Technology is marching ever onward, and it sometimes seems as though we are intent on eliminating all human involvement in complex operations–including flying airplanes. Who among us has not wondered, after some accidents that have happened, whether a properly programmed computer might have done a better job of flying the airplane?
The downward trend in the number of pilots in cockpits over the past decades seems to support that conclusion, too. Better technology directly eliminated the flight engineer position, and the two-pilot cockpit is completely normal now for the largest airplanes. Even one-pilot cockpits are ordinary, both in simple aircraft and in business jets that are fairly complex, from the lightest of Part 23 jets such as the Eclipse 500/550 to the Part 25-certified Citation 500/560 operating under a single-pilot exemption.
So the industry has already made the shift from two- to one-pilot cockpits. Are further reductions possible? Could the two-pilot flight deck of the airlines be shrunk further to one pilot? And what about the ultimate technological goal: a no-pilot passenger- or cargo-carrying aircraft? Is that where aviation is headed?