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?"
Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest the advance of modern technology has made co-pilots possibly unnecessarily redundant.
I would gladly take the additional risk and save a few bucks.
Flying is much safer than driving even if our monkey brains can't handle the concept of rare medium scale catastrophes vs common small scale ones.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe so but on Ryanair, they are mostly trained to sell you stuff.
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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.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever someone mentions how planes can fly themselves these days, I'm reminded Northwest Flight 188: the one that overshot MSP by 150 miles.
Clearly, if planes can fly themselves, it should have landed on its own and not overshot.
Re:Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
"They are trained for safety and security purposes, including crashes and hijacking."
They exist because of government regulations mandating certain staffing levels and minimal emergency abilities. Sorry, but anyone who wears high heals is not there for safety and security purposes. That apparel in direct opposition to effective safety and security measures is allowed to be worn indicates that their primary purpose lies elsewhere.
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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 l
Re:Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
If Ryanair scraps the flight attendants it loses the ability to try to sell stuff to a captive audience. That's not going to happen.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
On short flights and budget airlines, they hardly serve a purpose.
... unless something goes wrong. For instance, in the US Air LaGuardia Airport->Hudson River flight, the flight attendants were critical to evacuating the passengers safely. The pilots can't take care of the passengers in those sorts of situations, because they're busy trying to save the plane.
Of course, I should point out that the second option is an excellent idea.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Interesting)
I would glady pay a few extra bucks to ... not be on the same flight as typical Ryanair customers.
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and you're still too poor to afford a private jet.
Congratulations, you're a tool.
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save a few bucks.
You won't be saving anything. The loss of a $40k-75k/year co-pilot will save the company $40k-75k/year. Spread that out over all the passengers/year. You really think Ryan Air will pass those savings on to you in the form of a couple bucks? They won't.
The coin-operated bathroom idea wasn't designed to pass savings on to the customer either.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Commuter pilots in the US have been known to start as low as 19,000/year (less than a manager at Taco Bell, accordign to M. Moore).
Employees are estimated to cost around double what they are paid in various taxes and overhead.
Salary != expense (Score:3)
That wouldn't just be the salary. An employee costs the company far more than just their salary.
Common figures are 30-60% of salary in benefits.
Consider healthcare, training, per diem, taxes, middle management for the extra pilots, recruitment, equipping, etc...
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a story.
Once upon a time, the Captain had to tinkle. As he shut the cockpit door (which is required to be locked, btw) somehow the door slipped into Uber-Lockdown-Mode (aka guys with forks want in). There is a special trick to opening it like this, and it's only doable from inside. The FO didn't know it.
The moral? He had to chill out with the rest of the passengers and flight crew for the duration while the FO took care of everything.
Had there been only one crew, then it would have been interesting. They have autolanding and autobraking systems. Would you bet your life on them? (nothing being said of how they would be enabled remotely, not currently possible).
Random acts of god/nature/whatever could also seek to relieve your flight of your captain as well. Having the second man not only distributes the workload, but provides some redundancy here. The workload division is a good thing too. Imagine the flight director malfunctioned. There goes your autopilot. Imagine trying to keep the plane pointed forward and on-speed while checking your map chart, dealing with ATC and the radios, and any number of other little things that come up.
Re:Waste (Score:4, Informative)
Commercial airlines are already required by law to do a certain percentage of their landings automatically. They just don't tell you...
ref [airliners.net]
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Commercial airlines are already required by law to do a certain percentage of their landings automatically. They just don't tell you...
what you mean is that pilots must remain proficient in Cat 3 and 3a approaches - so they must maintain currency with those procedures by performing one every once in a while. This currency can also be accomplished in a simulator.
