Should the planes have a single pilot at cruise level?

Should the planes have a single pilot at cruise level?

Let me to begin with an autobiographical paragraph: Before entering the Human Factors area, back in the early 2000s, I worked in Human Resources and, among other things, I oversaw workforce analysis, planning and adjustment.

A very common standard in workforce planning is 80%, that is, to consider that, if 80% of the working day is spent performing the tasks inherent to the job, the workforce will be properly sized. It is a standard that has numerous exceptions, one of which is linked to the peaks in the task flow.

Can we think of a firefighters' staff defined in such a way that 80% of their time is spent putting out fires? And a police staff defined in such a way that 80% of their time is spent arresting criminals? Obviously, such workforces would be understaffed since they would not have the capacity to handle a peak workload.

What about the pilots? It is curious that the suggestion of having only one pilot at cruise level appears precisely at a time when, from different sides, they are trying to treat the pilot as an emergency resource, leaving, as much as possible, flight management in the hands of Technology.

Let us follow, then, the logic of dealing with the pilot's job as something whose sense is, during the cruise phase, mainly in the attention to possible emergencies: Their workload is very high when they are on the ground or close to the ground while, at cruise level, this workload normally decreases a lot, but...let's underline the "normally". A search for critical cruise events in the ASRS database returns 5,553 crisis situations, as the picture above shows.

?Let's add that a serious aviation event can develop in an extremely short time and its management may require the full attention of at least two people.

Different events have shown that two people represent an absolute minimum that, in some cases, may be exceeded. Consider cases such as Swissair 111, where a fire on board required preparing a diversion to a nearby, unknown airport, searching radio frequencies and approach routes, dropping fuel to reduce the weight of the aircraft and, in addition, seeing if there was any way to extinguish the fire. There wasn't. Would things have been different with one more person? Hard to know.

Other more fortunate cases such as AC143, QF32 or U232 tell us that, in a phase of flight when the workload is usually low, situations may arise that require more than two qualified hands to deal with them; that’s exactly the same situation of policemen, firemen or any other profession that, by its nature, deals with emergency situations.

The promoters of the idea of a single pilot at cruise level justify it on the scarcity of pilots and reassure the public by talking about advanced technological support for this single pilot. Would the rationale of scarcity be used to reduce the number of pilots on board from one to none?

As for technological support, it has an interesting peculiarity that is reflected in an old joke: Some people define a banker as a man who lends us an umbrella and, when it starts to rain, asks us to give it back to him. Similarly, technology tends to make tasks easier when they are originally easy. However, it can become an added problem when the situation is difficult and does not allow us to perform actions that would be necessary, or when it behaves abnormally.

The popularization of Artificial Intelligence means only added pressure to a situation whose effects were already visible. With or without Artificial Intelligence, although more so when it is present, systems can have strange behaviors derived from their programming and, when these appear, instead of making tasks easier for the human pilot, they add a new one that is not exactly minor.

• ?When an alarm stops sounding when the aircraft is at such a low speed that the system interprets that the aircraft is on the ground, it is adding confusion.
• When it interprets a pass as a landing and cuts power, it is adding confusion.
• When, very close to the ground, the system reacts to a stall warning and forces down the nose of the aircraft, it is causing an accident.
• When it interprets an approach as an overflight of an airport and deletes all the data of the scheduled approach, it is adding workload.
• When the orographic characteristics of an airport force pilots to "cheat" the system to make landing on a short runway feasible, it can produce unplanned reactions....

It cannot be forgotten that Information Systems lack common sense and leaving a single pilot in their hands as an alternative to an expert discussion of an unknown situation and the subsequent management of that situation is not reassuring or a guarantee of safety.

It can be argued that there is another pilot inside the aircraft and that, under this model, all that is being done is to avoid carrying backup crews. Be that as it may, but in that case, let me recall AF447:

The captain was out of the cockpit and, when he returned, the situation had become so unmanageable that, even when he was able to correctly diagnose what was going on, it was too late to recover the aircraft: An event that should not have gone too far - the freezing of a sensor - caused anomalous reactions in the system and they completely confused the pilots in the cockpit; when someone with more experience entered the cockpit, his greater knowledge was not accompanied by the availability of the time that would have been required to solve the problem.?

The last issue is the most obvious: What happens in the event of incapacitation - are they going to use practices like the railroads' "dead man's pedal"? It didn't work in the Waterfall case in Australia and it might not work in an aircraft where an event can quickly reach the level that makes it unmanageable.

On the other hand, how do you reconcile the idea of a single pilot at cruising altitude with the idea that the pilot should not be left alone in the cockpit, put in place after the GermanWings 9525 case? Does he have to be accompanied by a cabin crew member? Doesn't it make more sense for him to be accompanied by someone who, when faced with an emergency, can help assess and resolve it when, if it is serious, it is going to require the assistance of both?