Reduced crew

Roger Roger said:
Sure, the ultra rich for whom their own personal pilots are both a status symbol and a drop in the bucket of costs, may keep pilots on for a while. But that’s a tiny minority of corporate jobs. Does anyone seriously think that joe influencer booking a 135 charter through a brokerage is going to give 2 •s, as long as it’s cheap enough?
Click to expand...

That’s also assuming the same shot callers are in place the entire career of the pilot at that company. One management or owner change and overnight you’re now expendable. Thankfully there’s a CBA to fall back on…oh wait.
 
Inverted25 said:
It’s just that the good operators still but two pilots up front. I don’t see the airlines having that same motivation. You guys will be gone as soon as the regulators approve it.
Click to expand...

IMG_8565.jpeg


Man…if only I worked for a good operator instead of having contract language.
 
Hacker15e said:
Won't be long duration in that the industry will shortly stop pursuing the idea, or that single pilot won't be for long duration flights?
Click to expand...

I'd hope for the former, but I expect the latter. But I do think selling this to the traveling public is gonna be a much bigger hurdle than the tech bros think it will be. And a good bud of mine is CEO of an aviation AI startup with a pretty hefty DoD contract. He's been in Silicon Valley for a while now, and his takeaway from the more mainstream full-autonomous proposals put forth by the likes of Google and others, has been "they don't have the first clue about aviation, and are so far out of their lane it is embarrassing". Most all of those early AI proposals have gone to the graveyard by now, touted by the dumbest tech bros who think that this whole thing can just be easily machine learned. I don't doubt that the real manufacturers have some better resources at their disposal, and can probably make it work, but again, huge risk, huge investment, and a lot of public uncertainty at a minimum. My bud's company is pushing a much more incremental approach, which is basically creating an AI PM to facilitate better single piloted 135 ops. They would like to break into 121, and have met with several, but even that would still just be a better EICAM at the end of the day. Something to warn you "hey, you forgot to turn on the transponder in your prior to push checklist".
 
Autothrust Blue said:
What, more than it already is? Oh, you mean collectively, not individually/midlife mode, got it
Click to expand...
Mid-life crisis is something else. Didn't we already discuss boats here?
Boris Badenov said:
Isn't it already? The various manifestations of this problem may still be less than totally obvious to the, what, polity-at-large? But we've been sailing into the land of physical, practical labor being irrelevant for maybe a century or two? If we don't kill ourselves off, first, we've going to have to figure out what the hell to do with our endless, numbered days.
Click to expand...
But everybody has something to do right now. That's not going to be a thing fairly soon, and given how many people tie their very identity to their career, I think we are in for a rude awakening.

Not to do that that pilot thing where I make this all about me, but I've had to go through that whole thing where I had to reinvent myself. The loss of meaning was one of the hardest parts - indeed it still is, even though my job is "meaningful" in the traditional sense, it's more abstract than flying.

What happens when suddenly engineers, accountants, lawyers, etc. people who have strong career cultures are suddenly not "useful" anymore? What do those people do? Even if we do get UBI right, just sitting around kind of sucks. I've done it, you can enjoy it for a bit, but then... you've gotta do something. I mean, I'll be fine, I already know I dgaf about my job in the same way I cared about flying - like, I care, but I could take it or leave it, but we're going to have to reconcile with what a world where millions of people are rendered redundant means.

For the record, I think we'll have UBI, in order to preserve capitalism, we'll need people with money, so the government will give people money, which they'll spend on useless crap they don't need and the system will largely stay intact. Your life will likely be better materially too, but we're going to have to deal with what it means for this to be the status quo.

Lawman said:
What makes you so damn special?
Click to expand...

