One of the fundamentals that remains a part of civil aviation is having two pilots in the cockpit. It’s an indication of the safety related activities of the crew of a civil aircraft. Today, we have a mixture of human control and management. Pilots still fly hands-on when the need arises. The expectation is that throughout their working lives pilots have the competence to do so, at any stage in a flight.
Progressively, since the establishment of aviation’s international order in the 1940s the required crewing of aircraft has changed. Back in September, I visited the de Havilland Aircraft Museum in Hertfordshire. There I walked through the fuselage of a de Havilland DH106 Comet[1]. This was the first turbojet-powered airliner to go into service and it changed the experience of flying forever and a day.
That passenger aircraft, like aircraft of the time, had four crew stations in the cockpit. Two pilots, a navigator and flight engineer. It was the era when electronics consisted of valves in large radio sets and such long since forgotten devices as magnetic amplifiers. The story from the 1940s of IBM saying, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” is often repeated.
For modern airliners the navigator and flight engineer have gone. Their functions have not gone. It’s that having a crew member dedicated to the tasks they performed is no longer required. As the world of vacuum-tube electronics gave way to transistors and then to integrated circuits so computing got more powerful, cheaper, and abundant.
With a few significant failures along the way, commercial flying got safer and safer. The wave of change in a human lifetime has affected every mode of transport. More people travel to more places, more safely than ever could have been imagined 80-years ago. Does that mean the path ahead will take a similar shape? Excitable futurologists may paint a colourful picture based on this history.
Let’s get away from the attractive notion of straight lines on graph paper. That idea that progress is assumed to be linear. Tomorrow will be progressively “better” by an incremental advance. That’s not happening now. What we have is differential advances. Some big and some small.
The aviation safety curve is almost flat. The air traffic curve, with a big hole made by COVID, is climbing again. The technology curve is rapidly accelerating. The environmental impact curve is troubling. The air passenger experience curve may even be at a turning point.
Touchscreen tablets already help flight preparation and management[2]. Flight plan changes can be uploaded and changed with a button press[3]. The squeezing of massive computing power into small spaces is being taken for granted. What does this leave a crew to do?
Back to the start. Two pilots in the cockpit, with executive responsibilities, remains the model that maintains public confidence in civil aviation. The golden rules still apply. Fly, navigate and communicate in that order. Crews, however much technology surrounds them, still need to act when things do not go as expected. Does this mean two cockpit crew forever? I don’t know.
[1] https://www.dehavillandmuseum.co.uk/aircraft/de-havilland-dh106-comet-1a/
[2] https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/newsroom/news/2021-02-electronic-flight-bag-the-new-standard
[3] https://simpleflying.com/datalink-communications-aviation-guide/
John Vincent 