Reported by Michael Sainato
Aerospace giants have been accused of putting profits ahead of safety as officials consider cutting the minimum number of pilots required on commercial flight decks from two to one.
“This threat is not something that is 10, 15, 20 years away,” Capt Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents more than 78,000 pilots in the US and Canada, said. “It’s something that, quietly, Airbus, has been working on. It’s not what they are marketing it to be.
“The US has the safest aviation record in the world. We need to improve the standard for everybody, not just go to the lowest common denominator.”
“Everything that’s being driven when you look at crew sizes and inspections, it’s really driven by profit motive, it is not driven by safety,” said Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department. “That’s been true in railroads. It’s true in aviation. It’s the reason why the oversight inspections of Boeing were so lacking. It was geared towards: ‘how do we maximize profit on this?’ And we’ve seen it go way too far.”
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