Is a one person cockpit in the future?
One-person cockpits already exist for some smaller aircraft. It’s possible that larger aircraft will eventually go the same way. However, large airliners are designed for two pilots. While the computer handles cruise flight and occasionally landing, certain phases of flight still impose high workloads that would be difficult for one person to handle. This could be especially critical when things go wrong, as the workload increases dramatically when there are problems that need to be resolved. So having two pilots isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And the whole purpose to having pilots at all is that they can handle unforeseen situations much better than computers. Computers work well for handling the things for which they are programmed, but they fail catastrophically when they encounter things for which they haven’t been programmed, and then you really need human intervention to prevent disaster. Having pilots in the aircraft also means that the persons responsible for the flight’s safet
