Op-Ed: Ideas that don’t fly- Single pilot airliners and standing flights

The slums of the skies formerly known as airliners may now have an additional cost saving measure introduced- Pilot only, no co-pilot. Another great idea is the “standing flight”, in which you can commute like a public transport passenger.

Both concepts are guaranteed to cause serious damage and major safety issues. With planes making headlines and spraying themselves across landscapes all over the world, the single pilot idea comes from Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer and Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary. Notwithstanding the decades of requirements on civil and military aircraft for co-pilots, the theory is now that a flight attendant could land the planes if required. Fly by wire has come a long way, but not that far. To put the lives of hundreds of people in the care of an inexperienced person verges on insanity. Most pilots and co-pilots are required to have hundreds of hours on planes before being allowed anywhere near a cockpit. The “Standing flights” concept is one of the better ways of ensuring massive numbers of injuries in the event of a flight issue or turbulence. How, one may ask, are people supposed to stand or survive during a 10,000 foot change in altitude which can occur in seconds? This is “flight by committee”, and if packing more people onto planes and saving money on co-pilots is the basis for decisions, the Wright Brothers were wasting their time. These concepts are suicide. The safety factors in both cases are far lower than in the existing setup, which, for those interested, is based specifically on flight safety and best practice. Exactly why groundhogs think they know a damn thing about flying a plane is debatable. They don’t. Let’s clarify: The safety issues- single pilot airliners There’s a reason for having two pilots on airliners, and it’s not to prevent all those poor impoverished billionaires from making that all-important few bucks more. It’s safety, and a quality control on pilot performance. A pilot making mistakes through fatigue or illness is a disaster in progress. The margin for error in flying an airliner is zero. Any problem is amplified by the sheer mass of a large, heavy, brick-like object like an airliner flying at 500+ mph. Military aircraft use co-pilots as a built in safety precaution for a good reason: Time. The reaction time required in any flight situation is critical. In an emergency, even if the flight attendant was a qualified pilot, it’s unlikely they’d last long enough in a crisis to even reach the cockpit. One steep, unexpected bank, and it’s all over. Co-pilots are on the spot and can take action instantly. Fly by wire isn’t good enough. “Pilot error” isn’t confined to people any more. Machines break down, and so do electronics. In-flight computers can contain software errors. If you want planes crashing down like rain all over the world, relying on fly by wire is the surest way to achieve that. Standing room only? The chances of survival without injury for standing passengers in any of the recent airline emergencies would have been zero. It is quite possible for a plane to be subjected to severe forces in the air. These experiences are traumatic for seated, strapped-in passengers. Standing or even seated unsecured passengers can get tossed around like beans in a blender. Impact with any object in an air emergency is likely to cause severe injury. Until the law of gravity is repealed, the kinetic mass of a person subjected to forces at those speeds will accelerate them straight into hospital or a grave. Head and spinal injuries in particular are likely to be serious in these conditions. Forget it. Unless the airlines are in a hurry to spend the next 100 years or so fighting class actions by bereaved families, infuriated regulators, and international lawsuits by the truckload, it’s not on the radar. These ideas won’t, and shouldn’t, fly.