Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
> “I’VE COME across a number of people over the years who think that modern airplanes, with all their technology and automation, can almost fly themselves. That’s simply not true. Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate.” … “Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?” [0]
[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow https://a.co/2iSmRDH
> “Dr. Wiener[0] worried, and I agree, that the paradox of automation is that it often lowers a pilot’s workload when that load is already low. And it sometimes increases the workload in the cockpit when it is already high… For those who believe technology is the answer to everything, [he] would offer data to prove that isn’t the case. He said that automated airplanes with the highest technologies do not eliminate errors. They change the nature of the errors that are made. For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely… Dr. Wiener is not antitechnology, and neither am I. But technology is no substitute for experience, skill, and judgment.”[1]
[0] “Earl Wiener, Ph.D., a former Air Force pilot who is now retired from the University of Miami’s department of management science. He is renowned for his work in helping us understand aviation safety.”[1]
[1] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow https://a.co/gRNJtON
Automation is more interesting in how it can enhance human capabilities. Humans don't need a whole lot of help keeping the wings straight and level on a clear day. But they do need help landing the airplane in dense fog, and two humans and three computers working together can actually do that. The computers can't do it by themselves, the humans can't do it by themselves, but together, they can!
What I can't automate myself out of is my primary responsibility; Making sure that the site or service is up and available and making our customers happy. I can make constant improvements to that, with occasional backslides, but what I'm paid to do and feel comfortable with my job security is to make a reliable, trustworthy service. That's not going anywhere.
This is not remotely true. Two humans can easily land in dense fog with instruments alone. If you can't then you shouldn't be flying a plane especially not one with passengers. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
But they’re not because they need the paycheck.
You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential).
In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%
Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.
I now understand just how much progress we've made as a civilization
But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc.
It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
In some alternate world, perhaps.
In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us.
> That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power.
Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain.
Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now?
Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain."
Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects?
To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet.
The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all.
What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.
False. There would only be class difference. Even in Star Trek, some people are starship captains who own French vineyards or luxury apartments in San Francisco while other people can only manage to live in a trailer in the desert, or on marginal planets on the border that are surrendered to the Cardassians, and if those colonists try to declare independence from the Cardassians, Starfleet will literally use weapons of mass destruction to make their homeworlds uninhabitable to human beings.
This is _my_ fantasy world, not bound by the history of Star Trek; the show itself in later series got ruined by awful writers who couldn't figure out how to make a sci-fi utopia fun to watch and instead made a faux-military/action drama for no reason. I want no part in that future.
Second, I think you actually miss the point of these episodes; the challenge in the Cardassian border wars and issues was "how does a space utopia exist with a (comically) fascist regime?" Debatably, the actions of the Maquis and other border colonies were persons stuck in a land ownership mindset which is exactly what I think we need to avoid. Data even proved this in the episode with the Sheliak to convince the people of Tau Cygni V that a place is just a place.
I have no idea what you're referring to about a trailer in a desert, but in actual Star Trek, everyone had a home, had food, had a place to live.
Regarding luxury apartments and vineyards, I must ask: why would you care? If you have a spacious and great apartment that meets your absolute every need for you and your family, why would you care if someone has more square meters or a higher floor on a high-rise? In a world where transporters and shuttlecraft and replicators exist, why would you care where your home is located except that it meets your personal vision of a perfect home? You can live in the middle of the alps and have every modern convenience at your fingertips and just enjoy the snow.
As for the vineyard, again, I think you're looking at this from a very current perspective; in a world with replicators and synthehol where only a few specific snobs care about real alcohol versus replicated alcohol, owning a vineyard and manually tending to it likely is just something where everyone goes "right, have fun with that." (Also, Picard didn't own the vineyard, his brother did. I guess in the Picard series he controlled it also? But never watched it)
I really cannot take the comment seriously as I think you both miss the point of the episodes regarding property/land and also are not considering how people might view apartment sizes and such in a world when transportation, knowledge, information, energy costs, food, basically everything is already taken care of. Remember, even humble Scotty thought he was being given an admiral's treatment in TNG when he got a _basic_ quarters for his stay.
Try to imagine that's what your normal life looks like, and then ask yourself how much you would care if someone has a few extra square meters.
Also, class difference has been decoupled from material wealth for centuries already. Just like a prosperous burgher from an Italian city-state in the early modern period was never considered the equal of an aristocrat who held a fraction of his wealth, a successful arctic fisherman, electrical lineman, or oil field worker is still in a lower social class than a less wealthy Ivy League graduate.
A future where the baseline minimum isn't homelessness and suffering in the street simply has not been done before.
Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life, a new world has a chance to thrive.
The past has the burden of dealing with the fact that the difference between a day-labourer and a wealthy elite is the former has to struggle to meet basic survival and participation in society is eliminated the the basic day-to-day is already met.
Human nature will adjust, just like it did to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of data entry specialists were replaced by digital automation; even more land-laborers were replaced by farm automation.
The difference with the future I want is that there is a guarantee of a good and basic living, whereas the past had no ability to guarantee this.
Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them. It becomes a non-issue; just like some years ago emoji were a status symbol (remember, you used to need to _pay_ for stupid emojis), they're a standard now.
The world can be better, we see this everywhere even today with municipal and community efforts, with OSS, and so on. It's already here in many spheres, it's just a matter of accepting that there's no harm in a percentage of society taking advantage of such a system.
The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
Literally anyone who was alive during the 19th century would say that we’ve done this already.
