By Dr Simon Bennett, Director, Civil Safety and Security Unit, University of Leicester A critique of distributed crewing the necessity of a two-pilot flight deck here is a new fundamentalism in commercial aviation that single-pilot and pilotless operations, supported by ground-based pilots, are inevitable. This article will challenge such ideology around distributed crewing. It will show that it is sustained by self-interest, mendacity, greed and myopia for example, by universities seeking research monies and academics seeking promotion. Through case studies, and with the aid of theory, it will also demonstrate the enduring necessity of a two-pilot flight-deck. Advocates of single-pilot and pilotless commercial aircraft ground their advocacy in various beliefs. For example: 1. Aviations improving safety record demonstrates that flying is neither difficult nor dangerous One of the claims made for the Space Shuttle was that it would make spaceflight routine no more dangerous than flying. The loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and of Virgin Galactics SpaceShip Two, showed that spaceflight is anything but routine. Space is intolerant of the smallest weakness or miscalculation. Today, the same specious argument is being applied to aviation. Technology, it is claimed, can make a safe activity safer routine, in fact. As recent disasters demonstrate, however, flying is never routine. It is enduringly challenging. 2. Technology is reliable In 2018, Reuters reported that airplane manufacturers are working to build new cockpits designed for a single aviator. Asked to comment, Cranfield Universitys Professor Graham Braithwaite said: The technology to y an aircraft on automatic is brilliant. Really? Experience shows that all technologies harbour design flaws. Consider the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes, caused, in part, by a lack of redundancy in the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS). The MCAS was a flawed system that introduced a latent error into a previously reliable airframe. Lax regulatory oversight exacerbated the MCAS problem. I have worked on the flight deck for two decades, and witnessed failures especially of the autopilot at critical times. It is unlikely that designers will become infallible or that oversight will be made 100% reliable. Inevitably, technologies that support single-pilot operations will harbour latent errors system failures in waiting. When those failures occur, there will be no first officer on the flight deck to help out. There will be a pilot on the ground who may or may not have the bandwidth and situation awareness to support the captain. Automation problems are commonplace. Consider the Tesla semi-autonomous automobile accidents. On 1 March 2019, a driver engaged his Teslas autopilot system, whereupon, according to Bloomberg, the car slammed into the side of a semi-truck that was crossing a highway. Driver killed. 3. Pilots are unreliable Regulators, airframers and airlines are drawn to convenient statistics such as Boeings observation, in a 2007 edition of its magazine, Aero, that approximately 80% of airplane accidents are due to human error and 20% are due to machine failures. The statistic that regulators, airframers and airlines seem reluctant to discuss is the number of accidents avoided by pilot action. As the ALPA explains in its 2019 report, The dangers of singlepilot operations: No comprehensive review of the number of accidents and incidents that are avoided due to pilot actions has been done. Why do regulators, airframers and airlines frame pilots as a liability? Perhaps because they believe that by demonising pilots they can make single-pilot and pilotless operations a foregone conclusion. Professor Erik Hollnagel from the Institute of Regional Health Research, University of Southern Denmark, argues that workers make a net positive contribution to safety. He notes that things do not go right because people behave as they are supposed to, but because people adjust what they do to match the conditions. As systems introduce more complexity, these adjustments become increasingly important. Workers adaptive behaviour creates safety. It is vitally important for organisations to understand that health and safety is a shared responsibility across all areas of a business, and not the remit of just one or two departments 4. A multitasking, ground-based pilot is an adequate substitute for a second pilot on the flight deck There is a positive relationship between situation awareness (SA), performance and safety. Any degradation of SA will reduce performance and safety. Distributed crewing reduces SA first, because the groundbased pilot will, for economic reasons, be monitoring multiple flights. It is difficult for a single person to maintain an accurate mental model of multiple flights, however skilled they might be. Second, the ground-based pilot has no tactile (sensory) feedback from the aircraft and its components, such as the engines and control surfaces. Third, important non-verbal communication is lost. Research shows that 55% of communication is non-verbal for