One Pilot or No-Pilot Aircraft

I received an email tonight from my friend Captain Bill from Dallas that he forwarded to “his list”. The email was about UPS and FEDEX trying to transition to single pilot aircraft. Now understand that in the author’s context single pilot aircraft are not the Cessna 208’s that they use to feed remote locations, rather the cargo jets they operate as the backbone of their overnight delivery operation. These companies would eliminate the Second in Command and the Flight Engineers  from the payroll and use one pilot. The idea is the remaining pilot would take off from wherever they may depart from, then turn control over to a drone operator at a base somewhere. The Pilot would retire to a lounge to sleep while the remote pilots fly the trip. Once the airplane is set up for the approach the onboard pilot would return to the controls and land the airplane.

The premise is by flying cargo, with no paying passengers, there will be less public outcry about safety. The email went on to detail how the F35 will be the last new military aircraft to have pilots in the cockpit. Going forward the military’s preference would be to deploy the remote piloting capability that we’re seeing with the predator drones deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. An extension of this would be applied commercially to freight then ultimately passenger flights.

The author retired as an airline captain after flying numerous other roles during his career. He was lamenting on the sun setting of his profession. I thought about this a bit and got a little morose about how technology displaces so many workers and how capital always seeks the greatest return.

A sobering thought which made me reflect on my own career.  I started working as a machinist running Bridgeport J Millers which turned into CNC machines. I learned to program them over time and eventually stopped cutting metal for a living after a few years to become a CNC programmer. That morphed into several other positions in technology which were a great way to make a living from 1983 until 2004. Those positions allowed me to pay my bills with enough left over to start taking flying lessons in 1985, get my pilot license, get married and buy a home in 1986. I purchased my first airplane in 1988 and my current one in 2000. My computer career culminated in several really lucrative years which peaked with the Y2K and the dot-com boom. Business starting diminishing in the commercial vacuum that was the 2000/2001 recession and largely collapsed by 2004 due to the combination punch of companies off shoring and out-sourcing domestically to low wage H1B and L3 visa holders.

One could argue that the new piloting careers will be in remote flying, with large centers of rooms filled with people operating aircraft a world away. Their mantra will be “This will create a many new high paying jobs”. And just as surely, many communities that desire these remote flying centers and will offer incentives for the airlines to move their operations there counting on the steady employment they will provide.

Additionally once transport jets can be operated with a single person any shortage of pilots qualified to fly them will disappear. That alone will put an industry of people on notice that they too can be replaced with low cost labor a half a world away.    

These days it seems as if there is no shortage of highly educated and experienced people being displaced as capital seeks its return.  As a consumer I know that the price of most everything is going up. Insurance, marketing, infrastructure and facilities,   all of the elements key to operating a business will continue to cost more as time progresses. However it seems like the only negotiable component in any delivery chain is employee pay and benefits.   Creating the perception that professional skills are commodities, interchangeable and exchangeable, is a process has proved effective time and again. But honestly we all know from recent experience what will happen to those positions once they are integrated into the “faceless, nameless, delivery model”. And if anyone actually thinks the company will pay personnel to sleep, they clearly have been sleeping themselves for the past 15 years. Those Pilots will be sorting packages while sweeping the floor of the airplane.

Here is the copy from the email I got from Bill

One-Pilot or No-Pilot Planes Steve Chealander member of the NTSB 2007-2009 is a retired American Captain. He gave a safety presentation at recurrent training about two years ago. He opened the floor for questions and one guy asked facetiously when are we going to one pilot cockpit? Chealander said that is not funny. He said Fed Ex and UPS are now, (two years ago), working on the procedures for a one-pilot long haul over-water operation. The pilot would be at the controls for takeoff and landing then go to the bunk for cruise while the guy back in Memphis would take over for the cruise. One pilot passenger flights will take a bit longer to get approved. Twelve years ago, I was Director of Operations for the Alaska Air Guard. I went to a high-level conference and this three-star General gave a presentation that said the exact same thing the major said. The only limitation on fighter aircraft now is the pilot. We have the technology to do everything from the ground and it will be a huge cost savings. No search and rescue, no life support systems, no backlash when we lose a plane. So this article is right on the money. I attended a flight safety presentation last evening from a retired AF Major test pilot from Edwards, Bill Koukourikas, now serving there as a civilian. During the course of his presentation, his statement, "No future attack military aircraft within the next 15 years will have pilots in the cockpit. The last tactical aircraft with a pilot in the cockpit will be the F-35. He also indicated that, within the next 10 or so years, all UPS and FedEx cargo flights will be with pilot-less aircraft. This prediction comes from their test shop at Edwards. All drone testing, development, etc., is taking place just south of Edwards in the Palmdale area. Sounds like a continuation of the Skunk Works developments of Lockheed which previously took place there.. Simply amazing! Hey, are we pilots a dying breed or what? This post puts me in mind of the joke that was going around the cockpit 40+ years ago: "The cockpit crew of the future will consist of a guy in a lab coat with a clip board and a monkey with a baseball bat to smack the guy in the lab coat if he touches anything." Is the single-pilot/no-pilot good or bad? It's neither, of course. It simply is. We'll individually assign a value judgment to it according to which side of the street that we now or used to work on. I hearken back to the first monorail at Disneyland. At first, no one would ride it because there was no driver. Disney hired a wino to sit in the front of the lead car as it ran between the hotel and the park. There was a set of non-functioning, but impressive-looking set of dummy controls. When the passengers exited, the wino would walk to the other end of the car and sit there for the 90 second trip and repeat his actions until his shift ended. After six months, they fired the wino, but no one noticed and the success of the monorail is history. Does the next generation of aircraft need pilots? Probably not with the state of avionics and navigation gear. Would it be seductive to the operators of these planes to have computers that never call in sick, never miss a trip, don't need a set of windows that cost more than all of the houses on your block, instrument and CRT arrays? On the other hand, what happens in the event of another 9/11 when aircraft are told to land immediately at the nearest suitable airstrip? I think of what I do today: build, repair, and maintain Windows PCs. I fully expect that, in less than five years, that you'll be buying an integrated mouse, keyboard and screen that, five seconds after you turn it on, it will have contacted The Cloud, given you access to your operating system, applications, and data -- none of which are stored on your machine. During the transition, of course, I'll have a couple of years to service those folks that are wary of move from the computer to The Cloud. But it will be of no matter. The forces that drive the industry -- companies and the governments that buy computers in huge quantities -- will insist that the technology be implemented. As folks in the workplace become used to the idea, they'll have them in their homes within a couple of years. Another wino fired (in this case, us). So goes progress. Politics will, of course, attempt to insinuate itself into the process, of course, like the buggy whip manufacturers did when the horseless carriage was starting to catch on. They got the best justice that money could buy when they bought a law that said every car had to have a buggy whip holder and whip. In the global market, however, the gummint doesn't stand a chance, so I'm not that worried about their levels of control over the Internet. I take joy and gratitude for the fact that I started in props, moved to turbines, and finished my career in aviation in jets and flew with guys that flew behind props.