> The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
My point was that the oil workers and arctic fishermen are already richer than many of the Ivy Leaguers, yet occupy a lower social status because our elite status games are decoupled from material wealth. Making material wealth even less relevant to daily life will only intensify these trends.
> Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them.
No, it just means those luxuries will cease to function as markers of status. It doesn’t mean markers of status will go away. Most markers of elite status have little to do with money because money is already too easy to get.
https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...
Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.
You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks.
There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.
An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes.
Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car).
This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over.
It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost.
There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!
Automation ==/== AI. Automation consists of a series of systems that are designed (i.e., programmed using control algorithms, logic rules, machine/deep-learning) to operate under a series of pre-set boundaries. The boundaries are typically defined under "normal" operating conditions, and safe-guards are put into place once the automated systems deviate from those "normal" operating conditions (I see a lot of practitioners esp. in the ML world fail to account for abnormal conditions...may be this is what happened w/ the Uber driver?).
The only comment I will say about AI is that I'm glad I am seeing RL and the like come more into play. I also contend this feels like a supervisory problem.
That’s not really what happens though. I also have some experience in automation. We humans don’t free ourselves up to do human things. We become slaves to the machines and automation. Yes, automating something frees up a human from doing the same thing, but when does it stop? The human just moves on to some other automation task in a never ending quest of scale.
People in a factory I worked in last week aren't gnawing furniture out of lumber with their teeth, nor are they whittling it with stone knives, sawing it with steel hand tools, or cutting it with power tools, they're loading and unloading CNC routers. It's not one person and $500M worth of equipment that lets a forklift operator dump logs in at one side and spit out semi trucks loaded with pallets of furniture, nor is it 2000 people and a bunch of hand tools, and it's about 200 skilled people and $20M worth of equipment. The most important feature of the equipment is the diagnostics, adjustments, and flexibility, allowing their operators to use their human judgement to improve operations.
We have declined a few of potentially profitable projects in the past year because we felt they were not a good match for our values, when customers had specs that required locking out operators from doing more than pressing "Cycle start", were unwilling to invest in training due to high turnover, or otherwise treated people poorly, or especially when they wanted to cut corners on safety, those are just not places that we partner with. This isn't purely altruistic, the effort invested in those undesirable shops is typically less valuable over the long term compared to the rising companies that treat their people better.
[1] https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_compet...
That's kind of interesting. It sounds similar to how every once in a while, pre-smartwatches, I would walk a mile or so on my way somewhere before noticing that Google Maps had me pointed in the opposite direction.
It’s really great info for a lot of professions, not just aviation.
* Avionics
* Weather
* Communication
* Controls
* Positioning
What Sully refers to automation is controls. Beyond auto-pilot capabilities, there has been advancement but little has gone to mainstream/commercial.
Automation in communication and weather reporting has gone up leaps. Look at ADS-B or real-time satellite based in/out reporting.
Just like the advancement in AI we are seeing with other areas of computing, matter of time before we leapfrog in Avionics and Controls.
From a technical point of view, flying and landing planes automatically is not that hard. It's a lot easier than self driving cars. And probably also a lot easier than landing a rocket, which is of course something that is not done manually by spacex. Why would they? It's way too complicated for humans and most of the important things require split second decision making far beyond what humans can even do.
The hard part is going to be fixing procedures and practices, which are optimized for humans communicating via 1960s technology. A lot of what pilots do isn't staying ahead of the plane (as they sometimes refer to it) but dealing with a crazy level of communication overhead of people yelling out courses, altitudes, transponder codes, radio frequencies, and weather information to each other over a really poor radio connection, while baby sitting the auto pilot, running down endless checklists, and micro managing it's gazillions sub systems. It's stressful and even very experienced pilots quickly loose the ability to keep up if they don't fly regularly. Because people fundamentally aren't very good at this stuff. They make mistakes. They mishear things. Etc. It's hard but also very much something that could and should benefit massively from automation. Lots more than we have today. All that check listing can be vastly simplified with automation. All the routine sharing of information can be done in text/binary form and be machine readable so the auto pilot can act on it (with or without human confirmation). Etc. But that requires change and the aviation world is extremely change resistant.
The military will likely get there first. The new B21 apparently can fly unmanned. It may still have a crew but it should be able to operate without one.
The military is willing to accept a certain amount of operational losses in order to accomplish their mission, especially for unmanned aircraft. Tolerance for losses on commercial passenger flights is virtually zero.
But that resistance to change doesn't come out of nowhere. Getting complex systems on a plane is hard for a good reason. On a Level A system (which any system taking direct control over airplane controls would be) hundreds of people's lives are at stake.
The certification isn't there to stifle innovation and automated systems aren't disregarded because of a general dislike of "change". These systems are in place because they save lives. Software in planes needs different standards.
Most modern planes can fly themselves to quite a significant extent, but what they can not do is deal with emergencies, which push the plane outside of the design parameters where the software can function, that is where a crew is most needed.
It's ridiculous that pilots are still expected to attempt to calculate glide distance and airport in their head, and they almost always get it wrong.
Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
> Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
Every modern jet since the early 90s has this. In every family of Airbus you can press the 'ALT' push-button or pull on the V/S knob. Both will level off the aircraft immediately (with slightly different follow-on characteristics).
Edit: to add more context, this works in unusual situations like dives and high-nose attitudes as well. The only difference is the inertia of a modern jet means the leveling off takes a bit longer.