example, gestures, facial expressions and posture. By eliminating this, distributed crewing degrades communication and coordination. Fourth, it eliminates one of the cornerstones of safe flight in situ monitoring and cross-checking by the pilot who is not flying of the reasoning, decisions and actions of the pilot who is flying. A ground-based pilot handling several flights would be unable to perform this vital task. The checking burden would fall on the single pilot, adding workload, psychological stress and delay. Finally, distributed crewing degrades the crews capacity to deal with pilot incapacitation. There is no-one on the flight deck to monitor the physical and psychological health of the pilot who is flying. Should anything untoward happen a cardiac arrest or suicidal impulse, for example there is no-one to take control immediately and contact cabin crew and ATC. According to the FAAs Aeromedical Institute, there were 39 pilot incapacitations between 1993 and 1998. 5. Communications are reliable and secure Distributed crewing requires reliable and secure communications. Experience shows that electronic communication is neither reliable nor secure. Outages between aircraft and ATC are frequent. According to the ALPA report previously cited, during 2018 multiple instances of lost communications with aircraft occurred. Encryption makes communication more but not absolutely secure, but it delays signal transmission. Encryption-induced latency would degrade SA and a ground-based pilots ability to support effectively a single pilot in an emergency. Communications servers, including military-grade ones, have been hacked. According to the CIA, China and Russia run hacking operations. 6. In developing remote-control technologies, science has given us a wonderful opportunity to rationalise the flight deck and reduce costs Science, per se, has given us nothing. Rather, it is science funding, provided by parties with a vested interest in cost-cutting government agencies, industry bodies and airframers that has given us the new technologies. Funders call the tune. The allocation of research and development (R&D) monies reflects political and economic priorities. R&D funding serves vested interests in this case, the collective interests of governments, airframers and airlines in reducing aviation costs and maximising shareholder value. In their paper Exploring changes in pilot behaviour during distributed crewing, academics Kirsten Revell, Neville Stanton and Gregory Kelleher note that changes to crewing configurations in commercial planes are likely to emerge as a means of reducing operating cost. As suggested by academics Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, and by author Robert Caro in his analysis of Robert Mosess installation of bridges too low for buses (the default transport of the poor) on New Yorks expressways in the 1930s, technology is inherently political an expression of beliefs and, in the case of Mosess bridges, prejudices. Technology renders values tangible. Co-location payback Today, transport-category aircraft require co-located pilots. There is significant evidence that the co-location of pilots on the flight deck has saved lives. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737, Flight 243, suffered an explosive decompression at 24,000ft. The pilots worked the problem to a successful conclusion. A single pilot even if effectively supported by a ground-based pilot would, in all probability, have been overwhelmed. The same could be said of US Airways Flight 1549, which lost power in both engines on 15 January 2009, after a bird strike. The captain, Chesley Sullenberger, believes the aircraft was saved by teamwork. As he observed in his autobiography: Jeff [Skiles] and I had met just three days before. Yet, during this dire emergency with no time to verbalise every action and discuss our situation we communicated extraordinarily well. Final thoughts Airlines claim safety to be their number one priority. If that were so, remote-control technologies would be used not to remove a pilot from the flight deck, but to add an extra layer of safety to the two-person flight deck. The fact that airlines propose using the new technology to remove one of the pilots reveals their real priority cost reduction as an aid to maximising shareholder value. In its 2002 publication Line operations safety audit, the ICAO notes that decision-making in aviation operations is considered to be 100 per cent safety-oriented. This is hardly realistic. Human decision-making in operational contexts is a compromise between production and safety goals. The pressure on airlines to maximise profits and dividends is relentless, and shapes airline, airframer and government policy. Much R&D spending funds money-saving innovations. The single-pilot flight deck is one such innovation. A network of actors has been created to advance the concept. Universities are key. As an academic, I offer this advice: do not underestimate the degree to which academia is in thrall to venality and ambition. Academia is no less corrupt than the world at large. PI LOTLE SS FLI G HT The disappearing pilot