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Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

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Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#121

Post by TomSwirly »

gnopgnip wrote: post #108
bmitc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, I don't understand the push of humans to want to replace everything we do with machines. What's the point? What's the end goal? We just sit in a vat of embalming fluid consuming media with a feeding tube while machines whir about? Why can't enough ever be enough for humanity?

About 1/3rd of the cost of an airline ticket is labor. Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working

Most people I know would stop working in an instant if that didn't mean they ended up living on the street.

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%

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#122

Post by papito »

shitlord wrote: post #11
totalZero wrote: post #4

I'm not sure I'd want to travel on commercial aircraft if the regulators eliminate pilot redundancy.

If autopilot can control an airplane, then couldn't someone also pilot the plane remotely (as if it were a drone)? That would provide some pilot redundancy. I imagine airlines could also save money on staffing if the copilot didn't have to be physically present.

Airlines are fighting tooth and nail to not spend money to implement video feeds on the black boxes, a rather doable upgrade with huge safety benefits, and you want to mandate expenditures on converting all air ships to full remote drones? That is never going to happen.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#123

Post by chmod775 »

WalterBright wrote: post #96
josefx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at the MCAS disaster. The only override that wasn't under its control required someone present in the cockpit to basically physically lift the plane using a normally automated control. 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 re…

I know a bit about the MCAS disaster. Very few people know that there were *three* incidences of MCAS runaway trim. What happened with the third one (which was actually the first incident)? It didn't crash. The pilot just turned off the stab trim system. 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. Thi…

> Turning it off with the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch turned it off.

> 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...

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#124

Post by TomSwirly »

defrost wrote: post #29
polar8 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other pilot is working from home.

For the sake of the discussion this isn't an entirely ridiculous notion. 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…

Absolutely it's an entirely ridiculous notion.

> 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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#125

Post by quickthrower2 »

V99 wrote: post #72
rsj_hn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

Experienced captains at the major ("legacy") airlines make considerably more than you think. Up to ~$350 per hour (plus benefits, retirement, etc.) 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 com…

Hopefully a single pilot law change wouldn’t also mean this. Scary.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#126

Post by csydas »

TomSwirly wrote: post #119
csydas wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. 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 syst…

> Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. 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 f…

I'm not sure why you're taking this as victim blaming. _Everyone_ needs to change, including the corporations and the very society we live in to make it a goal.

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#127

Post by thefounder »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #114
WalterBright wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a bit about the MCAS disaster. Very few people know that there were *three* incidences of MCAS runaway trim. What happened with the third one (which was actually the first incident)? It didn't crash. The pilot just turned off the stab trim system. 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. Thi…

Huh, if only there could have been some kind of training that would be required to use this new system, but that would require recertification!

Or if this system wasn't so badly designed to require yet another training class.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#128

Post by iso1631 »

wrp wrote: post #70
indus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation in aviation can be broken down into: * 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 A…

I think there is some confusion here about "automation". The benefits referred to involve providing greater access to information. The problems referred to involve putting more layers of abstraction between you and what you are controlling.

I see this in system admin. It's not a popular view, but automation is not always the best way forward. maintaining your terraform/ansible/etc ecosystem to run a single service on a single raspberry pi that sits in an office running a ticker above reception is far more work than a 5 line instruction manual. Chances are you'll never have to touch that box again until it comes time to move office, and when you do all that automation fails anyway.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#129

Post by kayxspre »

maximilianroos wrote: post #49

> But many recent examples tend to confirm the unions' argument, including a 2015 crash in Europe. A co-pilot of a Germanwings flight locked the pilot out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and 149 other people, giving credence to the ongoing argument that in an airborne crisis you need two pilots working in concert to save the aircraft How does that support the argument that two pilot…

At least another pilot can try saving the plane even if a pilot attempted to crash it. In addition to flight 9525, I remember a Mayday documentary on EgyptAir Flight 990, where American and Egyptian investigators reached a very different conclusion.

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.

Re: Airlines lobbying FAA to have only one pilot in the cockpit

#130

Post by Sporktacular »

hef19898 wrote: post #106
pigtailgirl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-- it will likely still be a human factor - maintenance/mechanical is the second cause after pilot error --

Think it through, get rid of human engineers designing those aircraft, get rid of human mechanics and engineers maintaining them, human pilots flying them and human managers driving all of that. While we are at it, get rid of human passengers, without those there won't be any dead people neither if the machines get it wrong.

And get rid of the surface population of earth what we're at it so the flying robo-bombs don't fall on anyone.
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