FI: When will we drop the pilot?

[Dornier 335]

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The pilotless airliner is no longer unthinkable

By David Learmount

The pilotless airliner is no longer unthinkable. It is just a matter of time before airliners have one pilot, and soon after that they will have none.
The first one-pilot commercial air transport aircraft will be freighters, and that sector will almost certainly blaze the trail to the pilotless passenger aircraft. That will be a cockpitless airliner in which first class passengers will occupy the window seats at the sharp end.
The aircraft might have a pilot standing by for emergencies, but s/he will be back at base.
What are the indicators?
Airliners are already highly automated, and pilots are increasingly being told not to interfere with the automation. Meanwhile it is already accepted ? or even status quo ? that unmanned autonomous or remotely piloted air vehicles will take over many of the military and general aviation tasks now performed by aircraft with a cockpit.
Although serious airline accidents are now more rare than they have ever been, that is the result of improvements in aircraft and systems design, not of a Darwinian improvement in pilot skills.
In fact the effect on pilot mental skills of the high levels of automation is a serious worry to the industry.
Accidents resulting from pilot inability to cope when the automation or guidance fails ? or when it is simply not available ? are becoming the new killers. The common serious accidents now are loss of control or controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) resulting from pilot failure to monitor, believe or understand what is going on. You will find a brief description of this concern and the potential consequences in a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago.
The main barrier to pilotless commercial aircraft operation is the primitive air traffic control system we have at present. Although controllers are provided with predictive as well as actual traffic information now, the system is completely human-driven. From about 2020 this will begin to change, and by 2030 controllers will not control traffic, they will be available in case something anomalous happens. That?s like the airline pilot?s job has been for some time, but air traffic management is about 30 years behind onboard systems.
When Europe?s SESAR and the USA?s NextGen ATM systems have been fully up and running for a few years, aeroplanes will carry out their own trajectory management and their own traffic separation. The rest of the world is preparing to go down the same path. Pilots? and controllers? jobs as they are today will be redundant.
Imagine an airline crewroom in 2030. The airline has, say, 300 aeroplanes, but only about 50 pilots. About ten of these will be on duty in the crewroom at any one time. There they have several cockpit-like interfaces that can link them electronically to any of the fleet that?s airborne at the time. They have ten engine and systems engineers to help them. On the rare occasion that something anomalous occurs on an aeroplane, an alert sounds and all the flight and systems data for that aircraft are made available on the interface in real time, together with a systems diagnostic report. They can intervene as effectively as they could have done in the aircraft.
The aircraft commander will be the Purser ? the senior cabin crew member ? and the pilot back at base will be the driver.
It raises a lot of questions for the industry, especially the training industry and those who supply it. But also for the avionics industry. Avionics will still be essential, but the interfaces?
From the point of view of an airline management board, what?s not to like?
After the freighters have gone autonomous, the low cost carriers will be next. The legacy carriers will not take long to follow.
I am researching this issue right now. If you are in the industry and your company will probably play a part in this pilotless future, or if you totally disagree that it?s feasible, get in touch with me please.

 

[Dornier 335]

Part II: Pilot competency up for discussion

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Pilot competency up for discussion

By David Learmount on 30 July
That post on Facebook by my US airline pilot friend (see previous entry) developed into a discussion that made me more worried than I already was about the degree to which airline pilots are losing faith in their ability to fly ordinary manoeuvres and visual traffic patterns, because they practically never have to do it.
My disadvantage here is that I am not a line pilot, and all my knowledge of what it is like to be one comes from talking to people who do it for a living. What is more, things change all the time, including the priorities of airline training departments.
From what I am hearing now, it seems to me that the training priorities pendulum, even at major airlines with good safety records, has swung too far in the direction of mindless proceduralism.
While I completely appreciate the need for solid standard operating procedures (SOPs), mindless proceduralism is the result of an attempt to have a procedure for every eventuality, which is impossible.
Instead of preparing their pilots to cope calmly with non-routine circumstances, to equip them with aviation common sense (= airmanship), they try to secure them inside a comfort blanket of procedures. This robs the pilots of confidence in their own judgement.
I am more and more convinced that this is the explanation for accidents like AF447, where the pilots seemed to have lost all sense of connection with their aeroplane and what makes it fly.
It all boils down to this: if a pilot cannot cope when the automatics fail, it is the airline?s fault that s/he is no longer competent, and s/he should be taken off the line and provided with remedial training.
Or has the ability to fly visual patterns manually been covertly removed from the piloting minimum equipment list? You may rarely have to do it, but the idea that you no longer can should scare you, and your employer.
If pilots can no longer fly ordinary visual procedures manually, or fly instrument patterns in IMC manually, the ultimate backup system when all else has failed ? the pilot ? is no longer a pilot. If that is true, we might as well start automating pilots out of the system now.
The FAA has already conceded that foreign pilots cannot fly visual approaches at SFO and has directed ATC not to offer them the visual option