It used to be 'level the wings, pull the nose.' The issue is even expert ATPs often perform the wrong action initially, making the problem worse.
Pressing ALT is taught as the correct thing when you're not completely sure what to do but for a fully unusual attitude (e.g. really nose-high or nose-low, or an acute bank angle) then currently the procedure is to handle it manually. To be honest, to get a large aircraft into that situation requires a pilot to screw it up badly in the first place, the AP won't get you there (well it might but hasn't happened yet).
A couple of years ago most airlines started training a more verbose method of recovery (disengage, push/pull, roll, thrust, stabilise - is the mantra) in response to studies conducted by Boeing and Airbus. Before airlines I used to compete in and teach advanced aerobatics so I'm not completely happy with that procedure (e.g. why push/pull first if you have huge bank on, only going to make things worse) but it's what the industry is pushing right now.
Overall though I think the bigger issues with pilot error are not things like unusual attitudes, yes they do happen from time to time but far more incidents occur from unstable approaches and silly inputs during takeoff. Hence why most changes in regulation right now are in those areas.
The nature of emergencies themselve make dealing with them in software near impossible. How do you write software for a condition you can not anticipate? How would you test it? How can you make sure that it is not misdiagnosing a situation and making the problem worse?
The 737max disaster should be enough to demonstrate how dangerous misbehaving software in a plane can be.
As pilots age out of real experience, their replacement with by coddled by vr and never manage. Full manual for years until the auto fallback hits them and suddenly they have a huge issue of recall.
So no matter how many pilots you have, automation needs to be all or nothing.
After all, when the pilot goes to the potty, who is flying the airplane? The computer? LOL. When something unanticipated goes wrong, the computers are COMPLETELY USELESS because it wasn't programmed to deal with unanticipated problems.
Me, I'll pay a bit extra for my flight to have 2 pilots.
Pilots:
1. fall asleep
2. get distracted
3. make mistakes
4. misinterpret what is going on
5. panic
6. have heart attacks
7. take breaks
8. use the wrong checklist
9. have bad days
10. forget to watch the airspeed and altitude
11. skip steps on the checklist
I.e. are human.
And so a backup is needed.
Quote from 2014: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/06/20/w...
I think with planes carrying humans we don't want that track record, especially if you calculate crashes per mile flown.
A remote operator cannot pick up a fire extinguisher, go into the cabin and look out the window, smell the smoke, feel the weird vibration, relieve the pilot who is pulling on the controls with all his might, fend off intruders with the fire axe, etc.
Remote control is always going to have a lag in it. I doubt one could land an airplane remotely even with just a 1 second lag.
Having your butt in the seat of the airplane is a strong motivator to keep it flying. The pilot always arrives first at the scene of the crash.
On that note, we'd like to ask everyone to please stop using anything wireless, as it runs a small risk of interfering with the delicate connection to satellites overhead, which is currently all that is keeping our remote pilot connected."
[1] https://www.pyrosoft.co.uk/blog/2007/11/04/army-fly-uav-spy-...
This illustrates two things: First the design of the software used in commercial airplanes is bat shit insane and second, the fallbacks require that a trained person is physically present on the plane.
> We have been using remote controlled killer drones for years now.
While Boeing has shown some talent at killing people the goal of commercial airplanes is usually to get their passengers to their destination alive.
The override was there, it was always there. The thumb switches on the control column overrode it. Turning it off with the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch turned it off.
This procedure was detailed in an Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued to all 737MAX pilots after the first crash. The pilots in the second crash did not follow that procedure.
The pilots of all three incidents used the thumb switches to override MCAS and restore normal trim. The first crew then turned off the trim and landed safely. The second crew never did turn off the trim and crashed. The third turned off the trim when the airplane was in a dive and could not recover.
> The pilots in the second crash did not follow that procedure.
"At 05:40:35, the First-Officer called out 'stab trim cut-out' two times. Captain agreed and First-Officer confirmed stab trim cut-out."[1]
However they were unable to correct the trim of the aircraft without help of the electrical systems (still being on full takeoff power didn't help).
So around 3 minutes later stab trim cutout was switched back to normal. Pretty much the moment they did that the aircraft pitched down hard, the situation becoming unrecoverable within seconds, followed by the aircraft impacting the ground.
There were possibly ways to save the aircraft (reduce aerodynamic forces that prevented trim by hand by, for instance, reducing thrust), but those weren't detailed in any ADs.
[1]https://leehamnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Preliminar...
1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches on the column
2. then turn off the stab trim
The electric trim overrides MCAS.
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
That's probably not an easy thing with a computer undoing your work every few seconds and fighting you for control.
And they did try to correct the trim before moving to 2.
5:40:00 AND (here automatic nose down) activates for 9 seconds, computer trimming from 4.60 to 2.1 units, crew trying to counteract by pitching up.
5:40:14 Pilot begins adjusting trim up. Gets to 2.4 units.
5:40:22 AND activates yet again (7s), also pushing trim all the way down to 0.4 units. DON'T SINK warning and PULL UP.
5:40:29 Captain asks the First-Officer to trim up with him. They reach 2.3 units (9s). This interrupts AND.
5:40:38 stab trim cut-out
5:40:43 AND activates again, but at least now it leaves the stabilizer alone.
All in they did fine, considering all this happened in 40 seconds. They regained control of the aircraft and now have time to asses what even happened.