Oh, damn it, stop making me agree with you. But you're right, none of us are special, and tragically, there's nobody going to save us but ourselves (if we actually bother to try).
NovemberEcho said:
Only if you take the VFR’s out of the picture
Click to expand...
To be honest, I think VFR aircraft won't be a problem either. One of the first hit's on google scholar looks to be using LSTMs to do ATC.


this is all just cutting edge stuff and we don't know where it will go. I wish I was working on this stuff

Lawman said:
How much give a crap does a society buried in its smart phones care about what is at the front of an airplane that it never interacts with.
Click to expand...
Dammit, stop it. Stop making me agree with you.

Nobody cares about anything at all to be perfectly honest. There's a disturbing amount of solipsism I see on a regular basis, and generally speaking I find it pretty troubling. On the bright side, I'm really enjoying my role in this new crazy society - because I dgaf anymore. That's a really nice place to be.
Hiboglossi said:
Well, having a job was nice while it lasted.
Click to expand...
You'll have a job for awhile yet. It'll be ok. But definitely don't be stupid about what you spend your money and time on. Do things that enrich your life too, because in the crisis of meaning you'll want those things.
Roger Roger said:
If you want my real opinion? There is no grand plan for technological unemployment because the ultra rich and powerful are too busy raiding everything they can for when whichever climate change/biosphere collapse domino falls first. They realize it’s probably far too late to avoid, now.
Click to expand...
There's no plan because very few people are thinking exponentially, and even the richest and most powerful people on earth are subject to many many cognitive biases.
Roger Roger said:
With the kind of money and airspace efficiency you could gain on the line, that’s exactly what will happen. Or some hybrid solution requiring the newest whatever box to operate in controlled airspace.
Click to expand...
This is how I think it will happen, that and "sense and avoid" stuff being put in the aircraft in a decentralized manner and the boxes will broadcast their intentions and automated ATC will send back instructions to make the sequence work. I reckon eventually it'll just be an update to your flight plan.

The year is 2030, you're flying a bonanza across the country, auto-atc realizes you will be arriving too soon, easiest option is to send you to a fix slightly out of the way to buy some time. A notification pops up on your Garmin 69,420 holo-screen: "new route update information recieved, press ok to insert in flight plan!"

You press ok. "Clearance change accepted, press ident to acknowledge the routing change."

You ident.

Another notification pops up: "ident recieved, have a nice day!"
 
///AMG said:
"they don't have the first clue about aviation, and are so far out of their lane it is embarrassing".
Click to expand...
this was my experience when I interviewed for a few drone engineering things back after I got sick.

I would love to work on this stuff, but I've yet to find a place that actually knew a damn thing about flying machines.
 
And how will they calculate the mental burden of being all alone in the front of an airplane full of people?
At the single-pilot Pt. 135 airline where I flew for six years, about 1/3 of those who came to fly for us, including some with 121 experience, completely fell apart when they got up there all by themselves. Some had to be fired for doing something stupid, some faked injuries and illness, a couple just flat out admitted they couldn't hack it, there were a couple of the usual "I-don't-trust-the-maintenance-here types, and one middle-aged guy who died of a heart attack after returning home from his 3rd day on the job.
Only those who've flown single-pilot all-weather airline understand this, and none of them are Airbus engineers or airline bean counters.
I've just finished writing a short article on the topic but have no idea where to send it.
 
gliderboy said:
And how will they calculate the mental burden of being all alone in the front of an airplane full of people?
At the single-pilot Pt. 135 airline where I flew for six years, about 1/3 of those who came to fly for us, including some with 121 experience, completely fell apart when they got up there all by themselves. Some had to be fired for doing something stupid, some faked injuries and illness, a couple just flat out admitted they couldn't hack it, there were a couple of the usual "I-don't-trust-the-maintenance-here types, and one middle-aged guy who died of a heart attack after returning home from his 3rd day on the job.
Only those who've flown single-pilot all-weather airline understand this, and none of them are Airbus engineers or airline bean counters.
I've just finished writing a short article on the topic but have no idea where to send it.
Click to expand...