 

[Dornier 335]

Part III:

Wake-up call for cockpits

In an era of ever-increasing automation, the NTSB says pilot culture must change to clarify what it means to operate a modern aircraft during all modes of flight

By: Stephen Trimble

What specifically caused Asiana Airlines flight 214 to strike a sea wall and crash in San Francisco on 6 July will not be known for weeks or months. But investigators have already identified one salient fact about the incident that is likely to fuel an ongoing drive by regulators and industry groups to make pilots better monitors of automated cockpits.
In the case of flight 214, the right-seat pilot - Lee Jeong-min - told the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a post-crash interview that he was unaware his Boeing 777-200ER was flying 34kt below reference speed for approach and on the verge of stalling until it was too late. Jeong-min, as the "pilot monitoring", said he had assumed the auto-throttles were engaged, but they were not.
The need to make pilots more effective monitors in the era of automation is already a common discussion among aviation safety experts. NTSB studies dating to the early 1990s document how errors by either confused or oblivious crew members often contribute to or cause fatal accidents, but progress has been slow. Now a US working group launched by the NTSB and other industry stakeholders is working on a new way to improve pilot monitoring skills. The goal is to clarify what it means to monitor a modern cockpit and assign monitoring tasks depending on whether the aircraft is in taxi, ascending and descending, or cruise mode.

The group hopes the recommendations scheduled for release in December will spark broader awareness of the importance of pilot monitoring skills. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt, who has championed this cause for several years, says he believes that pilot culture must change.

PHASES OF FLIGHT

Speaking to the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA)'s Air Safety Forum on 17 July, Sumwalt said pilots are still judged mainly on their flying and interpersonal skills, but not on how well they monitor the aircraft's performance in all phases of flight. "I think it's time to have a paradigm shift," Sumwalt says. "Yes, a pilot has to have good stick and rudder skills, and, yes, they have to have good CRM [crew resource management] skills, but they also have to have good monitoring skills."
Part of the challenge of building better monitoring skills is the design of the human brain, which is ill-suited to many of the kinds of tasks necessary to manage an automated cockpit, according to Key Dismukes, a recently retired NASA chief scientist for aerospace human factors.
Dismukes, who also spoke at the ALPA forum, described a NASA study that observed commercial pilots on 60 flights involving Airbus, Boeing and Embraer aircraft. The study discovered that pilots made an average of six monitoring "deviations" per flight.
"Some of these deviations are fairly serious," Dismukes says. "On one occasion the flying pilot was about to advance the throttles, but neither pilot had noticed that an incorrect heading was set in the FMC [flight management computer]."
NASA's researchers recorded 19 instances when there was a failure by both pilots to call out a mode change in the automation system, such as switching to vertical speed mode for making altitude changes.
The study also examined the crew members on approaches that were not stabilised, meaning the aircraft has been hand-flown to land. Of the 60 flights reviewed, nine involved unstabilised approaches. All nine aircraft were required by the 1,000ft (305m) call-out to be in landing configuration and on the glide path.


In each case, the pilot monitoring is expected but not always required to call out altitude marks at 1,000ft and 500ft from landing. On five of the nine unstabilised approaches, however, the pilot monitoring made no such call-out. On the other four, the pilot made the call-out but did not indicate a deviation from the 1,000ft gate even though the aircraft was not in final landing configuration until the 900ft mark, Dismukes says.
"The big question is why do highly experienced, motivated pilots with their lives on the line not always monitor as effectively as we expect them to," he adds. "We need to know why because, I guarantee you, if we simply go back to the training department and tell the instructors to put more emphasis on monitoring, nothing is going to change."
Perhaps the biggest factor NASA identifies is simply how the human brain processes information. The human brain has evolved to most effectively react to stimuli, such as a master caution light appearing or a rapid decompression, Dismukes says. It is less well-equipped to monitor screens and buttons that are generally reliable to detect rare faults or situational anomalies.
"So if you have checked the position of a particular switch or gauge 1,000 times over a course of 1,000 flights and it's always been where it's supposed to be, on that one rare occasion it's not where it's supposed to be you look at it and you see what you expected to see," Dismukes says. "We look at it for a fraction of a second. That's not long enough for the brain to process the information about where the switch is actually set."