However they still have to apply up to 100lbs of force to keep the nose somewhat pointed up. Only at times when both of them are actually pulling on the stick does the plane gain altitude. On top of that they're getting a MASTER CAUTION "anti-ice left alpha vane", adding to their workload. In the next three minutes they're discussing the warnings they're getting, informing ATC of their problem, and are trying to manually trim the plane (which doesn't work). I'd imagine their arms are getting tired.
So the understandable next step is to switch stab trim cut out back to normal, then trying to correct the trim further.
5:43:11 stab trim back to normal, followed by some short manual electric trim inputs
5:43:21 AND triggers yet again (5s), stab to 1.0 units. Within the first 3.5s the aircraft pitches -8° down, descent rate increases to -5,000 ft/min.
If they had caught and interrupted the AND/flipped stab trim back immediately, maybe this could've been saved. But since the computer got to do its thing for a few seconds, it's pretty much too late to do anything. The pilots are applying up to 180lbs of force, which accomplishes nothing. The plane keeps pitching further down.
5:43:44 Plane impacts the ground at an angle of 40° nose down.
That whole timeline was 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
The only way you can reasonably expect a human to deal with a situation like that, which requires a quick response, is if you train them for it. You don't just give a vague warning, a bunch of steps with three IFs attached, and hope for the best.
More complete, interim, report: https://reports.aviation-safety.net/2019/20190310-0_B38M_ET-...
> That's probably not an easy thing with a computer undoing your work every few seconds and fighting you for control.
Having the trim start running again every few seconds is EXACTLY WHY there's a trim cutout switch. A few seconds is enough time to hit the thumb trim switches right on the column under your thumb, and the then hit the cutoff switch which is right there on the center console.
I don't dispute the timeline. But the fact remains, using the electric trim switches to return trim to normal, then turning it off, would have worked.
The stab trim does not move that fast, they had time to turn it off after trimming to normal.
Thanks for the link. At one point, it was clear the EA pilots did use the electric trim switches to override MCAS. They did turn off the trim at one point. What they did not do was follow the instructions in the EAD.
> maybe this could've been saved
The first incident shows the procedure works. Trim to normal, turn it off. That's all there is to it.
The thing about the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is it came out after the first MAX crash, and was about how to not die if it happens to you. If you were a MAX pilot, wouldn't you take extra care to read that EAD, understand it, and remember it? I cannot fathom ignoring it.
I can see why it they wouldn't have recalled it in the first 40s of that situation. However they got the situation stabilized to a point where they could've kept going for a while and maybe came up with a better plan of action before attempting to correct the trim again (which is what ultimately doomed the flight).
> Having the trim start running again every few seconds is EXACTLY WHY there's a trim cutout switch. A few seconds is enough time to hit the thumb trim switches right on the column under your thumb, and the then hit the cutoff switch which is right there on the center console.
Which is kind of leaving the territory of the AD. The way I'm reading it, it advises to leave the switch set to cutout for the remainder of the flight. They'd have had to come up with that approach (or an approach that would have enabled manual trim) on their own once they had the aircraft flying somewhat straight without immediate danger. Their main mistake may have been to not take more time to assess their situation when they had the chance and not fully grasping the danger of leaving that switch on normal for even the 5s it took the plane to become unrecoverable at the end.
But all those factors pale in the face of inadequate training and the fact that there could hardly be a more dangerous problem with an aircraft than it - out of nowhere - entering an uncontrollable nosedive if the pilots don't properly respond within seconds. I'd maybe rate complete loss of control/"wings fell off" higher.
I still have trouble blaming the pilots because - with the benefit of hindsight - I would have expected such crashes to happen as much as they did, maybe more. The aviation industry generally avoids expected mistakes that result in loss of life and someone was bound to make this one.
No, it isn't.
> The way I'm reading it
What it says is to restore trim to normal and then turn it off.
> not fully grasping the danger of leaving that switch on normal
Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement is a severe problem which is why what to do about it is a "memory item", meaning you don't have time to read the checklist. All pilots should know that runaway trim is a critical danger.
> out of nowhere - entering an uncontrollable nosedive if the pilots don't properly respond within seconds
There's enough time to respond. All three crews correctly restored normal trim immediately.
> I still have trouble blaming the pilots because
I give the pilots some of the responsibility, because they had all the information needed to counter the problem. The rest goes to Boeing for a bad MCAS design. It's a pilot's job to read, understand, and remember Emergency Airworthiness Directives. If that's unreasonable for them, they need to turn in their wings and drive an Uber.
I find no fault for the pilots of the Alaska crash where the stabilizer trim jammed. There were no instructions on how to deal with that, and they were in contact with the maintenance chief who had no clue, either. The pilots kept trying to break the jam loose, doing things like engaging both trim motors to apply more torque. The result was the jackscrew nut stripped the threads, and then it slid to hard over, then broke the end of the jackscrew off, and it was game over.
Now me, as an engineer who knows how that system works, I would have advised them to leave it alone, reduce airspeed to reduce the loads on it, and land ASAP. The jackscrew motors are way too powerful to let them grind away at it. Also, when it did move, it let off a very loud screech indicating that something awful was happening.
But they weren't engineers or mechanics. They made a mistake, but it was reasonable considering what they knew. They did the best they could.
However we design systems and procedures such that suboptimal usually doesn't mean fatal, and in those specific instances where it would, we train humans so they perform adequately.
If humans were so great, we wouldn't need a lot of the technology in modern aircraft. It's mostly there because humans suck. Taking work away from the meatbags, putting in safeguards, and designing with the human element in mind, produces more desirable outcomes.