Cat 3 and 3a autoland has been around for a long time. (1965)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland [wikipedia.org]
Trying to do one of these without a co-pilot is ill-advised (1 set eyes on instruments another looking out for the runway environment) - don't forget about radio calls, communication with home base / fuel management / emergencies / etc. I flew very complex, very large planes - and I can tell you that there is a real good reason for at least two in the cockpit. j
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest that an AI could replace their CEO.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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Crowdsourcing is the answer to everything! (Score:3, Funny)
Plus, they could crowdsource all their DBA needs here on slashdot.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Co-pilots are there to handle things in case the pilot gets sick or something. If modern technology has made co-pilots unncesessary, it has made pilots unnecessary, period. If it hasn't made pilots redundant, then it has not made co-pilots redundant, either.
Anyway, I think this is a really, really, really stupid idea. You are saving the $10,000-$100,000/year pilot salary and risking the $50-$150 million plane. Even from a corporate sociopath perspective, this is a really dumb idea.
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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:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I don't think that's correct. I think, in an emergency, two pilots probably improve the odds dramatically over one.
If there is an emergency, with two pilots, one can concentrate on keeping the plane in the air while the other deals with how they are going to get themselves safely on the ground.
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Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically. There was one such case just last June on Continental Airlines, and another in February of 2008.... So yeah, if you're willing to increase the number of large airplane crashes by almost one per year, go ahead and cut out the copilots.
The idea of training a flight attendant to perform a landing in the case of a pilot's death means that you would be trusting a minimally trained "pilot" to land a large jet with several hundred people aboard about once per year. That's absolute insanity. That's not cost cutting. It's homicide.
I know I would stop flying IMMEDIATELY on any airline that even CONSIDERED doing that (which means at this point, I'd base jump off the Empire State Building before I'd fly Ryanair, BTW). If your airline's management is stupid enough to consider that, you almost certainly are cutting corners dangerously in other areas, e.g. maintenance. After all, by that same standard, you don't *need* to inspect all those things with such regularity. Most of the time, the parts won't fail even after twice that time....
Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable. There are ways for technology to reduce the need for a copilot in this day of fly-by-wire aircraft. However, what this guy is suggesting puts him beyond bonkers straight to psychopathic, homicidal maniac. Their CEO shouldn't be leading an airline. He should be locked up in a padded room somewhere so that he can't harm himself or others.
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The idea of training a flight attendant to perform a landing in the case of a pilot's death means that you would be trusting a minimally trained "pilot" to land a large jet with several hundred people aboard about once per year. That's absolute insanity. That's not cost cutting. It's homicide.
You're assuming a manual landing. It should be reasonably easy to train a flight attendant to program an autopilot to land.
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In aircraft that are equipped for CAT III, sure, though many are not. Either way, it still would make me really uncomfortable to know that one flight per year was being flown by someone who could not take over adequately if autoland kicks out for any reason.
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So how uncomfortable are you with the knowledge that most crashes are due to human error (and large of those - pilot error) / why apparently it doesn't stop you from flying?
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it is ridiculous.
In the cockpit you have two pilots for a reason. One is PF (Pilot Flying). One is PNF (Pilot Not Flying). The PF is responsible for actually flying the plane. The PNF is responsible for all the checks and offloading to ensure the pilot can take care of the plane. He reads the checklists, handles communication and everything else. And even with this set of checks one of the most common causes of accidents is "Pilot Error". Removing the checking function of the PNF in that situation is beyond insane. It would take us back 30 years in aircraft security and completely ignores the whole CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) concept. You should think of removing the CNF as making a law that all drivers on the road must speak in their mobile phone and fiddle with the radio while driving.
Also, better technology has not made airplanes easier to fly. It has made them safer and more powerful, but not easier. It's like claiming that a modern nuclear powerplant doesn't need any engineers because it's all automatic... Planes are large and very complex machines. More technology means more failure modes.
Re:Waste (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly right. People don't understand what a co-pilot is. No airline refers to the second cockpit member as a co-pilot. They are both pilots. One is a Captain and the other is a First Officer--the sole difference being one of seniority, not training or skill. They two typically take turns flying every other leg, and both are required to balance the workload. No transport airplane will be certified for single-pilot operation unless it has been specifically designed for one pilot, and none have. There are good reasons to have two humans up there--to back each other up, and use their combined judgement to handle situations when things are not normal. It's not a matter of technology replacing the pilot's mechanical skills. A computer would have to replace the pilot's mind, and we're not at that point yet. Certainly it's crazy for any Windows IT person to suggest that technology is reliable enough to hold the lives of hundreds in its silicon hands. They of all people should know better.
