Single Pilot Operations

"In a bid to boost the economics of the aviation industry and alleviate a pilot shortage at the same time, researchers in the U.S. and Europe for the last two decades have been investigating ways in which one of the two pilots in the cockpits of passenger airliners could be replaced with an automated copilot based on artificial intelligence —with research labs of NASA and the European Union in the vanguard of that research.

"However, computer scientists and human factors experts are warning that removing one human pilot and force-fitting an AI into their role could see the aviation industry sleepwalk into disaster in failing to take into account the full range of subtle, often safety-related, psychological roles that pilots play when two work side-by-side on a flight deck.

"That was the overarching message at a mid-March conference of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) in London, where pilots, their trade unions, aviation regulators, computer scientists, and human-machine interaction specialists met to discuss the wisdom of the industry’s idea to move, sometime in the next decade, to a flight regime going under the umbrella name of Single Pilot Operations, or SPO."