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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • As a professional pilot. I don’t think there’s any future in single pilot ops. Realistically the only time you need two pilots in a modern airliner is when shit’s fucked sideways, which is exactly the time the single pilot in this situation needs to work. Normal ops are easy. You could automate that no problem, what is hard is automating whatever combination of failures and weather the engineers never thought of.

    Maybe in cargo, where the stakes are lower, it’ll happen. But in passenger ops, I think we’ll go from 2 pilots to no pilots before we go to one pilot.

















  • The problem isn’t the manufacturer or the operator, it’s the middleman looking to make a profit on the the difference. In any case $800 is an absolutely ridiculous price point regardless of liability. I don’t know where the fair price point is but not even close to that. Liability isn’t the primary driver for the cost anyway, it’s difficulty of certification. Getting any part certified runs from high 5 figures to many millions of dollars and these are all extremely low volume parts. Boeing has only made around 11,000 737s since 1967. The plane I’m working with now only has around ~250 built since 2015 and is quite successful. For comparison Toyota produces about 20 cars per minute. When you need to pay back certification costs and turn even a modest profit on such low volume you need to charge a ton for each part.

    To be clear I am absolutely not in support of non certified parts, it’s just a big problem in the industry and for rather obvious reasons.


  • The paperwork cost isn’t negligible at all. For example a company I used to work for had to replace a simple O-ring that failed. It’s an old part and quite rare these days and cost $800 to replace. You could buy a functionally equivalent (likely better) uncertified part for about 5 cents. That is why uncertified parts are such a problem, because certified ones are so incredibly expensive. Plenty of companies would love to step in and buy a few thousand O rings and sell them for $400 and a few are willing to forge a paper trail to make it happen. It’s a problem that I don’t really think will be ever totally solved without making certification too easy and potentially sacrificing safety by having bad certified parts.