GENETIC COMPLICATION

That fundamental, genetic complication is compounded by other sources of distraction, such as multi-tasking or rushing pilots, Dismukes says, such as when a first officer who is supposed to be looking for collision threats during taxi instead is head-down entering last-minute data into the FMC.
The NTSB-sponsored working group, which includes ALPA representatives, wants to offer airlines a new template for improving pilot monitoring skills. The group was formed November and has its final meeting in October. The recommendations could be published in December, says Helena Reidemar, ALPA's director of human factors.

Underpinning the working group's project is a sense that pilot monitoring skills are still not emphasised enough, even despite the NTSB re-designating the "pilot not flying" as the "pilot monitoring" in official reports starting in 2003. "With this change in terminology there really wasn't an associated training piece to go with that," she says.
The working group has clarified the term by redesignating it as "actively monitoring". One problem is that cockpit systems are often designed for the pilots to passively monitor the aircraft. "We're not just robots. We can't sit in there and watch and stare at the instruments for hours on end," Reidemar says. "We're not wired like that."
In the absence of a sudden new shift in cockpit design philosophy, however, pilots must adjust the way they interact with the automated systems. That means one or both pilots should be "actively monitoring" by mentally flying the aircraft as if there were no automated systems engaged, she says. "Consider how active your scan is while you're hand-flying," Reidemar says. "Try to incorporate that mindset in other non-hand-flying situations."
Some US airlines are already developing training programmes aimed at improving monitoring skills in similar ways. ALPA's Air Safety Forum featured a presentation by Christopher Reid, manager of the advanced qualification programme at JetBlue Airways.
The carrier recently established a training module that divides a flight into three zones: red, yellow and green. In the green zone, the aircraft is in a stable cruise flight, so one pilot is supposed to be actively monitoring while the other can accomplish non-essential tasks, such as stowing an electronic flightbag or eating lunch. In the yellow zone, as the aircraft approaches a flight level change or a descent, the non-flying pilot is supposed to be fully monitoring but is allowed to complete essential tasks, such as a required radio call-out. In the red zone during final approach and taxi, both pilots must be actively monitoring the cockpit systems. "What we try to convey is that if you're not monitoring the flight instruments exactly like you would if you were hand-flying the airplane, you're not really monitoring the airplane," Reid says.
http://www.flightglobal.com/learmount

 

[BILL LUMBERG]

UPS bubba of mine says that UPS Technologies has been doing this work for the military and is looking into doing it for them.

God help us all....anybody got a number for a steam engine or elevator operator school handy??

 

[lorien]

I might agree with the single pilot operation but airlines eliminate crew positions for the same reason they got rid of the engineer, cost right? How would having a pilot "back at base" reduce cost? Still, being single pilot sure would make for a long three day!

 

[Secret Squirrel]

You would act more like a dispatcher I suppose. Responsible for 10 flights going on at the same time. You and a dog sitting at a simulator that can up link to any of your aircraft. You to monitor the aircraft and the dog to bite you if you try to touch anything.

 

[JT12345]

Not worried.

When the sh!t hits the fan one pilot can't handle it. We are not even close to the reliability for this. And it happens all the time in real life. Systems fail all the time. You just never hear about it most of the time, because no one notices. And why does no one notice?

There are so many things that can put you in the yellow with this job. Sometimes it has nothing to do with stuff breaking. And when you go red you really need someone to bring you back into the green. That is why the second pilot is there. BTW do I need to explain where these colors come from now?

 

[madjack]

So much for the "pilot shortage"...

 

[LJ45]

I'll start worrying once I see the amazon drone at my front door :smash:

 

[TMMT]

The passengers, not airline management will decide if they want pilotless aircraft.