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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

It's an option, but nobody will be excited about it. There's already a pilot shortage. (20 hours of paid time not flying a plane) x (all the pilots who fly) = a substantial loss of pilot availability. Plus some number of the majority of pilots who are mentally healthy would resent being "forced" to sit through mandatory therapy. They already have to do medicals often enough.

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It wouldn't have a significant impact on the pilot shortage. If you look at the FAA airman statistics [1], there are fewer active pilots today than there were in 2013. Not commercial or airline pilots, but all pilots total. The entire recruiting pipeline has collapsed, even though there are 25% more licensed instructors and double the number of student pilot licenses (starting in 2016, the FAA made them perpetual instead of a 60 month expiration date so that stat is actually meaningless).

There just aren't enough people involved in general aviation at the start of the funnel to feed the demand for commercial and airline pilots later. Changing some HR policies won't move the needle on that.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/c...

Don't pilots have a maximum number of hours per year that's way under 2000, leaving a lot of "office time"?

100-120 hours per month, which leaves 30-50 hours per month "office time" to use your term and that can easily be taken up with non flight time required tasks like planning, logs, safety, CE, etc

And training, a lot of training to stay current and up to date on changes.

How much of that so-called "office time" is spent in remote cities waiting for the required crew rest time to complete before making one's next flight?

For the work they do. Huge technical and communications skills requirements. The trust required. And shortages.

Pilots seem to very underpaid and overworked.

I'd think twice about flying on any airline if I thought or new they were anything less than pampered.

> Pilots seem to very underpaid and overworked.

Seems to be a trend these days. The more safety critical the job, the worse conditions and pay are.

Competitive market and passengers view price as the overriding factor when buying a ticket.

passengers view what they can afford, or what they can't afford the least, as the overriding factor when buying a ticket. Passengers who have money don't buy the cheapest flights they can find and care more about leg room, direct flights, and agreeable departure/arrival times. Poor people (the majority of the US) take whatever they can get.

Mostly because passenger have absolutely no way to understand airline pricing. The exact same seat can change price 2x in 24h. With that in mind, it’s almost impossible to know if you are getting more for your money or if you are seeing a product of the algorithm.

All properly competitive markets have thin margins and price being a major competitive factor. The problem isn't with that, but rather with flight staff, as a class, being unable to defend proper salaries and work conditions against the competitive pressures on airlines, and as a result they end up squeezed to near a breaking point.

(I'm no political or labor expert, but to me this feels like a case of the air crews being in need of an union.)

There's a public safety interest in fixing that, but like with other safety-critical jobs, there seems to be no way for that interest to become a force acting on the market. Yes, it would mean slightly more expensive flights, but as it is, the price floor on air travel is too low. Sure, current prices mean flights are available to more people, but that's just subsidizing the poor via having everyone accept a small but growing risk of death.

There certainly are pilots unions in the USA and other countries. I don't know what percentage of commercial pilots are unionized, and I don't know how much real power the unions have. When push comes to shove they may be prohibited from striking, as air travel is an essential service (remember when President Reagan fired the striking PATCO controllers). One difference there is that air controllers are FAA employees and pilots are employees of the airlines.

So, with pilots in short supply generally, and if they had a strong union you'd think that they'd be in a position to command good compensation.

Airline CEOs are making at least three or four million a year.

Strange, the compensation in the executive class is never that heavily squeezed

Because the CEO's pay is peanuts in the context of the financials of a major airline. They spend many multiples of that on one airplane.

Yeah, I imagine paying pilots better would help solve the "shortage" problem and ease the mental health burden as well.

Yes, to an extent. But there is a long delay between raising wages and having a pilot ready to work for an airline. The pipeline takes years. It takes years to earn the necessary licenses and build up enough flight hours.

What would help more in the long run is for airlines to hire untrained candidates and then pay them to go through training. Lots of people would like to become pilots but can't afford to pay for their own training. Some foreign carriers already do this.

> resent

Fine, step one, work on why you'd resent that.

I'll start.

Because it feels like being punished for the actions of other people to have my finite time in this universe forced into therapy if I'm a pilot who doesn't need it. Three incidents in the past four decades against 110,000 pilots working daily and not crashing planes because they've had a mental breakdown should not justify the pilot having to give up a whole day a year to talk about their feelings.

