Ryanair's CEO Suggests Eliminating Co-Pilots 553
postbigbang writes "Ryanair's miser-in-chief Michael O'Leary now suggests eliminating co-pilots as a way to save money. Will airliners be powered by drones, or is it actually viable to have just a single pilot on passenger planes?"
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Providing he and other members of the board and senior management are forced to be on every aircraft that has only one pilot, you know, to show that they stand behind what they say, I say give it a go.
Pilots on Food Stamps (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of this segment [youtube.com] of Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story', where he discusses airline pilots that are so poorly paid that they are on food stamps and having to work second jobs to make ends meet (with potentially disastrous consequences).
Re:Waste (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for cutting waste and luxuries we can do without. But when it comes to safety and personnel this is just going too far.
The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.
They too were the "eyes and ears" on the train, served critical safety functions, and acted as a backup engineer. Better technology came along, and they were simply no longer needed. The new air brakes failed less often than the people did. Trains were safer with an automated system being responsible for a task formerly done by a human.
The exact same thing was said in 1911 when someone entered a car into the Indy 500 that carried only one person. It was unsafe; it endangered other drivers. The new technology this time was a rear-view mirror. Now this dangerous technological replacement for a live human being is a standard feature on all cars.
Also in 1911 came the development of automatic helm control for ships. The technology ended up faster, more accurate, and more reliable than a trained, experienced career helmsman. Guess what the major complaint was? Yeah...it was "unsafe"
Re:Waste (Score:5, Interesting)
I would glady pay a few extra bucks to ... not be on the same flight as typical Ryanair customers.
Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: IANACP (I Am Not a Commercial Pilot) but IAAP (I Am A Pilot)
There are probably some flights, in some aircraft, where you could train a flight crew member to do enough to relieve the captain of enough tasks so that (s)he can concentrate on landing the plane. In some cases it isn't that any one part of getting an aircraft from A to B is difficult so much as it's the sheer number of tasks at hand -- between monitoring a zillion instruments and talking to approach, then the tower, then the ground -- that you just need a second person there. Even in a small plane, there are times when having a co-pilot just handle the radio makes things a lot easier.
The actual mechanics of flying an airplane are not especially difficult, but knowing how to handle bad or emergency conditions while keeping cool is. It's easy to get overwhelmed just by the quantity of things you have to keep track of. It's plausible that, on shorter, commuter flights, a computer could do enough of those things so that one person can reasonably fly a plane.
The problem is that, while most pilots are pretty safety-conscious, there is such a huge supply of them that there will always be people willing to fly for these companies under less than ideal conditions. Particularly with the minimum number of hours (in the US, anyway) jumping to 1500 (from something like 200-250, which was indeed too low), you're going to see a lot of young guys with a lot of debt from flight school (where commercial loans are on the order of 12-18% interest) who will take any job just to pay the bills. They just don't get paid very well these days, and airline margins are tiny as it is.
Re:Some aircraft are designed to have a crew ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop through their eyelids
FTFY.
Re:Waste (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually auto piolet can take off and land a plane, what it cannot do at this point is runway taxiing. The problem is that in some cases a human can deal with unexpected circumstances better than a computer, so it is advantagous to have a human pilot onboard, and redundency is always nice incase one is injured/rendered unconcience in some sort of accident. However it would be feasable to eliminate a co-pilot if airline attendentes were given basic flight instructions (emergency landing/radio operation). In the grand scheme of things, i personally would not feel comftrable (at this point) with the knoldage that there is only one HUMAN on the plane i am on capable of manuvering and landing said aircraft.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot [wikipedia.org] (shows that take-off and landing autopilots do exist)
Re:Waste (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the two of them are there mostly to control actions of each other, to notice possible mistakes. At a certain point of technology advance, this level of verification might go the way of flight mechanics, navigators and radio operators (eliminating them was also a stupid idea, right?)
Re:Waste (Score:3, Interesting)
At any rate, we still need pilots, and will need for quite a long time, because:
1) not all airports have category 3 ILS systems
2) such systems are awesomely expensive; in fact, they are only installed on heavy-traffic locations with visibility problems
3) even if both airports have cat 3, you still need to account for alternate landing plans
Re:Waste (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to think that flight attendants only serve the purpose of serving orange juice. They are trained for safety and security purposes, including crashes and hijacking. Have you ever noticed that they are never teens who want to make a few bucks, like those who wait tables at the local pub? Yet, if the companies could save money hiring teens, rest assured they would.
And the co-pilot is not trained in safety procedures? Such as... being able to fly the aircraft in the event the pilot is incapacitated.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Waste (Score:2, Interesting)
Already fly without copilots on commercial flights (Score:3, Interesting)
What he's really proposing is increasing the size of the aircraft where it's legal to fly with one pilot. Currently you need a co-pilot if there are 12 or more passengers (flight crew are considered passengers).
Many commercial carriers who do fly the smaller aircraft, mostly to remote areas, have a co-pilot on board anyway; it's how you train your pilots.
One would assume Ryanair simply want to poach pilots with experience from other airlines; otherwise the only other conclusion is they are fine with inexperienced pilots as well.
I won't go into how Ryanair fits compared to it's competitors or how a flight on their craft is different from other carriers, but broadly speaking I wouldn't trust any proposal from Ryanair on anything.
Re:Waste (Score:1, Interesting)
That's also assuming a CAT III equipped airport will always be within a safe distance. I'm not a pilot, but it seems very plausible to me that the plane's engines might die when it's simply out of range of any CAT III airport (but easily manually landable), or that a particularly dangerous failure might require the plane to be brought down NOW rather than be glided to a CAT III airport, or that some critical failure occurs during takeoff and an emergency landing has to be made on something without CAT III (such as the Hudson River) or turned and landed on a CAT III runway in a way that a CAT III system is incapable of doing.
I guess basically this is just one big argument for keeping pilots on planes, which I believe in very strongly, partly because humans are better at improvising and partly because I love the idea of pilots and wish I was one. But in any case, if you need a pilot on a plane, you need a copilot in case the pilot is incapacitated. This is pretty simple.
Re:Waste (Score:3, Interesting)
They may be (minimally) trained to perform those functions - but it's still cost-benefit. How often are those skills used ? How much of a difference does it make on the average ? For what costs ?
All passenger-planes carry lifejackets, and has for decades. What is the cost, in space, fuel, production and maintenance ? Can you point me to a few cases where those lifejackets have saved lives ?
Most of the time, planes don't fall down, so the lifejacket is useless. If a plane -does- fall down, but does so over land, the lifejacket is useless. If a plane falls down in the sea, but in such a manner that passengers don't survive the landing, the lifejacket is useless. If a plane falls down in water in a manner that leaves passengers alive and conscious, the lifejacket is still useless if it's the north atlantic in january. If neither of the above is true, and you land, say, in the hudson, the lifejacket is of -limited- use and MAY save lives. With boats immediately around the planes, especially in summer, swimmers would be okay with or without a lifejacket, and it's entirely plausible that absent lifejackets, the deathcount in the Hudson would still have been zero.
That leaves, what exactly ? Can you point to a few -actual- (as opposed to imagined) cases where lifejackets in planes have saved lifes ?