Airlines Face Acute Shortage of Pilots
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Basically, it's really expensive to learn to fly. Think $112/hr for an extremely basic 2 seat plane, and around $65/hr for the instructor, at least in the NY area. Even assuming you do all the bookwork on your own without an instructor, that's around $7-8k for a private license(40-50h). After that, you need to get an instrument rating(40h), for around the same price.
Then, at 250 hours, you can get a commercial rating which lets you fly people around for money (you can't solicit passengers though). At this point, pilots usually go for a CFI rating, which lets them teach students. Most flight schools are happy to have the cheap labor, and the pilots want to get more hours so they can apply to regional airlines. The pay is pretty horrible (maybe $20-$30/h when you start), but it's the only way to build hours for most pilots. After doing this for a while (could be up to 600-700h), pilots either manage to find a gig flying businesspeople around on a corporate jet, an odd job like ferrying cargo around on a small plane, or go to a regional carrier. Regional carriers pay even worse than being a CFI, around $20k-$30k starting, but the tradeoff is that you're building time in a "serious" turboprop/jet plane, which the big airlines require before even hiring you as a first officer.
You have to take on a massive amount of debt to become a pilot, then get paid terrible wages once you start. Even when you hit the top and become a captain at a major airline you're still only making around $100-$110k, and very few pilots achieve this.
Raising the number of hours required to be hired as a pilot will cause less people to become pilots. It means CFIs will be instructors for much longer, making it harder for newly minted CFIs to find a job to pay off their debt.
The fundamental problem is that avgas costs a ton (up to $6-$7 in NY). If it was free, or at least much cheaper, to fly a plane, the hour requirements would not be a problem - pilots could just train for longer. I think the solution is going to be electric trainer planes. I see the most promising company in this area as beyond aviation (http://www.beyond-aviation.com/). They're developing an electric version of the Cessna 172, the most popular plane produced to date(43k+). Their president was the COO at Cessna for 6 years, so I'm really hopeful they can achieve their goal.
An electric plane has three major benefits: no avgas needed, air inlets can be reduced significantly (no oxygen-hogging combustion reactions) for reduced drag, and significantly reduced TBO. Background: on piston engine planes, a mechanic needs to disassemble the engine every ~2k hours of flying, replace bad parts, and reassemble it. This costs around $15k, contributing a nontrivial amount of money to cost of flying. On an electric planes, the engines last much longer (think 20k-30k hours), so this cost all but vanishes.
That's probably one of the causes of distortion. They skip some steps (compared to an all-civilian air course) and have several flight hours
The thing thats astounding in all of this, is how both the FAA and the airlines sat for 5 years since they mandated age 65 and did absolutely nothing. Now, everybody is begging for forgiveness and leeway.
From what I've read, people have mentioned that senior pilots who have great influence on union decisions, take a somewhat expectedly selfish attitude when it comes to negotiating salaries whereby junior pilots are left holding the bag. This gets repeated by junior pilots when they become senior pilots.
Which is usually the case in industries that claim a shortage of workers.
In total Airlines pay pilots plenty, too much even. The issue is that unions have distorted the allocation. A fresh pilot will graduate with considerable debt yet garner a wage far below their economic value. Once they become senior they've "earned" the higher distorted wage. They may even still carry student debt. The situation thus becomes re-enforcing.
"Congress's 2010 vote to require 1,500 hours of experience in August 2013 came in the wake of several regional-airline accidents, although none had been due to pilots having fewer than 1,500 hours."
air space all around the world is becoming open for drones. cargo planes will be the first to switch to drone operation. for the people pointing out that AI is not there yet - drones are piloted by humans on the ground. BUT: you can have multiple drones monitored by one person. only sticky situations need human attention. the flight time over the atlantic at 35000ft does not need humans on board, cause guess what, it is already being flown on auto.
think of the savings for DHL, UPS, FEDEX. no more pilots in the craft means more room (no cockpit, no life support, etc). pilots on the ground can follow different safety regulation for sleep periods. you can switch to any pilot during flight, not just the one in the plane. and liability is way cheaper, you can actually decide to crash the plane into the sea in case of a failure.
i would not invest in being a driver of any kind as a long term thing. trains, planes, automobiles - the writing is on the wall. subways already become automated, trains are next.
also do not forget that a lot of catastrophes are happening due to pilot error. see the air france crash off of brazil. inexperienced co-pilot pulled the stick through a stall.
smoke in the cockpit and other shit does not impair an operator. you can have 15 operators rotate in and out of a flight - but only the pilots you have onboard. one medical issue with them and flight is over. operator? send him/her home.
elevators used to have pilots too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_unmanned_aerial_vehi...
the wikipedia article above is a good entry point. note how drones were successfully used in the Vietnam war.
All the aviation (and space) experience is full of stories where unforeseen events have been well handled by creative humans in hopeless situations (maybe thanks to adrenaline). When you are remote, you are dependant of all the associated issues (communication failure, instruments failure), you may be obliged to follow procedures even if you think they are not adapted to the unforeseen circumstance. When you are in the plane, you can feel acceleration, see outside, and do the best to save your live.
Perhaps, I am wrong and your analogy with elevator is the correct one.
I think there is a long way before remote piloting. The first experiences with drones were far from crash proof.
the human eyes do not work in fog, night, rain, etc. the human ear does not help at all in trying to distinguish between acceleration and climbing - both press you into your seat. the classic stall is exactly that, the pilot does not realize the angle of the plane.
you can see something similar at play in modern surgery. robotic instruments are taking over as they will not shake, ever. and surgeons can suddenly rotate in and out easily, even remotely. no one does LASIK manually...
and don't forget, the heroic anecdotes of human intervention might be strong survivor bias. maybe the problem would not have been there in the first place. or do not counterweigh all the fuck ups human pilots have caused.
