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.
Click to expand...
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?
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...

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
Click to expand...
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!
 
flyingcheesehead said:
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.
Click to expand...

The variation is because the carriers that have long haul flying have augmented crews, requiring more pilots per airplane.

Also, your pay rate for United is $54 low, based on a 5 year Airbus F/O.
 
Groundpounder said:
The variation is because the carriers that have long haul flying have augmented crews, requiring more pilots per airplane.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the long haul thing made sense, though why are FedEx and UPS so much lower? They do lots of long haul as well.

I was more surprised by the variation between the various domestic (14.32 at Southwest up to 18.10 at Spirit) and regional carriers (14.27 at Envoy, 9.93 at SkyWest).
Groundpounder said:
Also, your pay rate for United is $54 low, based on a 5 year Airbus F/O.
Click to expand...
I just took everything off of airline pilot central. I thought that was awfully low given the competition.
 
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.

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
Click to expand...
So, pretty much the was it always was before the “1500 hour” rule then….
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Yeah, the long haul thing made sense, though why are FedEx and UPS so much lower? They do lots of long haul as well.

I was more surprised by the variation between the various domestic (14.32 at Southwest up to 18.10 at Spirit) and regional carriers (14.27 at Envoy, 9.93 at SkyWest).

I just took everything off of airline pilot central. I thought that was awfully low given the competition.
Click to expand...

The numbers on APC are suspect at best.

SWA vs Spirit, Spirit does redeyes, so their airplanes fly a lot more, so more crews required.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Yeah, the long haul thing made sense, though why are FedEx and UPS so much lower? They do lots of long haul as well.

I was more surprised by the variation between the various domestic (14.32 at Southwest up to 18.10 at Spirit) and regional carriers (14.27 at Envoy, 9.93 at SkyWest).

I just took everything off of airline pilot central. I thought that was awfully low given the competition.
Click to expand...
International block hours at UPS are probably similar to United or Delta for each airframe that does this flying.

Our domestic flying is what drives the numbers down. The big difference is that we will fly out of the hub to say Oklahoma City and then the airplane sits all day while trucks deliver and pick up packages for the evening departure.

Basically, we don’t fly 5 737s between the hub and whatever city every day. We fly 1 767 and carry all of our “passengers” at once. Because of this our domestic block hours per airframe are much lower than the people carriers and brings our average down.

Our numbers are probably going up compared to what APC says because we are now flying for the USPS so the planes are flying in and out of the hub twice a day to a lot more cities. We are currently in the middle of a hiring wave because of this.
 
Yall hired two of my guys recently. Putting the second one thru 38 IP requal when he gets back from ioe in mayish.
Hope the contact sticks and doesnt turn into the stagnation currently befalling the guys at purple. Cyclical industry is the understatement of the century.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
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!
Click to expand...
The 18 pilots per plane is still misleading at Delta. That number includes augmented widebodies and training/staff positions. Actual staffing per seat is about 7 pilots for each narrow body airframe.
 
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?

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.

Nauga,
and his cattle car
Click to expand...

I recall when a leaked memo from an airline on the transition to EFBs away from paper. I not positive which airline, but I think it was Continental, calculated just the weight savings of not having to carry 75lbs of paper between the two pilot crew would save an average of something like 50K USD over the course of a year per crew in fuel savings. The conversion cost including all the subscriptions, EFBs, FAA paperwork therefore had an estimate payback of less than a year.

So, go beyond just the salary of the co-pilot. Think about how much additional fuel burn as an example is saved.

Tim
 
The cost of establishing a data link system with 100% reliability as well as the costs incurred to move the enormous amounts of data may well exceed the cost of a copilot. Currently the data link technology does not exist. It would also need to be fully hardened against both jamming and attempted takeovers.
 
Don't we already have airliners that can land themselves? We have GA planes that can do it too. And they're self-contained.

The performance, including the data link, only has to be as reliable as human pilots and current technology. What happens today if the "data link" between pilots and the ground is hacked, jammed, or breaks? What if current technology or a pilot malfunctions?

Comparing proposed technology to a standard of perfection we don't expect or demand from current technology is unreasonable.
 
Lindberg said:
Don't we already have airliners that can land themselves?
Click to expand...
Sure, after a person pushes the right buttons. :p
Lindberg said:
We have GA planes that can do it too. And they're self-contained.
Click to expand...
Yeah, those planes can land ONCE by themselves, and then they'll be going to the shop for a while. There's also a lot more involved in regular aviation decisionmaking than "Land as quickly as possible at the nearest suitable airport".
Lindberg said:
The performance, including the data link, only has to be as reliable as human pilots and current technology. What happens today if the "data link" between pilots and the ground is hacked, jammed, or breaks? What if current technology or a pilot malfunctions?

Comparing proposed technology to a standard of perfection we don't expect or demand from current technology is unreasonable.
Click to expand...
The technology needs to be better than today's technology because today's technology requires humans.

Also, IMO we'll need to see an order of magnitude safety improvement if this stuff is going to happen in the short term. Get on a plane with no pilot? No thanks, you first.
 
Chris Dickens said:
Yep, and one other problem I remember discussing is how do you develop experience? Right now, pilots build up to ATP minimums and then they usually sit as an FO for a while. You gotta have 1,000 hours of 121 experience to upgrade. How does that work with only one pilot in the cockpit? New hires would, by definition, be PIC immediately. It's not impossible, but that obviously sucks a lot of experience out of the cockpit instantly.
Click to expand...
This is a real issue. I’m old enough to remember three pilot crews. I started my career sideways on the flight deck. That experience helped me immensely when I had the opportunity to move to the right seat. Many years later as a PIC in two pilot crews I would look at new hires and sometimes wonder where they found these guys and how they got hired. Then I remembered they never sat on a panel. I was flying with someone that had their hands on the controls of the jet and had only been in a crewed cockpit for 25 hours of IOE prior to flying with me. Then I felt bad for them… talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool.

If this single pilot **** actually happens pilot development will be a serious problem.
 
Chris Dickens said:
Yep, and one other problem I remember discussing is how do you develop experience? Right now, pilots build up to ATP minimums and then they usually sit as an FO for a while. You gotta have 1,000 hours of 121 experience to upgrade. How does that work with only one pilot in the cockpit? New hires would, by definition, be PIC immediately. It's not impossible, but that obviously sucks a lot of experience out of the cockpit instantly.
Click to expand...
I suspect the planes would have to be equipped for two pilots. The second seat would be for an FO in training. Once they attain sufficiency then they can be PIC and either fly solo or with another trainee.
Those longer legs would also carry a second pilot.

I for one would not have a problem being a passenger in an airliner with one pilot. I might qualify that with the expectation of better auto-pilot systems with even better auto-land systems. My problem with being a passenger is the cattle-car environment they stick you in. Not the number of pilots.
 
MauleSkinner said:
When issues pop up that the manuals DO cover, it can be way too entertaining.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's why I'm thinking single pilot airliners aren't as simple a concept as some people think.

I DO think that the automation technology will allow airliners to cut long-haul crews from 3-4 pilots to 2-3 pilots. I can see a future in the next 5-10 years where oceanic crossings have one pilot awake at cruise while the other one sleeps.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top