News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Airbus' self-flying plane just completed taxi, take-off, ... by Robotbeat on Monday July 27, 2020 @05:44PM (#23969758)
Sure, but you get a huge amount of the labor cost reduction just by going from 2 to 1 and probably have a much easier time justifying it. Labor costs are already a pretty small part of air freight costs, for instance, so proportionally, the improvement in total costs (in both absolute and relative-to-total terms) from going to 1 from 2 pilots is about the same as going to 0 from 1.

EDIT: Just to illustrate... a 777 Freighter can fly a 5000 mile route at like 500 miles per hour carrying about 100tons of freight, I think in one shift so you only need a pilot and copilot. That’s 50,000 ton-miles per hour. Air freight revenue is about $1.40 per ton-mile, so in terms of revenue, you’re talking $70,000 per hour. Pilot and co-pilot wages are much lower per flight hour than you’d imagine, around $20-50/hour, so combined, they both contribute about $70 in direct labor costs per hour, so already just on thousandth, or 0.1%, of the revenue from the freight they’re carrying. Even eliminating the pilots doesn’t reduce costs much!

Much bigger difference for smaller and slower regional air freight routes.

There are no comments on this comment yet.