31 July 2014

With driverless cars to hit the UK streets in January, are the pilot’s days numbered?

Vince Cable, the UK business secretary, has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on UK roads from the beginning of 2015.

The pressure will now increase on airlines to look at doing the same in the sky. With low cost airlines desperate to take further cost out of their business, the days of the traditional pilot role must now be limited.

Crew salaries are a major cost base for aviation companies. Michael O’Reilly, CEO of Ryanair, stated recently that if he could remove pilots from his aircraft it would be a ‘star trek’ moment and his fares would be slashed even lower.

It’s already happening in the military sector, where operations are now flying more drones than piloted aircraft. So the technology is available and could soon be implemented for civilian flights.

The first step will be to reduce the flight deck from two pilots to one. Then, when the public are ready (and this is the bigger challenge than the technology), aircraft will be controlled remotely from the ground, with an airborne systems manager on-board to monitor the flight path.

But for the private jet industry the role of the pilot is much more than just about flying the plane. As a Captain on a Citation XLS+ myself, I know first hand how important the role is. The private jet pilot is a very visible presence in private aviation – not kept behind a locked cockpit door (most cabins are open to the flight deck).

The Captain will meet and greet the passengers in the lounge before the flight; provide them with information throughout the flight; and even serve the refreshments. The job is as much about customer service as it is about flying the aircraft. It’s all part of the job and great communication skills are a very important part of a private jet pilot’s toolkit.

So it will take some major adjustment for pilotless planes to be accepted in private aviation. Perhaps the time private jet passengers will appreciate flying without a pilot will be to ease crew duty restrictions.

Take for example a day return flight from London to Nice, which is a typical route in the summer months. After a full day of corporate meetings, the passengers decide to have dinner and ask the pilots to delay the flight until 10pm. Unfortunately due to the long day, the crew cannot legally fly after 9pm. So the evening’s entertainment would have to be curtailed or another crew found at short notice (which might not always be possible).

That is unless the passengers opt to fly back home pilotless. The aircraft being fully controlled by a ground based operations room back in the European Air Traffic Control Centre in Brussels.

It still feels like a way off for me. But with driverless cars on the street next year, maybe the airborne days of the pilot are nearing an end too.

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