Single pilot flights coming in 2025?

With the announcement by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA; their FAA) that single pilot evaluation will begin in earnest — awarding $1,100,000 each to participants during testing — the clock is ticking down — to a future commercial airline flight with only one pilot up front.

The emergence of autonomous unmanned aircraft systems (such as ILS auto landing, TCAS for collision avoidance, and auto-navigation via GPS) all bear a huge potential for both safety and efficiency gains already.

Airbus Chief Technical Officer Sabine Klauke added, “There are a lot of possibilities — artificial intelligence, automatization. We can bring synergies between the divisions. We are already looking at certain flight phases, the cruise part for example. I cannot say today on which aircraft this will be implemented first but we will bring it all on when the time is right.”

Pilot error needs to be evaluated here as well. Projects to be tested must ensure that the cockpit design is, according to EASA, “appropriately tolerant of errors, noting that when operating as single pilot, there is no scope for cross checking by another pilot.”

Overall, it is crucial to assess failure cases from a single pilot perspective. Unlike Boeing, which is saying nothing for now, Deutsche Aircraft’s Martin Neusseler is outspoken.

“We will require new design solutions, such as securing aircraft control in case of flight-control jamming, or incapacity of a single pilot.”

Private aircraft have already developed single and no pilot emergency landing systems that, in fair weather and over America with our myriad of small runways, already are succeeding with emergency landings. The issue with a large commercial aircraft is the incredible instrument and systems’ complication, the selection of automated-suitable runways, and, never least, security issues having a single pilot in command.

Some of the solutions may come from the military with their control via telemetry of drone aircraft, which take off and land thousands of miles away from their “handlers” (video-game pilots on a distant base).

In the end, the early testers and future adopters are working on a game plan that requires a new cockpit team, a system where a machine and a human interact. Where the system learns to interpret voice commands and attributes, stress and fatigue, and then can prioritize short-term flight safety measures with ground control in real time.

The ongoing fear of pilots, however, is that real-time in-flight incidents are never properly valued by airlines or manufacturers, nor are they openly shared across all flight training — until an accident provokes real open-to-the-public changes.

Bertrand de Courville, a retired Air France pilot sums it up nicely, citing one month, November 2019, “There were more than 100 incidents [unreported across all platforms]. Engine failure in flight, hydraulic leak, bird ingestion, weather radar malfunction, rejected takeoff… all required near-real-time decision and sometimes instant decisions… In other words, humans are essential sensors, not machines.”

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now resides in New Mexico.