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It's also a catchall. Most accidents are not the result of a single "pilot error." They're the result of MANY small errors that build up, the last piece being the final 'pilot error.'
Take Comair 191 for example, the one that took the short runway. You have two tired pilots, a closed taxi lane, outdated airport charts, a lone controller in the tower. So while, in the end, it was a 'pilot error,' there were issues all over, any one of which could have changed the outcome of the flight.
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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
Re:Waste (Score:4, Informative)
That's a dangerous overgeneralization to make. Some people might misunderstand that sentence and interpret that to mean that any autopilot-equipped aircraft is capable of doing this. That is not the case.
First, the avionics aboard many planes in service are not configured from the manufacturer for autoland (e.g. every 737 that American Airlines flies [airliners.net]). These can only do "coupled" approaches.
Second, many smaller planes and older planes are not fully fly-by-wire, so they would require a serious retrofit to make them capable of full autoland.
Third, not all airports have the facilities to support autoland.
If you limit yourself only to fully fly-by-wire planes and limit yourself to major airports, that statement is true. However, the autopilot system in a sizable percentage of aircraft in the air today are NOT capable of autonomous landing.
And, of course, as you alluded to, in the event of an autoland glitch, the system kicks out and you're back under full manual control, which means you still NEED a pilot. So yeah, it's possible, but it's not a good idea.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Some people might misunderstand that sentence and interpret that to mean that any autopilot-equipped aircraft is capable of doing this. That is not the case.
First, the avionics aboard many planes in service are not configured from the manufacturer for autoland (e.g. every 737 that American Airlines flies [airliners.net]). These can only do "coupled" approaches.
The 737 is delivered from Boeing fully capable of autoland. All modern airplanes these days have at least 2 completely separate autopilots (the 757, 767, and 747-400 have 3 autopilots). However, AA orders their 737s with HUDs (Head Up Display) which are certified by the FAA for the pilot to hand-fly a Cat IIIb approach (700 feet forward visibility, no ceiling). The cost of the HUD quickly pays for itself since the airline does not have to maintain the airplane's autoland certification because the pilots are doing the approaches, not the airplane.
A "coupled" approach simply means that both autopilots are active at the same time, which is normally the case during an autoland; no transport jet's autopilot is certified for a single-autopilot autoland. Coupling the autopilots allows for cross-checking and either fail-passive or fail-operational autoflight. Typically, a two-autopilot airplane like the 737 is certified as fail-passive: a failure of the one autopilot will render the airplane unable to complete the autoland but will not dramatically affect the attitude of the airplane as the pilot takes over. A three-autopilot airplane has both fail-passive and fail-operational characteristics: fail-operational means one autopilot can drop out and the remaining two can still perform the autoland; a second failure is fail-passive and the pilot has to do something.
Second, many smaller planes and older planes are not fully fly-by-wire, so they would require a serious retrofit to make them capable of full autoland.
Fly-by-wire is not a requirement for autoland. Transport-category aircraft have been doing autolands since the 1960s.
If you limit yourself only to fully fly-by-wire planes and limit yourself to major airports, that statement is true. However, the autopilot system in a sizable percentage of aircraft in the air today are NOT capable of autonomous landing.
There are almost no commercial aircraft flying around these days that don't have autoland capabilities. The last of the older generation jet aircraft such as the DC-9 and the 727 are mostly out of major airline passenger service. Any commercial transport jet made after around 1980 has autoland capability by default.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it can. An autopilot/autothrottle/autoland system can fly an ILS approach, flare and touchdown. It's called CAT III ILS and isn't new technology. It has been around for a few decades. Both JFK and Heathrow have CAT III ILS approaches.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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To be fair, the guy who landed safely in the Hudson River is a "hero" precisely because he landed safely.