And it's not like this crew had the wrong ideas. They attempted all the right things, but execution was lacking and sadly the situation had no room for error:
1. Did use cut out, but left it on normal for a few crucial seconds without any manual input, allowing the computer to mess everything up again.
2. Did try to fix trim before cut out, but only got it halfway there to the point where they could at least achieve level flight and a slight climb. Tried to trim the rest of the way manually, but that didn't work.
> There's enough time to respond.
Disregarding that the situation could have been avoided, the second time this crew didn't have time to react anymore. It took only 3.5s from the automatic nose down engaging to descending at -5,000 ft/min, pitching -8° down and quickly increasing to -40°, despite the pilots pulling on their sticks full force. They had maybe a second or two to nip it in the bud, then had twenty seconds left to somehow arrest the rapid descent of an aircraft that is trimmed precisely the wrong way with the horizon in a place you don't ever want to see it in a commercial airliner. I don't think it was physically possible?
It's not hard imagining situations where an aircraft doing something like that within 3.5s out of nowhere would be disastrous. There certainly wouldn't be time to respond. This crew was warned by earlier misbehavior, so the situation was theoretically avoidable, but there was little room for error and so we should be glad for all the times something didn't happen.
> All three crews correctly restored normal trim immediately.
Are you counting this crew? I don't think they had normal trim at any point once the incident started. They were trying to get there.
We expect pilots to pay attention to those things. They make mistakes, sure, but they are still responsible for those mistakes. The EA pilots did not follow the procedure laid out as "how to not die like the Lion Air pilots". Seems to me that should be worth reading, understanding, and remembered. Especially as there was nothing complicated about it - trim to normal, turn it off.
Wouldn't you prefer to fly with pilots who did? I do.
At least in that case. But it isn't normal that you blindly trust a sensor, not even Level D (failure is unimportant and easy to deal with) Software would/should do that. It actually takes a significant effort to put Software into a plane, which only increases with safety requirements.
The chain of failure which needed to happen in this case is enormous. Dozens of people need to have looked at the documentation and nobody cared/figured out this blatant security issue. How can a company like Boeing even operate like that?
Yes, safety requirements which include the double buffer of two trained and experienced human pilots being in physical command of the plane double checking themselves and the software/hardware
A lot of hardware/software is totally automatic and it would be insane if it were constantly checked by humans. Of course none of these systems running totally automatic have the ability to push thevplane into the ground based on faulty sensor data.
My point was that the failure of the MCAS was institutional, you should not be able to bring software like that onto a plane.
On the topic of the number of pilots my thoughts are that the redundancy is for the most part only neccessarry in exceptional situations. But exactly those situations are the ones in which the best thing a plane can usually do is graceful failure and handing control to the crew, which can far more easily overwhelm a single pilot.
The yaw damper does.
There was another crash where the autothrottle was reading data from only one of the radio altimeters, which was giving false data. At 400ft altitude the autothrottle thought the airplane was landing, and pulled the throttles back to idle. The airplane pancaked into the ground.
All avionics software that has control authority can crash the airplane.
What was wrong with MCAS was its reliance on only one sensor, and no way to tell if the sensor was faulty. That's not an issue with the concept of MCAS.
I don't think that argument flies.
If your answer is “the pilot on the ground takes control”, what happens when that system gets hacked?
Also, this is an attempt to reduce labor costs. They aren't going to put a pilot on the ground as primary or backup - they just want to remove the second pilot from the loop entirely.
We have a list of airliner crashes[1], that once we figure out absolute numbers of total flights likely shows that airliners are much, much safer than remote controlled drones (after excluding shoot downs for latter), but what we don't have is data on how many aircraft landed safely but only because the second pilot was there. I'd want to know:
1. How many times did a pilot immediately intervene for a developing safety issue while the other pilot was asleep, in the toilet, or suffering from a medical incapacitation? A huge amount of work has been done to ensure redundancy of human control in such situations, because many crashes have occurred where this process failed.
2. How many times did a pilot make a mistake that was corrected by a second pilot, and if that correction hadn't been made a safety issue would have developed? There are numerous crashes attributed to pilot error and the second pilot failing to correct that error - a huge amount of work has been done to make sure that can't happen again, because everyone knows pilots regularly make mistakes, often a critical time of the flight from a safety perspective: landing.
3. How many times has an automated system shown better error correction performance that saved an aircraft vs a human being?
Until we have this data, the data we have suggests remote controlled aircraft or removing a pilot has the potential to be one of the most dangerous decisions to happen to civil aviation in the history of the industry.
[0] - https://dronewars.net/drone-crash-database/
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The first 737MAX MCAS incident you never hear about because there were 3 pilots in the cockpit, and one of them reached over and turned off the stab trim system.
I don't think the comparison to a drone that doesn't need a pilot on board applies to an airline. If there are humans on board, one or ideally more of them should be capable of controlling the aircraft.
The difference here is that if the drone fails then nothing really happens, the targets might even be spared lol, but if a commercial airplane fails then hundreds of lives could possibly be lost.
I don't think the airline industry is ready for that massive risk. It's already risky enough for them now.
"Little did they know, that one small oversight would set off a cascade of failures that would seal their fate."
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/american-airlines-ca...
So, if he was the only pilot in cockpit, everyone on the flight would have died too?
