82 Vol. 10 / No. 5 / May 2018 Global Aviator
navigator?, well at the start of aviation,
what didn’t we have? We certainly
didn’t have GPS, nor radio beacons, nor
inertial navigation systems and pretty
critically nor did we have accurate
wind information on longer routes.
So the navigator was responsible for
handling a constant set of ded-reckoning
calculations, estimating from those
and external observations atmospheric
conditions, and taking regular
observations of position – which might
often include star and sun sightings
with a sextant, observations of position
from ground observations, and of course
lots of predictions of what is going to
happen next, so that those predictions
can be checked against reality.
So that’s what we did have, now
what happened to all these chaps? Well
Aircraft Technical
By Prof Guy Gratton
The incredible
shrinking crew
When proper airliners started to
be built in the 1920s, a typical flight
deck crew was large. Typically two
pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator
and a radio (or wireless telephony)
operator. That’s five people to do a
job that nowadays is being done by
two, in arguably an aeroplane that was
much smaller and simpler than the
modern equivalents: so how did we
shrink that flight deck, and what does
the future of the flight deck look like?
Let’s start by looking at what
those five men (let’s be honest, they
were originally all men) were there to
do. Firstly the pilots – well they were
there to handle the aeroplane, make
judgements about the immediate
flightpath, keep it under control, and
of course the Captain was there to
command the crew and make the most
safety critical decisions. Most of the
time, they were not heavily involved in
the management of the engines – that
was the job of the flight engineer who
managed four (or sometimes more)
engines, and to a lesser extent other
aircraft system – these engines were
complex, unreliable, prone to fairly
regular failure (Dick Stratton, the famous
post WW2 flight engineer once told
me that he’d had five simultaneous
engine failures whilst test flying the
Saunders Roe Princess, but fortunately
still had three more whilst he got a few
re-started!) and of course there was
no such thing as automated engine
management and monitoring; that made
for a lot of workload. Next up was the
wireless operator – early aircraft radios
were huge boxes of components that
made the engines look quite reliable! –
requiring careful tuning and also, when
radios were first put on aeroplanes,
used Morse Code, not voice. So, not
unlike the engines, the radios needed
an expert there to constantly manage
them – and that was the job of the
WT, or RT operator. Finally why the
the first to go was the WT operator?
Two bits of technology came along to
make him redundant. The first was the
transistor, invented by some engineers
at Bell Labs in the early 1950s; that
shrunk big glass valves the size of a
light bulb down first to something
the size of your little fingernail, and
then later technology starting putting
hundreds and eventually tens of
thousands of transistors onto chips the
same size. The second was 2-way voice
communications, which had obviously
been around since WW1, but took quite
a few years work, improving a whole
bunch of components to make Morse
code happily necessary. So, no longer
did anybody need Morse, and no longer
was an aircraft radio a set of huge
unreliable boxes that needed an expert
to constantly nursemaid them. So, the
radio operator could be made redundant
and the radios moved from a console
at the back of the cabin, to a square
foot or less of main instrument panel.
Next to go was the navigator –
their job started to get a lot easier with
two bits of equipment – the Inertial
Navigation System, and various radio
beacon technologies such as NDB and
LORAN, then later VOR and ILS made
the workload of knowing where an
A Concorde flight deck, one of the last to require
a flight engineer.
aeroplane was, and which was it was
going vastly less than it had been. By
the 1970s we were even eliminating
sextant windows from the cockpit
roofs! So, the navigator could also be
made redundant, and the navigation
work passed forward to the pilots.
This did put extra load on the
pilots, but there was technology helping
them out as well. Controls became
powered, and autopilots introduced
that at first would just keep the wings
level and the aeroplane pointed in the
right direction, then would handle
maintenance of height and speed
better than just trimming alone, and
eventually follow more complex pre-
programmed flight paths. So the pilots
started to have enough spare capacity
to manage radio and navigation rather
than having to constantly provide two
pairs of hands and feet on the main
flight controls just to keep the aeroplane
under control most of the time.
And what about the last man?
Well the Flight Engineer stayed with us
for a very long time, as whilst engines
were getting a lot more reliable, with
the advent of the jet engine, and then
the steady improvement of jet engine
reliability – aeroplane systems were also
getting steadily more complex and the
engineer was also needed to manage
all of that. So, when I first trained in
aeronautical engineering in the late 80s,
the flight engineer was considered a
normal and essential part of the airliner
crew. Finally removing him was on
the cards for a long time, but in the
end was a lot less straightforward –
because the whole philosophy behind
the cockpit and its workload had to
be redesigned, and that took many
years of combined effort between
airlines and manufacturers, much extra
pilot training, and a leap of faith by
authorities who took a lot of convincing
that only 2 in the cockpit was at all safe.
But we got there, and now that’s normal.
And what next? Will the next stage
be to eliminate the co-pilot? Doubtless
the airline accountants would love that,
and equally modern combat aircraft such
as Gripen are scarcely less complex than
an A320. The big question really has
to be whether we can accept hundreds
of human lives being in the hands of a
single, fallible, human being – for the
moment, my answer would be no, and
the 2 person (not all men now, at last!)
flight deck stays for large passenger
transports, although perhaps not for
smaller aeroplanes, or freighters in the
shorter term. One day I’m sure that the
co-pilot will go as well, but not in my
opinion until we can design the fallibility
out of the human, which means that
ultimately, the aeroplane can fly itself
and we won’t need a human being at-all.
We will see, but not this year I think.