Had he crashed 5 meters short of the Hudson River, taking out a couple of tall buildings on the way, there would have been plenty of "WTF was he thinking" type of questions.
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And they are also going to charge £1 for a visit to the loo.
So what happens when you run out of coins? Wet your seat? That would put an end to the fee fairly soon.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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Before I get hit with a straw man, I am in no way saying that computers are infallible. Of course they are programmed by humans, and mistakes will be made. I am just saying that the error rate for computers is probably less than that for humans. We kinda suck at not making mistakes.
Old joke (Score:5, Funny)
Frankly, I believe that computers make fewer mistakes than humans, so I would in fact prefer a plane with a single (or no) human pilots.
Reminds me :
Q: What is the ideal cockpit crew?
A: A pilot and a dog...the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot in case he tries to touch anything.
Re:Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
"Frankly, I believe that computers make fewer mistakes than humans, so I would in fact prefer a plane with a single (or no) human pilots."
I've got 26 years as a tactical aircraft avionics tech, engine weenie, and crew chief, from manual control (Bronco) to hydraulically-boosted and electronically supplemented flight controls (Phantom) to excellent fly-by-wire flight controls (F-16 A/B/C/D) and in my experienced opinion...
FUCK THAT NONSENSE! We aren't there yet for passenger applications. UAVs and drones are still early in their development, let alone autonomous systems.
Pilots fuck up, systems fuck up, and one can compensate for the other which is a good reason to have both.
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May depend on what kind of aircraft Ryanair flies, if previous discussions of air safety had any substance to them.
Recall the Air France flight that came down over the Atlantic, and it led to a debate of human vs. computer control in passenger aircraft. Lots of it boiled down to Americans and Europeans beating the our-engineers-are-smarter-than-you drum at each other, despite the fact that both Airbus and Boeing have comparable and very good safety records with their respective approaches. If anything the d
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You'd gain valuable cockpit space for first FIRST class seats that get wall to wall windows which would help for co
Oh dear... (Score:2)
Emergency decisions could be controlled from the ground.
Because there'd never be any sort of interference between the plane and the ground...
Hijack this, bitch.
So now it can be hijacked with a cell phone, instead of box cutters. And now the TSA will start banning personal electronics on planes, making air travel even less pleasant, even though it would also be possible to do the same thing from the ground.
Thanks for that.
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:4, Insightful)
trains... cars... boats...
Q. What do these things have in common?
A. They don't go 500+ mph or fly.
Right now, our ground-side air traffic control systems are still a relic of the 50s.
Until that changes, there is a limit on how much technology you can put in the plane to compensate.
BTW - Those guys at the Indy 500 rely heavily on their track-side spotters to tell them if they can make a move or not.
Not only that, they communicate through the spotters to pass messages to other drivers on the track.
Just because he isn't in the car, doesn't mean he isn't co-piloting.
The 3rd dimension (Score:3, Insightful)
You have heard of 3D? Well, trains and ships and automibiles lack it. They travel on a flat service. Planes don't.
What happens to a train whose engines stops Nothing.
What happens to a ship whose engines stop? Nothing.
What happens to a car whose engines stop? Nothing.
What happens to a plane whose engines stops? It crashes into the ground.
The difference and one that should really be obvious is that with ground based vehicles, if something goes wrong, you got more time and the only safety procedure that m
Re:The 3rd dimension (Score:4, Informative)
You have heard of 3D? Well, trains and ships and automibiles lack it. They travel on a flat service. Planes don't.
Exactly, lacking that third dimension makes it far more dangerous. You have both the introduced weak points of connecting to the 2D surface (think tyre blow-outs, trains derailing, etc) and also critical reliance on brakes. With planes 3D removes these weak spots and you have an extra dimension in which to take evasive action.
What happens to a ship whose engines stop? Nothing.
Not true. In the case of a large oil tanker you end up with a massive environmental disaster, as we've seen numerous times.