Here in W.Australia Rio Tinto manage and remote co-pilot otherwise fully automated 100 tonne Haulpak dump trucks (that can easily run over and crush a car or pickup truck) from 1,000 km away.
I'm fully in favour of a human pilot and a co-pilot (an advanced trainee even) for short haul flights that don't require shift work for the pilot (eg: long haul Australia -> Europe you'd want a pair of experienced pilots to tag team at least, + copilots and flight engineer) .. but there is an argument to made for emergency remote pilot capability.
The argument against that, of course, is terrorists remote flying a hostage filled bomb.
A much larger issue is copilots do a significant amount of work especially in an emergency while also gaining experience in the aircraft. This means a steady stream of highly experienced senior pilots on the exact airframe being flown.
> Here in W.Australia Rio Tinto manage and remote co-pilot otherwise fully automated 100 tonne Haulpak dump trucks (that can easily run over and crush a car or pickup truck) from 1,000 km away.
Comparing a truck that goes slowly back and forth on a single, unvarying track which never changes to an airplane is not reasonable.
And do you know what happens when those trucks, which drive at slow speeds, lose connection? They stop and wait for the connection to re-establish. Does that work for planes?
> but there is an argument to made for emergency remote pilot capability.
You don't actually make that argument, because there isn't one. Most air emergencies happen in seconds and require situational awareness, and usually some sort of physical input.
Modern aircraft are capable of autonomous flight and large armed drones are able to fly with light supervision switching to tight control as required already (and for some time).
Emergencies such as three way redundant altitude control failing, bird strikes, engine failure, et al are best handled by humans at the controls, sure.
None the less it's both possible and desirable for emergencies such as the humans at the helm having heart attacks or food poisoning to dealt with by remote supervision.
Again, that desirability must be balanced against other security factors.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/01/31...
Communication lags and sensor fidelity are a huge problem.
They tested it only with remote assasinations.
>co-pilots in foreign countries are required to have just 240 hours, with some of those hours occurring in a simulator.
This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely. don't know if the "pilot shortage" is still happening that resulted from lots retiring/taking buyouts at the beginning of covid but it is quite a lot of hours to train for a role that doesnt pay too much.
https://injuryaccidentnews.jcreiterlaw.com/2019/10/09/do-int...
The other low hanging fruit is to not underpay new pilots in exchange for them hitting the lottery and the career only paying off if they are lucky enough to land a cushy gig at a big airline.
It’s going to take a generation of higher salaries to build that pipeline back out. Instead they just want to drop a pilot. F that.
[1] private pilots make up part of our natural disaster infrastructure and the FAA has long been trying to get more people into aviation because that’s going to be a painful shortage if i.e. the big one hits the Seattle area and most of rhe highways get eaten by sand
It's expensive yes but not out of reach of most people.
Once you start looking into CPL, night rating, multiple engine etc that's when it gets expensive.
Minor nit: You can fly at night with a Private Pilot's certificate, but it must be under VFR like all your daytime flying.
Night flying over LA is great; night flight over the desert or the Midwest away from cities can be effectively IFR; VFR private licenses require some IFR time but I highly recommend spending some time on instruments if you’re going to VFR at night.
And VFR over the top at night I just don’t recommend unless you have an IFR rating.
Really? Can you back that up with some reference somewhere?
From talking to aspiring airline pilots, it seems that their career trajectory is terrible until they actually land their butt in the seat of a major airline plane.
How can we have such a shortage of pilots and at the same time have such lousy pay and working conditions for the infeed?
[1] https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/c...
A friend went through flight attendent training recently. She did very well but eventually dropped out when the total compensation was small and didn't include things like the rent you pay to "hot bunk" at wherever you wind up stationed. Compensation also didn't include things like paying for your attorney if you are sued while working for the airline.
So many "shortages" are like the "shortage" of engineers. No, there are plenty of engineers--just none willing to put up with your bullshit at that price.
Pushing for single pilot flight will only make it worse.
When this flight hour change runs head first into a large number of pilots retiring the entire industry is going to be in a state of emergency.
And when the war is over we have a glut of pilots.
The wiki page for it mentions a lot of other issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 . Including an offhand remark by the pilot that he only had one hour of sleep and warnings that only sounded when the plane was in a remotely sane orientation.
That's not even considering the safety implications.
It maximizes earnings through reduction of the cost, not through competitive advantage (i.e. bigger sales volume).
In other costs: it's saving more vs making more money. Two non-exclusive ways of improving your overall financial status.
I don't know about the security implications but I'm inclined to believe that lowering costs is good for business.
The fact that the airport/TSA experience can be so difficult and airlines are still fine is a testament to the lack of viable alternatives.
Also, it might be about the availability of pilots. How is the demand for air travel doing? If it is very strong then 1 pilot per plane would mean twice the pilots in the market. Then it's up to hardware producers to supply the pilots with planes and increase market.
No one is "fucking employees" when that leads to bottom line growth in a crippling and money losing industry with insane regulations and red tapes like required no smoking signs in brand new airplanes.
I'd agree that risk is not affected only if the plane can take off, navigate, land and park on the runway entirely on its own (effectively replacing a pilot)
Buses go 400MPH at 40k feet? I guess I should travel by bus more often.
FWIW i wouldn't take Google as a source of information.
When a deadly bus crash occurs in the vast majority of cases a few people may die at the impact zone (for example a semi hitting the back of the bus).
When a deadly plane accident occur it is very common for there to be no survivors at all.
