Aerospace giants have been accused of putting profits ahead of safety as officials consider cutting the minimum number of pilots required on commercial flight decks from two to one.
The move, which is currently being evaluated by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), would weaken standards to the “lowest common denominator”, the world’s largest union of airline pilots has warned.
“This threat is not something that is 10, 15, 20 years away,” Capt James Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents more than 78,000 pilots in the US and Canada, said. “It’s something that, quietly, Airbus, has been working on. It’s not what they are marketing it to be.
“The US has the safest aviation record in the world. We need to improve the standard for everybody, not just go to the lowest common denominator.”
Pilots spend an insane amount of their non-flight time in simulators doing this very thing, to the point where when things do go wrong they subconsciously know the routine to address it. There’s no time to think about a reaction in many cases. And now they want to just have one person be at that alert level all the time.
And I thought that fatigue was an ongoing problem with pilots now, but I’m sure having just one person focused the whole flight won’t hurt.
I wouldn’t say it’s an insane amount of time in the simulator. That probably averages less than 15 hours a year; however, there’s many hours spent preparing for the time in the simulator which is what really makes emergency procedures rote.