What happens to a car whose engines stop? Nothing.
Sure, only 11M annual road accidents in the US alone. Really safe mode of transport.
What happens to a plane whose engines stops? It crashes into the ground.
Or you could just glide down and land. Apparently even possible to land on a river I hear.
Even terrorists know this. That is why ships and trains have rarely been hijacked. There is no urgency.
The shipping around Somalia will be pleased that you've managed to alter reality to make them more safe.
Wonder how come you forgot to mention the REAL reason brake men could be removed, the simply switch that in the event of a disaster happening to the driver, the train coming to an automatic stop. Wonder why you left this device out? Because it would ruin your entire idiotic rant of "X works in situation Y, so it will work in situation Z"?
That doesn't always [wikipedia.org] work [wikipedia.org]. But aren't you arguing againt yourself? The real reason you can lose the co-pilot is that the plane can land itself in an emergency.
And oh gosh, that is OFTEN the cause of SMALL aircrafti with SINGLE pilots crashing. That is why if you fly passengers, you need two pilots.
By your reasoning, that is why cars, trains, subway systems, trams, boats and every other vehicle needs two drivers/pilots.
Phillip.
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A driver/pilot CAN stop a train, car, boat in near enough any circumstances though.
"Moderating demands" has nothing to do with it. Planes are a lot more complicated than any of those other vehicles. They're complicated enough with 2 trained crew plus a sophisticated computer system.
If anything goes wrong on a train that does not immediately destroy it, there is a good chance that it can be rescued. The same cannot be said of planes. Taking away layers of safety from such a complex device is not smart, regar
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so you have to adjust the schedules for all trains on that line. Fast.
No you just have to leave the red signal behind the train red until the train leaves the section of track it is on.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which will work great until that pilot has a coronary at 35,000 feet.
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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.
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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.
I dunno ... never underestimate the power of human stupidity, particularly when there's money involved. I mean, this particular board has tolerated a fruitcake as CEO for some time now.
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I dunno ... never underestimate the power of human stupidity, particularly when there's money involved. I mean, this particular board has tolerated a fruitcake as CEO for some time now.
Boards don't generally view CEOs who generate huge and increasing profits, and vast quantities of free publicity, as fruitcakes.
Re:Huh? - Plenty of work to keep both pilots busy (Score:4, Informative)
There's an article, by a commercial pilot, about the myths of jets able to "fly themselves" at http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2009/11/19/askthepilot342 [salon.com] . You have to scroll down a little to get to the meat of it, but there's plenty up there to keep 2 people busy.
He also talks about how busy things can get in an earlier article http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2007/08/31/askthepilot243/index.html [salon.com] .
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Cathay Pacific, Pilot Rates, B747 Cargo, 13 flights per month = $14,343.
That's $172,116 a year, working essentially 156 days out of 365, with maybe another 156 days layover in foreign hotels and a couple of months vacation.
My heart fucking bleeds for them, the poor underpaid loves.
I've NEVER even SEEN $172,116 all at the same time in one place.
You don't want the best, you want cheap. (Score:5, Informative)
Ryanair has been coming up with more revolutionary ways to save money:
Let stewardesses land planes:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7981643/Ryanair-boss-says-air-stewardesses-should-be-allowed-to-land-planes-in-an-emergency.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Let passengers stand:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/5753477/Ryanair-to-make-passengers-stand.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Re:You don't want the best, you want cheap. (Score:5, Funny)
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Let's not forget his charging passengers for using the plane's toilets:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7914542.stm [bbc.co.uk]
People! RyanAir's CEO makes these crazy suggestions for the news coverage! He has no intention of going through with any of these mad schemes. He just does it because he believes any publicity is good publicity.
And judging by RyanAir's share price on the London [yahoo.com] and Dublin [yahoo.com] stock exchange since last week when this was first announced, it's a plan that has some merit...
Eliminating co-pilots? (Score:2)
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I suggest sending them to sleep or maybe browsing Facebook...