At this point, a regional jet pilot is making less than a Starbucks barista or Apple Store salesman. ( http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to... )
To put it in WSJ-speak: The present situation is evidence that we have exhausted the marketplace of people willing to fly airplanes for poor pay, eroding benefits and lousy job security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
You'd need it very much if you wanted to deal with unforeseen situations. In those cases pilots come in real handy:
I am no pilot, but two recent high profile crashes, the Colgan Air crash at Buffalo and Air France 447 were caused by pilots not handling stalls correctly.
Perhaps, there really is a need for more basic flying experience?
Air France 447 was more complex than you make it sound. The pilots lost their spacial awareness due to weather and then made a number of mistakes which caused their instruments to "malfunction" (the stall warning stopped even though they were still technically stalling, and then came back on when they tried to correct the stall).
Essentially Air France 447 is what happens when a pilot decides some of their instruments aren't working correctly and aren't sure which (air speed was in fact malfunctioning but everything else was fine). This wasn't helped by things like Alternative Law turning on and disabling AoA protection (which the pilots wouldn't know they were violating without a visible horizon line or one that they trusted).
Now, yes, Air France 447 was caused by human error. But it wasn't simply "not handling stalls correctly." They literally didn't know which was was up or down, and the stall warning was starting and stopping at seemingly random times.
How is this possible when there are so many qualified pilots looking for a job?
Anything unforeseen. Aviation is still a craft, not a science even if a very large number (a huge number, actually) of hours have gone into making it a science. The basic problem here is that you're dealing with chaotic natural systems on one end and machinery at the other. All it takes is a flight of geese or some unusual weather pattern and all your careful programming is worth zip. In situations like that humans tend to do better than computers.
The BA 38 example highlights why we need to get humans out of the loop. Good software would have instantly detected the uncommanded loss of power, and immediately started raising the flaps and landing gear. In fact, good software would probably have exercised the control surfaces and engines before descent and diagnosed the problem then, when the aircraft had tens of kilometers of glide remaining.
Approaches like that are common for playing board games like chess, for finding clever transfer orbits for spacecraft, etc.
So you want to detect a fail to spool? OK you need to put a sensor on the engine to detect speed. And one on the throttle to detect position. Maybe there is another way to detect fail to spool but this is what we're going with because linear and rotational sensors are pretty common and well sorted.
Now you need to make sure that those sensors are 100% correct before factoring it into your code. So you add another of each sensor. But what if one of those sensors is out of calibration or broken? You need another one to vote for majority. Ok so now you've got 3 sensors on both the throttle and engine shaft.
Nothing really crazy here and pretty common.
Now you've got to build the software to model the engine. Jet engines have a delay in spool times that depends on air speed, how fast you feed in the throttle, how fast the engine is already turning, and other factors I have no clue about.
Now that you've got the model setup you have to add in some hysteresis to keep things nominal and to deal with glitches in readings due to iPods and cosmic radiation and vibration.
And then you have to remodel the whole thing depending on which engine is fitted (there are 3 available for the 777 plus variations). And then you've got to test it.
Now that you've tested that you are able to detect a fail to spool situation you have to generate the model of what to do in various flight modes. And that depends on how much thrust was lost, air speed, altitude, attitude, rate of decent, wing configuration, weight, landing gear configuration, etc.
And then you have to test the flight model. And then you have to update the operational handbook to inform the pilot of what to do if the above fails to work. You also have to amend the inspection and maintenance books to inform the A&P how to test and verify the sensors. You also have to modify the flight recorder to record the sensor positions and software behavior. And you have to modify the sat recording and playback software to handle the new data.
You have to do all of the above because if the fail to spool code activates on a normal approach it can very easily lead to a stall and kill 200+ people. You want to be 99.99999% sure your code is correct.
You've now spent millions of dollars and years of development to replace something a pilot can detect in 3 seconds by simply listening and feeling to what the plane is doing. AND you have created a liability if a bug crops up.
The control software does not need to know about the different models of engine. Each engine should measure its own performance and report the results to the self-fly software.
In the case of BA 38, this was done: the aircraft automatically detected the loss of power. Unfortunately the (dumb) autopilot had used a flight profile that was unsalvageable if loss of power had occurred at that point.
The future of travel is self-controlling vehicles. We have usable self-driving cars today. Airplanes are easier to control than cars, and the aviation market has a huge pent up demand for short hop travel that cannot be met by the heavily crewed business model.
And we'd need to be able to do this even for a cargo plane with no passengers on board, since a disabled plane crashing into a populated area would cause a lot of deaths.
Cars also enjoy much safer failure modes than aircraft - if a catastrophic failure occurs in all likelihood you can pull the car over to a stop without issue. When a catastrophic failure occurs in an aircraft's controls it hits the ground and everybody dies.
We're not even quite there yet for self-driving cars, though we are close - and that is a problem orders of magnitude easier than fully-competent autopilots.
We already have the technology to take off, fly, and land planes in the Happy Case. But the devil is really in the unhappy cases.
Nobody is saying we won't ever have full autopilots - but that we are very, very far away from such a capability, and simply throwing engineers at the problem is unlikely to give you the solution substantially faster. When you're pushing the absolute edges of scientific and engineering knowledge progress does not correlate strongly with workforce.
If you still think it's possible take some time to learn of all the novel failure modes that have occured over the past few decades in commercial aviation. Pay special attention to the ones requiring crew to override onboard computers.