your 'common sense' remark is likely referring to fly by wire, which was created in the 1940s and adopted commercially in the 70s and 80s

Intelligent flight control systems using neural networks have been developed heavily over the past 20 years and will become a large piece of this as well.

Are the autonomous controls overridable?

Seems like a perfect setup for Germanwings Flight 9525 to be replicated.

It does sound like the perfect setup for a repeat of that, but it's even worse.

The US FAA has already said [0] there's too much automation in the cockpit because it tends to make pilots be out of practice. In that case, when an emergency hits, pilots are often not competent enough to meet the situation.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/airline-pilots-depend-t...

This is a poor excuse.

Pilots are required to keep a certain number of hours logged in simulators. The simulations are always abnormal flight situations.

So the only argument here would be that the number of simulator hours required is too low. In the context of this discussion, this idea should be mostly irrelevant.

It's not. The FAA puts a lot of emphasis on understanding the psychology of flying, especially in emergencies. In their eyes, while pilots have responsibility, that responsibility should never go beyond actual human capabilities.

A big capability that is relevant to this discussion is task saturation. With planes as complex and big as they are, it is easy for pilots to be task saturated even during normal flight. Taking a pilot out of the cockpit would make that even worse.

Many of the recent airline accidents have a common thread. A Junior first officer with under 1000 hours flying EASA rules. It’s no coincidence

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