Well, in the U.S., FAA rules prevent pilots from taking naps, I understand. Not sure about Facebook though.
Slashdot suggests eliminating VPs to reduce cost (Score:5, Funny)
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Should an emergency arise, the CEO could ring a bell and a specially trained board member could come in and take over running the company.
Yes. And that board member will have a large red, rubber nose and have huge, goofy shoes and will be named "Bozo."
What could go wrong? (Score:2)
It's actually very smart, if evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's actually very smart, if evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrary to popular believe, any publicity is NOT good publicity. Anyone willing to even propose such a blatant risk to the lives of their customers isn't a company I will ever do business with.
You'd better tell Ryanair that. They are possibly the only company I've ever met which has turned appalling customer service into an art form of which they are proud.
How About... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because getting rid of the back-up pilot is such a wonderful idea. How about I eliminate Ryanair as an airline I'll travel on?
More typical wankery from the master thereof. (Score:5, Insightful)
This jerk gets publicity for his cheap-ass airline by making outrageous threats, most of which are unlawful in any case. Not long ago it was pay toilets in the plane. Then it was standing room only, no seats, with harnesses to hold you in place. It's just a way of getting print space in newspapers that emphasizes how low his fares are.
He is, in short, a troll. Buy some advertising and STFU.
Re: (Score:2)
He is, in short, a troll.
I think you're right. He'd fit right in here on Slashdot: of course, he'd either get "+5 Funny" or "-5: Troll." Hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps if they need to cut required costs, then they have no business being in business? Surely it's not impossible to make a no-frills airline actually work out. Oh wait it is because if you're too competitive no airports will let you land there because they don't want you competing with their airlines.
Why pay *anyone*? (Score:2)
How about just offering free flights for pilots, waitresses, and doctors? Kind of like the self-checkout at the grocery store...
Better Idea (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You've never seen a passenger throw a hissy fit, have you? Or start screaming? The FAs may be useless until the shit hits the fan, and then there aren't enough of them. They aren't there to serve drinks; they are there to keep the passengers in line.
I have 2 pilots in my family; it's hard, stressful work that takes a toll on their families and their own health.
Eliminating more staff is not the way to go. Do you really want the cheapest, least experienced person at the helm and in the cabin? That's fine
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:Pilots on Food Stamps (Score:5, Informative)
Frontline: Flying Cheap: "A hard look at the risks that may go with cheap flying."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/ [pbs.org]
When you start off flying commercial, almost every starts at a regional airline. You may be buying a United or Continental ticket, but it's a seperate airline that codeshares with the big boys. Those co-pilots on those aircraft are making between $18K-28K/year, are only paid from when the cabin door closes until it opens at the destination, and have their schedules dicked with by the airline's scheduling/routing department so that, while technically compliant with labor laws, they're extremely exhausting and some even nap in the cabin. Keep this in mind the next time you shop for your airline ticket based on price.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep. People love to blame 'evil' CEO's and 'greedy' businesses for cutting corners - but the root cause of their seemingly 'evil' and 'greedy' practices is the Wal-Mart mentality.
And it's the same over on Wall Street - Wall Street isn't some monolithic organism that gorges on increased profits. Wall Street is machine for appeasing the people who insist their retirement accounts have a high enough yield so they can wait
God is my co-pilot (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously (Score:4, Informative)
I'm all for leaning on technology, but this just seems like profiteering
Just in case you weren't paying attention, there has been a big move in the US to increase regulations on commuter carriers who have driven down pilot pay and driven up pilot hours in order to increase profits. A lack of pilot training and an over reliance of the autopilot was seen as a direct cause of the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-07-30-aviation-safety_N.htm [usatoday.com]
IMHO, this makes ryanair's request unreasonable
Some aircraft are designed to have a crew ... (Score:2)
Re:Some aircraft are designed to have a crew ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the job of a pilot is to keep an eye on all the automation. The problem is that its very difficult to stay alert for long periods of time waiting for a very rare failure. Two pilots tend to keep each other awake and alert. (Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop - but that is such a rare event that it made the national news).