Damn, it's almost like workers rights and safety are aligned in some way...
The law can give a bit of leverage to people who otherwise have none, but I’d wager there are more people who have leverage of their own than whose employers are only restrained from abusing them by law/contract. Especially in a tight labor market like today’s (outside tech).
One side wants something. However, they have no leverage. Accordingly, they make a claim and see if the public will back it up. If so, you now have a token to trade at the bargaining table that you never actually intended to play. If the public isn’t on your side, you just say you’ve learned from the public’s opinion.
We see this garbage with the NFL all the time. Most recently, it was with the manufactured penalties from touchdown celebrations.
I highly recommend checking youtube for crash analysis videos and series btw, the incredible detail these investigations go into is eye opening, and really gave me an appreciation for the field.
Even if planes become fully automated, a pilot and a copilot should always be present on the plane. One to serve as a check against the automated system, and the other to serve as a check against the pilot.
I know the chance of them having a heart attack or stroke, suicide is statistically unlikely. But putting your life in the hands of a single person you’ve never met vs two is a no brainer to me.
2) The latency issues are literally deadly.
No airport supports autopilot taxi nor takeoff (takeoff is done half-automated at most).
https://nci.edu/2021/06/08/the-most-common-causes-of-aviatio...
https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oam...
Also, doing a CFIT while flying on autopilot is still a pilot error, because they gave the autopilot's orders.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
--
What I think the regulators and manufacturers are missing has less to do with the what-if scenario of an incapacitated pilot and more to do with what happens when pilots get bored. Sitting in a cockpit for my 7+hr shift at night over the Pacific is made safer by the fact that I can have a conversation with the other pilot to keep my mind somewhat alert. Take that away and the mind gets dull, complacent and prone to error.
I'm all for more automation as long as there's a measurable benefit to safety. If getting rid of all human pilots leads to a reduction in lives lost per unit of time then it's worth it. Sure there will be major accidents that a human could have prevented, but there will be accidents prevented by the machine too. The crossover point matters.
I'm also a programmer in my spare time, I started coding long before I was a pilot. Sometimes I do consulting work and I also have a startup. Flying jobs generally give enough spare time to do these things in a limited way.
Interesting how I assume HN is capable of a rational conversation around this, but when the exact same premise is raised around self driving cars, all rationality flies out the window
The execs who are pushing this effort appear to know little to nothing about flying, safety, human centered design, and automation.
I might be as brash to state they may not give a damn as long as they get their bonuses and punch out leaving the other exec holding the bag. The compensation structure and laws regarding claw back clauses must be revamped.
Anyway, as a person w a controls background and system automation, this is a total cluster fvck w out a major investment in sensors and UX redesign.
If this passes, I am going to seriously consider those private plane sharing programs.
What is the long term plan here? Will there still be duo pilots in 2040? 2060?
Surely long term it will be automated with remote supervision/override and a cabin crew who have basic training to emergency land.
Do the testing on mail delivery, get it good enough, introduce it into domestic with pilots still present, slowly phase out pilots to be remote.
I would fly domestic automated flights if the automation was proven as safe, the above conditions were met, and the price was 40-50% cheaper.
I don’t see why a company hasn’t gone all in on this yet, but would love to hear why it’s a dumb idea/not feasible.
* Edit: based off this link it seems that staffing is only 12% of costs which would not address my criteria of significantly cheaper flights. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/33770/how-much-...
You believe pilot salaries are 40-50% of airline ticket prices? A pilot makes ~130K per year and flies, say, 2 trips a day, so ~500 trips a year. So on a plane with 200 people, they are each paying about $1.30 per pilot. Two pilots, round it up to $5 per trip. That's how much you'd save if the automation system was free.
But, hey, I'd also fly an automated flight that was proven safe for a 50% discount. Even a manual flight.
On the other hand, salaries are VERY back-loaded towards the end of their career. A first-year first officer ("copilot") is maybe $90/hr. And if you switch employers, you start all over again at the bottom of the ladder. A strange world compared to hopping around tech companies like most of us here are familiar with.
Also pilots do not work 40hrs/week, and the more common airframe variants are maybe 150 seats on average. Those all somewhat cancel out, but it's probably more like double your estimate. Still not a huge fraction of ticket price.
Part of the problem with a single pilot is how a new person gets the experience in the real world of big boy planes. You need 1500 hours of flight time before airlines will hire you. New pilots often get most of those hours as CFI's tooling around teaching others how to fly a 4-seat Cessna 172. Ready to get in a 737 with them at hour 1501?
The required hours are a problem; the solution is not to go to one pilot but to go back to three, so the third pilot can build actual flight hours in type without issue.
Now that I’ve thought about it what I’m actually trying to ask is…
What would it take to drop flight prices 50%?
Automated flights, a change in fuel technology, 0 marketing spend, reduced maintenance?
More specifically, what is the bare bones cost to transport a human from point a to b, safely, in the same or less time it takes a flight.
1. Free fuel. Fuel is the biggest cost of flights. For domestic flights, about half the ticket cost.
2. No taxes/government mandated fees (including fuel taxes). These are the second biggest cost, and for international flights, can easily be half the ticket price, but for domestic flights, about 20% of the ticket price.
3. Free planes. Planes are the third biggest cost.
4. Free administration. The Airline bureaucracy is the fourth biggest cost.
5. Free Stewardess labor. Fifth biggest cost.
6. Free Pilots.
Saves a bit on fuel and a bunch on other costs. But people would be unhappy about it.
