Fallible Technology At Heart Of The Issue

Airline pilots from around the world are very concerned about what they consider to be a potential threat to the safety and security of passengers during commercial air travel: reducing the number of pilots on the flight deck.

Given that nearly all airliners are flown by a Captain and a First Officer, that means the safety of airline passengers would be entrusted to Single-Pilot operations. No pilot thinks this is a good idea, as evidenced by the letter sent by the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA) to Guillaume Faury, CEO of Airbus, who has been a proponent of increasing automation and reducing flight crews in airliners.

In the letter, ALPA President Jason Ambrosi outlined the reasons he urges Faury to reconsider his strategy regarding Extended Minimum Crew Operations (eMCO), that is, single-pilot operations.

The three main points against eMCO are, first, is the fact that technology in general and aircraft in particular, specifically automation and autonomous decision-making, are not infallible. 

Witness the recent CrowdStrike outage that wreaked havoc across the airline industry causing hundreds of flights cancelled and thousands of passengers and crew members stranded. The lesson to be gained is to think of technology as assistance to humans, not as replacement.

Second, humans are not infallible either. Should a flight crew member become incapacitated or ill during a single-pilot operation, the risk to everyone else on board becomes exponentially higher.

Third, many aircraft systems incorporate redundancy so if one system fails, the other can take over that function. A two-pilot crew is similar in that they share tasks and deal with emergencies much better as a team. With only one pilot in the cockpit, he or she is a potential single point of failure jeopardizing the flight and all on board.

FMI: alpa.org