Single Pilot Airbus?

eman1200 said:
get rid of all flight attendants, make the beverage cart self-serve, scan your boarding pass at your seat to make sure you're in the right seat, one passenger gets selected at random to be the enforcer to resolve any inflight fights that may break out. that's how u save money and make for exciting flights every time.
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I would warn of giving Spirit any ideas, but seems that problem took care of itself.
 
I’m against it. If you think they meow on guard a lot now, just wait until they don’t have an FO to talk to.
 
nauga said:
Using a rough hack of $150K for a pilot's yearly salary and $110M for a new A320, eliminating 100 left-seaters from the payroll would pay for itself in just over 7 years. You bet your ass they'd do it for that. Why do you think they're requesting the research from the major airframers and doing some of their own?
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100 pilots per airplane?!?

Looking at the fleet-wide numbers:
Delta: 18.08 pilots per airplane ($226)
United: 17.96 ($172)
American: 18.17 ($219)
Southwest: 14.32
Frontier: 16.48 ($142)
JetBlue: 16.20
Spirit: 18.10 ($176)
FedEx: 14.74
UPS: 11.97
Envoy: 14.27
Endeavor: 12.31
SkyWest: 9.93

It's quite an interesting amount of variation, but the one constant is that nobody has anywhere near 100 pilots per plane. Also, you're not eliminating the left-seaters from the payroll, you're eliminating the right seaters. Dollar amounts above are the hourly rate for those right seaters in their 5th year in an A320 for those airlines that fly the 320. It looks to me like even at Delta, eliminating half of the A320 right seaters would save only about $2 million per year per plane, so it's not worth accelerating fleet replacement by much. I would imagine that the purchase price plus additional costs will likely take at least 10 years to pay off anyway.

nauga said:
We used to joke that certain 121 carriers would trade their firstborn for a 1-count drag reduction to save pennies on a flight. It's a joke, of course, but there's some truth to it.
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Ryanair's CEO famously proposed replacing right seaters with "highly trained flight attendants". The Pilots' union proposed replacing the CEO with a highly trained flight attendant. :rofl:
Corin said:
For non-cargo, I can't see the FAA allowing single pilot, due to the unfortunate suicide risk. I would therefore assume they would rather require zero pilots, than one.
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There's a lot of reasons why I think it'll go straight from two to zero. The biggest value of the second human in the cockpit is to catch the errors made by the first human in the cockpit.
Corin said:
Another option could be a single pilot, with a non-ATP pilot as second in command to ensure the pilot cant do something stupid, as well as to help with checklists. An ATP pilot + safety pilot with 500 hours is much cheaper than 2 ATP pilots, even if it's not half the cost
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Before Colgan 3407, you theoretically only needed a commercial to be in the right seat. Most of the time, in reality, you still needed a lot more than that. 20 years ago, the numbers that would get you hired into a regional right away were 1500 TT with 500 multi.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
There's a lot of reasons why I think it'll go straight from two to zero.
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Need to keep remote pilots in the mix. Its a very mature technology and is currently being used on a number of levels. For example, all eVTOLs are designed for remote pilot ops.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Before Colgan 3407, you theoretically only needed a commercial to be in the right seat. Most of the time, in reality, you still needed a lot more than that. 20 years ago, the numbers that would get you hired into a regional right away were 1500 TT with 500 multi.
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In the hiring boom pre 9/11, some of the regionals were taking pilots at 500 TT and 100 multi for FOs.

Despite pressure from the airlines and other groups, Congress has expressed zero interest in changing the ATP FO rule. Just one reason I don't foresee single pilot 121 operations happening anytime soon. Even single pilot 135 operations right now are dependent on having fully functioning autopilots and other requirements. Even then many 135 customers still pay the extra expense to have two pilots in aircraft that are single pilot certified for their own reassurance.

I remember as a kid in the 80s that wanted to be a pilot, all of the industry literature of the time said we wouldn't need pilots by the turn of the century. All aircraft would be unmanned. That deadline passed over 20 years ago.

They also said we would all have flying cars too...
 
I want my pilot to have blood in the game, not a remote pilot.

Taken to the extreme, how would some of the historical air carrier accidents with survivors have fared without the pilotS doing their thang?

How about a different extreme - how much financial opportunity was lost over the last 50-100 years on dual pilots if you divide the difference in their salary vs one remote pilot (or single pilot on board) by the number of lives lost? It’s putting a $/life and that’s what everyone is really talking about.
 
nauga said:
Oof. Sometimes you play the numbers, sometimes the numbers play you.

Nauga,
who owns his mistakes
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No worries, that number just stuck out to me because in the 135 world we hired 4 pilots per plane. I knew the airlines would have more because they're more of a 24/7 operation. OK, not really 24 hours a day, but the airplanes are certainly flying longer than one crew's duty cycle.

I didn't know the answer either, which is why I went looking... Both the numbers and the differences themselves were interesting!
 
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