You (and I) prefer to keep the pilots there, but still, there's a push to need only one person and not two in that plane/cockpit. I have little to no doubt we'll have to relearn some hard lessons after we've AI'd up pilots.
I wanted to say maybe the 2nd pilot could double as a flight attendent if they're not needed full time in the cockpit. Still retains redundancy while saving the airline money.
The problem with that is most skills need to be practiced. When you only need to use your skills unexpectedly in an emergency, that may not end well. Same applies to other fields where AI can do something 95% of the time, with human intervention required in the 5% case. Is it realistic to expect humans to continue to fill that 5% gap if we allow our skills to wane by outsourcing the easiest 95% of a job and only keep the hardest 5% for ourselves.
For those who can stomach it, reading aviation accident reports, listening to actual recorded voice footage, you very often read about the cognitive load of a two-person team trying to get through a shitty moment.
Richard de Crespigny, who flew the Quantas A380 that blew one of its engines after a departure from Changi, explains very clearly and in a gripping way the amount of stuff happening while trying to save an aircraft.
Lots of accidents happen today already at the seams of automation, I don't think we're collectively ready for a world with much more automation, especially in the name of more shareholder value of a 4 dollars discount.
Agree 100%. Watch a few videos on youtube from Mentour Pilot. The cognitive load is such a huge factor in so many accidents and close calls. There are also equally many accidents that could have been prevented with just a bit more automation and fault detection. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that after an accident, it can take years to get a real corrective action across the industry. It would be like level 10 CVEs taking 5 years to get patched!
With the level of regression I get from 'security patches' :-) I won't blame the conservative mindset there.
The Air France Rio-Paris crash is a good example of sudden full mistrust of automation and sensors by the crew after a sensor failure appeared and then recovered. Very, very sad transcript and analysis... I'm arguing against myself here, singe it was also a huge case of crew management failure and it might not have gone to crash with only one person in the cockpit.
You kinda said it, but you didn't hit the nail on the head. Yes we need the pilots. But -I will repeat my own example in my current mega-corp employer- I am about to develop a solution using an LLM (premium/enterprise) that will stop a category of employees from reaching 50, and will remain to 20, and with organic wear & tear, will drop to 10, which will be the 'forever number' (until the next 'jump' in tech).
So yes, we keep pilots, but we keep _fewer_ pilots.
It's unclear what your numbers refer to. If I had to guess, I'd say 50 means the number of employees in the category employed by your employer, but I'm not sure.
