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Proposals for commercial planes to operate with one pilot shelved after critical EU report
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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I did research on communication systems for exactly this. You need a few more than just one pilot, but the general idea is that only take off and landing are hard so you have pilots on the ground remote piloting the aircraft in these situations. In theory you don't need pilots at all, but current autoland systems reduce throughput at airports.
and if there's an emergency? like the pitot tubes go out, or there's an engine fire, or a loss of cabin pressure, or landing gear malfunction, or stab trim runaway, or loss of communication, or GPS jamming over a hostile area, or TCAS alerts, or fuel contamination, or power failure, or the ground equipment for autoland goes out, or fire in the cargo hold, or slat deployment failure, or a bird strike on takeoff, or loss of hydraulic pressure, or a bad storm cell, or wind shear, or wake turbulence, or tower radio goes out, or a tail strike, or a badly contaminated runway, or a radio problem, or a software bug?
For GPS jamming there is research into alternative ground based location services, I'm currently doing research in that area. Interestingly one major problem there is not GPS jamming in hostile areas, it's truckers using GPS spoofers for their tracking devices, because apparently that happens and it happens far away from any wars. Loss of communication was what I researched before, i.e. how reliable communication links are. For most of the other things you list a regular pilot can't do much more than someone remotely operating the aircraft from the ground, the pilot is not going outside to fix an engine mid-flight, or hit the landing gear with a hammer until it works again. For autolanding, the whole idea of remote piloting is to not rely on autoland.
with the landing gear there's mechanical backups. the pilot can (destructively) manually drop the gear if there's a failure. same with other backups: on a non-fly by wire aircraft, the pilot can physically move the control surfaces with enough force. even Airbus has a limited mechanical backup (which has been used a couple times! like when all three avionics controllers disagreed and tripped offline.) likewise, even when there's a total loss of power, the pilot can windmill the engines to start. and since any loss of communication dooms the aircraft, it needs to be extraordinarily reliable - and I'm not sure that level of reliability is physically possible, because the underlying communications links (even ACARS) aren't rated for it, nor are the backbone routers of the internet.
finally, I think it is human nature that remote pilots will become complacent if their own lives are not at stake, like their passengers'.
I'm sure it's fascinating research, and may have a place for cargo/repositioning flights, but I can't see that such a scheme could be made reliable enough to risk human lives.