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Is it a worry to have just one pilot in the cockpit?

To cut costs, a European consortium is eyeing ways to replace co-pilots with computers - leaving just one human in the cockpit.Flying almost solo could be the future of air travel. A consortium of airline stakeholders and engineers is hashing out a way to cut

pilot costs by clearing out the cockpit so it's manned by just one person, a

captain at the flight deck.

The European Commission-funded research initiative known as ACCESS, or Advanced

Cockpit for Reduction of Stress and Workload, is looking at ways to introduce

automated systems that would effectively replace the duties of the captain's

first officer.

Project

ACCESS comprises 35 European manufacturers, research institutions and aerospace

engineering firms, including Boeing, Airbus, Thales and

Jeppesen.

One of

the partner stakeholders, the air-to-ground communications company TriaGnoSys,

released a statement this month explaining that the mission of ACCESS is to seek

a "long-term answer for aviation operations" and to also "identify the remaining

open issues for the implementation of potential single pilot

operations."

That

prospect could be worrying for some air travelers.

"Airliner

cockpits have gone from three-pilot standards down to two-pilot standard, and in

a lot of people's minds, it stands to reason that eventually there will be the

one-pilot cockpit," said Patrick Smith, a Massachusetts-based commercial pilot

and author of "Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air

Travel."

Pilots

have also taken issue with the argument that introducing automated systems would

reduce the chance of human error resulting in accidents, which are still few and

far between.

An

editorial about ACCESS in the trade publication Flight International argued that

judgments that the pilots are the problem is part of a distorted perspective -

"rather like blaming the goalkeeper for all the goals scored against his

team."

Smith

said single-pilot commercial airliners, aside from smaller private jets, are

very rare.

The

three-pilot standard was, for the most part, phased out about 15 years ago with

the debut of higher-tech 727 and DC-10 jets that eventually eliminated the

flight engineer's role.

But

trimming a second pilot from the crew to leave the captain alone in the cockpit

raises many questions, Smith said.

"Going

from three to two pilots is not the same as going from two to one," he said.

"Let's say the airliner with one pilot is out over the ocean right now. The

pilot becomes incapacitated somehow. Well, what happens now? I can't even begin

to answer that."

Technologies

aren't yet advanced enough to truly fly a plane without constant human

supervision or at least tweaking of the controls or settings. While the general

public may believe that systems such as auto-flight systems do much of the work,

Smith said that's a very false impression.

"You

still have to tell the auto-flight system what to do, how to do it, when to do

it," he explained. "It's sort of like cruise control on your car. It alleviates

the operator from certain tasks, but it can't drive your car from one city to

the next."