With the exception of a few markets that have price volatility, deflation is a really rare thing. What people get instead are products that are packed with either more performance or more features(whether useful or not) and that is justification for the slight price increases that we see from year to year.
> I take a contrarian opinion on this, the price of a flight in the US outside of major hubs is egregious. Especially during peak times or holidays.
Highly-engineered tubes that fly 10km above the ground at very high speeds, have absolutely amazing reliability and long-term safety, and can navigate all over the world are, unsurprisingly, very expensive. But people still want to hop in one and pay less than a train ticket.
In other words, when they can safely fly with no pilots they can have one.
How does that support the argument that two pilots are necessary?
It supports the argument that a determined pilot is going to crash the airplane whether or not there are one or two pilots on the plane!
American investigators said that it's more likely for the first officer to intentionally nosedive the plane while the pilot was away, and the pilot tries to recover from it, while Egyptian investigators said there's a problem with the elevator control.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but companies never allocate resources as if that were true.
If prevention becomes a cost center, some jackass is going to try to cut it. They couldn’t measure the prevention. It was just another line item on the wrong side of a ledger.
(* I am not a commercial pilot but I've watched enough Mayday/Air Accident Investigations to get interested in the FAA publications on CRM. Interesting read. Active work was being done ~20 years ago in this area.)
It would have been nice if the article covered some numbers on different things. Such as how many times a pilot has had a medical emergency or some other issue that renders one of the two pilots incapacitated. Or what kinds of situations benefit from two pilots, or might even require two pilots, such as bad weather/winds, or decisions/actions in emergency situations, including technology failures.
I also wonder about what happens if the single pilot became incapacitated with all the security these days. Would there be the ability for the crew or someone else to gain entry to the cockpit to fly the plane? Or would they essentially replace a pilot first officer with a non-pilot role?
And as long as passengers are duly alerted when the inflatable copilot is deployed in emergencies...
How about they just revert the flight hour requirements to those that allowed for adequate staffing and safety for decades a d be done with it.
I can't help but suspect the intent is to raise the cost of borh the equipment and pilots required to a point that makes new competition all but impossible.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
* https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
* https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2015/05/msp2015050...
Some of the pros and cons of cockpit automation:
* https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/cockpit-automation-advant...
Generally automation exists on a spectrum, and the pilot should be able to select the level depending on the circumstances:
> In Van’s presentation he describes three levels of automation:
> *The pilot manually flying the aircraft.
> *The pilot using the flight director, autopilot, and autopilot modes to fly the aircraft for a short period of time. For example: Heading select, Flight Level Change, Vertical Speed, Indicated Airspeed, etc.
> *The pilot using the FMS to command the autopilot to fly the aircraft for hours at a time.
* https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/09/stepping-down-in-automat...
Another thought is that if one-pilot planes are allowed, to insist on more training for pilots: if the computer/autopilot can handle the more mundane stuff, then more hours could be spend by pilots in simulators being (virtually) thrown into strange situations (perhaps taken from real-life incidents) to deal with. There are (IIRC) already per-mont flight hour restrictions on pilots, so reduce those by some ammount and move them to the simulator.
[0 https://obituaries.gloucestertimes.com/obituary/warren-van-v...
Then a ground based copilot can be involved in complex manuvers, emergencies, etc. But not have to be present for the dull multi-hour cruising.
But most likely it’s just a negotiating tactic to get a related concession like reduced training hours.
[0] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/newsroom-and-events/news/minim... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39749803
Or is it forever going to be a catch 22: if you can securely lock the cabin to prevent a hijacking, whoever locks themselves in can crash the plane? :/
>Alone in the cockpit after Sondenheimer left to use the bathroom, Lubitz immediately put his plan into action. He moved the cockpit-door toggle switch, located on a pedestal to the left of his seat, from “normal” to “locked” position, disabling Sondenheimer's emergency access code. Moments later, he reached forward and turned the dial on the automatic pilot to bring the plane down to 100 feet. Just before 10:31 A.M., after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its cruising altitude and began dropping at a rate of 3,500 feet per minute, or 58 feet per second.
>At 10:39, Sondenheimer called for a flight attendant to bring him a crowbar hidden in the back of the plane. Grabbing the steel rod, the pilot began smashing the door, then trying to pry and bend it open. The plane had dropped to below 10,000 feet, the snow-encrusted Alps looming closer. Inside the cockpit, Lubitz placed an oxygen mask over his face. “Open this fucking door!” Sondenheimer screamed as passengers stared in bewilderment and mounting terror. Lubitz breathed calmly. At 10:40, an alarm went off: “TERRAIN, TERRAIN! PULL UP, PULL UP!” The plane dipped to 7,000 feet. The alarm signaled a shrill “ping-ping-ping,” a warning of approaching ground. Sixty seconds later, the Airbus's right wing clipped the mountainside at 5,000 feet. The only further sounds picked up by the voice recorder were alarms and screams. Moments later, the jet slammed into the mountain at 403 miles per hour.
https://www.gq.com/story/germanwings-flight-9525-final-momen...
Should buses have two drivers? A large bus carries about as many people as a small plane. And per distance, road travel is > 100 times more dangerous than air travel.
References:
- https://journalistsresource.org/economics/comparing-fatality...
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/24/avoid-...
Can anyone land a plane? Does it land automatically if the pilot has a heart attack? Will all the passengers die?
The outcomes are quite different.