Humans and automation tend to fail in very different ways - humans are much better at dealing with unexpected situations, automation is much better at doing repetitive jobs without mistakes.
Having a second pilot probably adds about $1/hour per passenger seat (including all overhead etc) - at the moment I think its still a good deal.
Re: (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.
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:Maybe, but not necessarily a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of curiosity: Could some of these tasks and procedures be simplified, perhaps with the help of technology? For instance, exactly what information does the pilot need from/provide to the approach, tower and ground? Couldn't any of this be sent automatically by computers?
Pilots that I've talked to explain you'd pretty much need Nobel prize quality strong AI. Look at that squall line. Is it going to develop or get weaker? And how does that interact with my judgment of the quality of the plane and the quality of my flying? Meanwhile I see a fresh NOTAM shutting down the escape route to my backup airport... or is it? And trust me, even native English speakers misinterpret NOTAMs (with sometimes very bad consequences). Meanwhile fuel filter #5 is clogged but not enough to replace, while transfer pump 2 is running slow but not bad enough to replace, and the peculiar loading of cargo today means strange weight and balance issues ... should I top up tank 3 and risk running out of gas due to transfer failure or top up tank 2 and burn so much extra fuel due to being out of balance that we might run out of gas ... Or could I try a strange reconfiguration never tried before and pump tank 3 into tank 1 and then tank 1 into tank 2 bypassing all the questionable gear? And how does that interact with the development of the squall line storm meaning higher turbulence at least or maybe needing to divert.
Non-pilots think the work required is simple control system theory, just need a fancier autopilot. Can't you replace that whole paragraph about with a simple linear equation or something?
Passengers (Score:4, Funny)
They should get rid of all the passengers. Think about it....they wouldn't have to pay for meals, they could fire all the flight attendants and save that salary money, the seats on the planes wouldn't be needed anymore. They'd even save on fuel, since the planes would be so much lighter without all those people on board.
In other cost savings news... (Score:4, Funny)
RyanAir's co-pilots suggest eliminating the CEO position as a way to cut costs.
After all, when cutting costs, start first with things that don't contribute directly to the bottom line, and don't affect safety...
Put your money where you mouth is, O'Leary (Score:3, Insightful)
Pilots don't just fly the plane (Score:3, Insightful)
However, that's not really the point. People seem to think that all a pilot has to do, is fly the airplane (or even easier, make the autopilot fly the airplane) pretty much like a bus driver. If they saw us "work" during cruise flight, they would probably see this suspicion confirmed. However, as a copilot, I quite frequently have to point out minor and sometimes even major mistakes of the captain, that might have resulted in serious incidents. And the same happens in the other direction when I'm flying (both pilots fly just as often). Misunderstood instructions from air traffic control, finger trouble with the autopilot, missing a level off altitude on a procedure, etc... Lots of accidents are blamed on pilot error, imagine what that rate would be if there wasn't a second pilot to catch the first one's mistakes. Times ten would be a conservative estimate.
And then we're just talking about normal operations. We get simulator training every six months, and you should see how high the workload is then. Engine failures, electrical problems, bad weather, lots of checklists to do, judging the situation and the best course of action while one pilot has to manually fly a crippled airplane with a third of the instruments still working... there's absolutely no way you could let just one pilot do this kind of thing safely.
O'Leary is not that stupid. He's just getting free publicity, spreading the word how relentlessly he's cutting costs to keep ticket prices low. And they're not even that low if you miss out on the few promotional tickets that are advertised everywhere. The rest of the passengers often end up spending more than on a real airline.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
To be a flight attendant in Australia you have to have your First Aid level 3. I bet you're one of those passengers who yells "where's my beer, honey" whilst wiggling an empty cup in the air and the reason I hate other passengers. I'd like to remind you who you'll be relying on when you get hurt on an aircraft (wont be me, I have a first aid level 1 (workplace) and absolute contempt