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Airliners Could Ditch Their Co-pilots Under EU Plan to Impro

发布人:小蓝     发布时间:2016-10-11 09:59

It may seem a little pie in the sky, but in the not too distant future, commercial airliners could be flown without co-pilots under an EU-backed project designed to improve safety and cut the cost of flying.

Aircraft manufacturers are working on a project that could eventually lead to the introduction of single-pilot operations on commercial jets.

A consortium of 35 companies and research groups across Europe, including Boeing, Airbus and BAE Systems, is developing automated technology to reduce reliance on crew members in the flight deck.

 

The ACROSS project -- Advanced Cockpit for Reduction of Stress and Workload -- seeks to develop more sophisticated autopilot technology to take over aircraft, particularly during bad weather, emergency situations and in congested skies, situations when accidents are more likely to occur.

The scheme, co-funded by the European Commission, hopes to lead to the development of new technologies which can help improve pilots' "situational awareness", as well as relieve some of the burden placed on them at a time when air traffic is only predicted to increase.

The research programme makes it clear, however, that the ultimate aim is the "long-term evolution" of single-pilot cockpits, rather than the existing two-pilot flight crews on most aircraft.

The project says that research is needed because although continuous safety improvements have succeeded in reducing the accident rate in aviation over successive decades, the reduction "seems to have reached a plateau, stabilising at a rate of approximately two accidents for every million departures."

 

This translates to one accident every million flight hours, or the equivalent of roughly one accident every ten days worldwide.

With air traffic volumes forecast to grow steadily at a rate of up to five per cent per year, this rate could equate to "several major incidents and accidents per week".

While pilots had prevented large numbers of accidents, "issues involving the flight crew" were contributory factors in 60 percent of fatal accidents between 1990 and 2010, its website said.

The project has three objectives. The first is to better support a fully operational crew in pressure situations such as bad weather, or when there was an emergency on board.

The second is to allow a reduced crew to operate safely within a limited number of situations, such as when one or both crew were incapacitated, or when a pilot took a break during the cruise phase of flight.

The third objective is to build on those initial evaluations in order to identify the "main aspects to consider for future implementation of single-pilot operations."

 

Pilots' leaders claim that the project represents an attempt to shift towards fully pilotless aircraft in the future, despite public opposition.

The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) warned that an increase in automation would put planes at increased risk of hackers and computer failures.

It highlighted a number of cases in which the quick thinking of pilots had prevented potentially catastrophic accidents, including the landing of a British Airways airliner after a loss of power just short of Heathrow in 2008.

Stephen Landells, a flight safety specialist at Balpa, said: "Pilots welcome the introduction of technology designed to make flights safer, but we have concerns that the Across project could lead to too heavy a reliance on automation."

"A reduction in the number of pilots in the cockpit could have serious detrimental consequences for fight safety due to lack of cross checking of safety-critical switches and operational decision-making."

The ACROSS project started in January 2013 and will conclude in June.

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