Planemakers look to a pilotless future

BRUSSELS — Every commercial flight has two pilots at the controls — but some planemakers are now designing cockpits that need fewer pilots, or someday even none.

So far, their airline customers have been quiet on the issue, but pilots’ unions across the globe are getting louder, saying any fewer than two pilots is dangerous.

The idea is most active in Europe, where French manufacturers Airbus and Dassault are pushing for regulators to allow passenger planes to operate with only one pilot in the cockpit for the majority of a long-haul flight.

“It’s a commercially-driven initiative with enormous risks for passengers, for pilots, and for cabin crew,” said Otjan de Bruijn, a captain with Dutch carrier KLM and president of the European Cockpit Association, the largest pilots’ union on the Continent.

Dassault and Airbus did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

It isn’t just theoretical. Manufacturers are actively developing and testing a host of autonomous flight projects, including for commercial uses. And EASA, the European Union’s aviation regulator, is considering a concept that would have two pilots in the cockpit only for take-off and landing. For the rest of the flight, the second pilot would rest outside the cockpit, swapping shifts mid-way through a long-haul flight.

EASA is expected to sign off on this by 2027. An official with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is not considering any of the proposals that EASA is weighing.

Boeing, which did not respond to a request for comment, isn’t actively working on the technology, and no U.S. airline CEOs have publicly embraced the reduced-crew concept EASA is exploring.

But U.S. pilot unions are up in arms nonetheless, and are warning that any successful effort in Europe will put competitive pressures on U.S. airlines and the FAA to follow suit.

The Air Line Pilots Association, the largest pilot union in the U.S., started a campaign called “Safety Starts With Two” along with their European counterparts, hoping to take their argument straight to passengers who might also find the idea alarming.

EASA’s communications director, Janet Northcote, said the agency would require manufacturers to demonstrate that safety levels are “at least as high as in current two-pilot operations” to get reduced crew operations certified.

“Even recent-generation planes, such as the Airbus A350, would need enhancements and design features or systems not required today to ensure that they can be safely operated” in the configuration under consideration, she said. “Future aircraft could be designed with such operations in mind from the outset.”

But de Bruijn said the same level of safety can never be guaranteed with fewer people in the cockpit. He argued that only having one pilot at the controls would remove an important backup in case a pilot has a health issue, or some ill intent.

Take the 2015 case of Germanwings Flight 9525, where one pilot locked himself in the cockpit while the captain was on a bathroom break, then intentionally crashed the plane into a mountain. All 150 people on board perished.

He also pointed out that when a pilot takes a toilet break (“unless you want to wear a diaper”), there would be a few minutes where there’s no one in the cockpit.

“What if there was a request from air traffic control? There’d be no response. They’d need direct, quick action to avoid a conflict to avoid a crash in midair. So you can imagine that there’s nobody to control at the time that will just lead to fatalities.”

Empty cockpits

The concept of letting one pilot sleep while another works in the cockpit on long-haul flights is a precursor to only having one pilot on board, according to a working paper presented by dozens of mostly European nations last year at the International Civil Aviation Organization, a global standard-setting body for aviation.

While in the past, many aircraft had two pilots and a flight engineer, two-pilot cockpits are now the norm. However, on longer flights crews can have three or even four pilots to allow them to rotate and not overshoot maximum flying times.

Pilot unions fear once cockpits are down to one pilot, it will inevitably lead to a world where planes are completely automated.

And though Airbus did not answer requests for comment, in 2019, Christian Scherer, a top executive at the European planemaker, said the company had already developed the technology needed to not only fly with one pilot — but without any pilots.

“When can we introduce it in large commercial aircraft? That is a matter we are discussing with regulators and customers, but technology-wise, we don’t see a hurdle,” Scherer told the Associated Press at the time.

And, the piloting scheme under consideration at EASA is referenced in Airbus’ “Autonomous flight” innovations web page.

Cathay Pacific, which according to Reuters was working with Airbus on a reduced crew plane in 2021, didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request for comment. Lufthansa, which Reuters reported has worked on a single pilot plane program, denied it was looking into the idea.

“There was never a plan or a program at Lufthansa for a single-pilot-aircraft and there is none currently existing,” the airline’s spokesperson Boris Orgursky said in an emailed statement.

Safety concerns, not to mention potential consumer reaction to a plane flown without a backup pilot, might explain why the industry isn’t eager to talk about increasing automation — at least for now.

An Ipsos poll conducted in 2018 on behalf of the Air Line Pilots Association found that 81 percent of those surveyed said they wouldn’t be comfortable with a pilotless airplane, and 80 percent said having two pilots working together was the best way to handle an emergency.

″[Passengers] like to think there are two pilots up there,” Emirates boss Tim Clark said earlier this year when quizzed on the concept.

Carriers are just as interested in the concept as manufacturers, said de Bruijn, who added that the appeal for them is obvious.

“In their view, they’re reducing the fatigue of pilots because there’s more time to rest on-board,” he said.

Accelerated automation

Airplanes and their designs have moved steadily toward increasing automation as technology has advanced, and airplanes now already fly semi-autonomously, although with pilot oversight. But the push toward reducing the number of pilots on board may take on new urgency amid complaints from airlines that they can’t hire enough pilots to keep up with demand.

Martha Neubauer, a senior analyst at AeroDynamic advisory consultancy, agreed that pilot workforce challenges could be driving interest in plans for airlines.

“[It] has increased the need for reduced crew operations since the low supply of pilots is constraining airline capacity and causing schedule disruptions,” she said, although she added that the shortage also provides pilot unions with strong bargaining power with carriers.

But she believes that reduced crew probably won’t have a huge impact on airlines’ bottom lines.

“Crew costs are only 10 to 15 percent of an airline’s cost structure,” she said. “This includes pilots and flight attendants, so even if reduced crew operations could cut pilot costs in half, total airline costs would only go down by 3 to 5 percent. Airlines must balance this against the concern for safety.”

ALPA President Jason Ambrosi, a Delta Air Lines 767 pilot who flies internationally, said the push for fewer pilots is “economics.”

“I’ve heard ridiculous claims that it helps with the pilot shortage,” he said.

Ambrosi said in many cases three or more pilots would still be required if there are factors that could make the flight more complicated, such as bad weather or volcanic ash. So airlines would still need to keep backup pilots on hand anyway, reducing the potential cost savings.

“Are we going to have pilots just loitering around waiting? Just go ahead and put the pilot in there,” Ambrosi said.

John Breyault, the vice president of public policy at the National Consumers League, an advocacy group representing consumers, said the single pilot push is part of a larger trend in the airline industry to cut costs.

“At the end of day the final line of defense for hundreds of people on a commercial airliner is the pilot on the plane,” Breyault said. “Reducing the number of pilots in the cockpit reduces redundancy.”

Breyault added that in the U.S., the families of Colgan Flight 3047, the last U.S. commercial airliner to crash in 2009, are effective advocates for airline safety measures in Washington and would present a major roadblock to any single pilot push.

“They are a voice that can’t be ignored by the FAA or the industry when it comes to this,” Breyault said.

Ambrosi said that most European airlines and U.S. passenger airlines for now are not publicly backing plans to have fewer pilots on board, though some U.S. cargo airlines have expressed interest.

But it might not stay that way, Ambrosi said.

“We’ve been told that North American passenger operators are not interested and the legacy European operators are not interested,” Ambrosi said. “But they all understand that if some are allowed to do this it puts significant operational pressure” on them.