This is a real challenge for the FAA; they do not like having a variable they can't control, but they also know they don't have a good enough model of mental health to control it yet. I don't envy them the challenge, or they pushback they'll get trying to use their traditional intervention strategies to fix the issue.

A perhaps less conventional intervention could be using starlink or similar to permit remote takeover of flights that appear to be going rogue. Potentially also addresses some hijacking scenarios (though maybe introduces others).

Then you have to trust a bunch of people on the ground to be sane, in addition to whoever is in the cockpit.

Trusting a bunch of people seems a lot better than trusting a single person. For instance, in this case, the two sane pilots were able to restrain the third and prevent a disaster.

This is just completely untenable in reality, you're going to have multiple people jump in during an emergency (how do they know? will they be monitoring every flight at all times?) and potentially rip the controls away from PIC because they, by committee, decided on the spot that they could do a better job?

And that system to be absolutely safe. Imagine a 9/11 scenario, but with thousands of remotely hijacked planes.

Locking out a conscious crew in the cockpit? Never going to happen, for reasons others have already listed.

The only thing where I could see a remote landing system make sense is during the (very few) cases of crew incapacitation (e.g. Helios 522), but it would almost certainly be done in a way that makes it very apparent and easy to override for the crew actually on board, just like the cockpit door lock operates currently: Require authentication (a PIN code) for unlocking from the cabin-side; give the cockpit crew complete authority to override even that.

That very system has unfortunately contributed to at least one tragedy (Germanwings 9525), but I think the general risk assessment of "bad guy in the cockpit" being significantly less likely than "bad guy trying to compromise the good guys in the cockpit" still makes sense.

Until somebody pulls a circuit breaker...

The same satellite internet provider whose owner micromanages access to in times of crisis based on whatever idea is playing in his head? I'd really prefer starlink to not be a control mechanism for anything until the ownership changes hands. Maybe iridium would be a better choice, if we ever hit the point we'll need it (10+ years with single digit number of passenger fatalities tells me we don't)

Everyone does this. Everyone.

I 100% trust my life better to two human pilots than to the same flight on an aircraft with a remote control system capable of taking over the aircraft's control against the wishes of those in the cockpit.

A reasonable concern, but I'm surprised at the degree of negative reaction to this— for example, who has the last word on control of a manned spacecraft? Obviously they are controllable from the ground, but can the personnel onboard take that back?

I feel like there's at least scope for an interesting discussion on what a takeover could look like and how the process could be abused and/or protected from abuse.

For example, what if it was something that could be requested using a "call for help" mechanism available elsewhere on the craft? Perhaps there could be buttons on opposite sides of the galley that would activate the distress call, so two flight attendants would have to collude for it— that would call the attention of the ground station to a pilot-incident-in-progress who could then receive telemetry and begin to investigate what was going on and go through some kind of clearance process to unlock the final takeover key that would let them disable the cockpit if deemed necessary.

Fair, but these pilot mental health incidents are not that common. We all rightly resented two decades of taking off our shoes in security because of that one shoe bombing attempt.

The trick would be to position it as being about broader spectrum welfare than just a binary determination of whether you're crazy enough to try to kill a plane full of innocent passengers.

Correct. I’m an aviation geek/disaster post mortem junkie and the only incident I’m aware of is Germanwings (obviously) and potentially MH370 depending on which scenario/theory you subscribe to.

There have been a few other incidents that essentially boil down to CRM (crew resource management) issues regarding pilots with clear and obvious personality issues that when combined with the wrong crew members has resulted in loss of life.

Basically, combine someone on the flight deck with seniority who’s an asshole with a junior and impressionable crew member and it can be a problem:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlink_Flight_571...

Either way aviation is remarkably safe generally speaking and I’m not sure I’d put mandatory therapy, etc towards the top of the list in terms of approaches to make flying even safer.

Of course pilots have a tough job and are responsible for hundreds of lives at a time and their needs should be looked after. But the incident rate just isn’t there.

“Aviation regulations are written in blood”.

There is also, allegedly, Chinese Eastern catastrophe from last year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Fligh...

EgyptAir flight 990 in 1999 is also suspected to be a suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990?wprov=sfla...

Fedex Flight 705 was an attempted hijacking by a suicidal pilot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705

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