Shouldn't be a big surprise, this has been the trend with railroads for years. In the steam era, having helper engines meant having crews in each engine, in the diesel era you needed only 1 crew because of MU capability. In the original era of trains they need brakemen to put the brakes on, with the air brake the engineer did it. Railroads used to have people at trackside checking trains for hotboxes, these days that can be monitored from the can of a train via sensors and video cameras. A steam engine needed an engineer and fireman, that kind of transferred over to diesels, but a fireman was really just another body in the cab if what a friend of mine who had been one told me. Lot of subway systems run by computer and the engineer is only a backup. Airliners have had the capability to be flown by an automated system for many years now, but is not likely to be automated any time soon, though you could see a plane where a single pilot is a backup (they used to have 3 people in the cockpit, today it is 2...
|
|