Curiously, fell apart how? Did they not possess the aptitude/skill/SA/ability to manage a cockpit themselves without the crutch of a second pilot there to help with decision making in a committee setting, or even to make decisions for them?
 
MikeD said:
Curiously, fell apart how? Did they not possess the aptitude/skill/SA/ability to manage a cockpit themselves without the crutch of a second pilot there to help with decision making in a committee setting, or even to make decisions for them?
Click to expand...
Crutch makes it sound like they're bad pilots. But I think it's just a big change for some people. If somebody spent years always having somebody to talk to, it's quite a change to suddenly go fly around with nobody else there. Some people just don't do well by themselves, and that's not just referring to flying.
 
I always get a chuckle out of the fact corporations are in a rush to get rid of humans doing work for the bottom line. At the end of the day what will be our purpose in the world then? I don’t feel as fearful for my job going single or zero pilot anytime soon.

These “project” timelines never pan out how they should and the new technology in the airliners is certainly nice but I think we can all agree it just isn’t close to there. Then factor in if some • happens to literally one of these things and kills everyone, well then what?

Maybe I’m wrong. Out of my control anyways so I don’t stress about it. Kind of silly in my opinion to say you picked an industry to work in because of single and zero pilot scenarios, lol.
 
All this talk of trucking and flying helicopters without humans on board is interesting. However, the railroads have been trying to implement a similar system with their PTC program. The railroad safety act went into effect 2008. When I was working on the system in 2014-16 they still couldn’t get all the equipment to function properly and the mandate kept getting pushed back. 2018 the mandate went into effect but at a greatly reduced level of oversight. Only being mandated to certain Class I lines and passenger service on certain tracks in certain areas.

We’re talking about a form of motion that’s tied to a track with almost no uncertainties in the path, and to this day they still have two people in that cab.
 
Wardogg said:
We’re talking about a form of motion that’s tied to a track with almost no uncertainties in the path, and to this day they still have two people in that cab.
Click to expand...

I’ve always heard that is because of collective bargaining agreements and not because the tech isn’t there
 
NovemberEcho said:
I’ve always heard that is because of collective bargaining agreements and not because the tech isn’t there
Click to expand...
Sure that’s part of it. The campaign to keep 2 people in the cab is strong. However that only gets you so far. The way I understood it while I was there, railroaders can’t strike. If the railroad decided tomorrow to cut the engineers in half and let PTC/ATO drive the trains what’s stopping them? Reliability in the system.
 
NovemberEcho said:
I’ve always heard that is because of collective bargaining agreements and not because the tech isn’t there
Click to expand...

Also, someone ( conductor )always has to be available to leave the cab and go fix, or try to fix a problem, this generally requires coordination with the engineer, who then does engineer stuff and voila…. The train moves along again after the conductor is back in the cab.

There is a lot of mainline railroad track in this country that is very remote and or difficult to access from outside the rail itself, and having a train foul the track for extended periods of time waiting for outside help is a mess.

If the true plan for AI is to functionally un employ a significant percent of society in an effort to increase efficiency, productivity, profits etc… then the problem of what to do with society when this happens should be a bigger priority than making the tech work.

What do I know, though, I’m just a human, not an AI algorithm.
 
Wardogg said:
All this talk of trucking and flying helicopters without humans on board is interesting. However, the railroads have been trying to implement a similar system with their PTC program. The railroad safety act went into effect 2008. When I was working on the system in 2014-16 they still couldn’t get all the equipment to function properly and the mandate kept getting pushed back. 2018 the mandate went into effect but at a greatly reduced level of oversight. Only being mandated to certain Class I lines and passenger service on certain tracks in certain areas.

We’re talking about a form of motion that’s tied to a track with almost no uncertainties in the path, and to this day they still have two people in that cab.
Click to expand...
Technology moves exponentially, not linearly. Look at cell phones between 1980 to the early 2000s and compare it to what we have now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top