The Seat That Disappeared Behind Me

Last week I wrote about Walter Hunt, the man who invented the first sewing machine and was talked out of bringing it to market because his daughter worried it would put thousands of seamstresses out of work. The history that followed proved her fears wrong. The industry didn’t shrink. It exploded, and the women who would have been seamstresses found bigger work waiting for them on the other side of the machine.

I’ve been thinking about that story because I lived through a smaller version of it myself.

I started flying the Boeing 727 in 1998. By then the 727 was one of the last commercial airliners that still required a three-person cockpit, and I sat in the flight engineer’s seat — the panel turned sideways behind the captain, a wall of switches and dials for fuel, hydraulics, pressurization, electrical and engine systems. It was real, demanding work. You earned your keep on that panel.

Even then, everyone knew the job was going away. The 757, the 767, the MD-11 — all the newer airplanes had been designed for two pilots from day one. The computers had taken over what I was doing on the panel. The flight engineer’s seat was, in a literal sense, being designed out of the airplane.

When my time on the 727 panel ended, I moved into the right seat of the same airplane as a first officer, and then up into the two-pilot fleet. I have since flown the 757, the MD-11, and the MD-10 — and the MD-10 is the part of this story I think about the most. That airplane started life as a DC-10 with a three-person cockpit. FedEx pulled out the flight engineer’s station and rebuilt the cockpit so it could be flown by two pilots and share a crew rating with the MD-11. They took a perfectly good airplane and surgically removed the job I used to do.

Today I am a captain on the 767. The seat I started my career in does not exist on any airplane I have flown since.

And here is the part worth saying out loud: the industry did not shrink. Aviation has grown almost without interruption for my entire career. There are more pilots flying today than when I started. There are more airplanes, more routes, more freight, more passengers. The flight engineers I trained with became first officers and then captains. The people who would have been flight engineers in a different generation became pilots, dispatchers, instructors, maintenance controllers. The work moved. It did not vanish.

The same thing happened to the railroad fireman a generation before me. The diesel engine didn’t need anyone shoveling coal, and after a long fight the job ended. The trains kept running. The men kept working, most of them as engineers up front.

I tell this story because I am hearing a lot of fear right now about artificial intelligence. It is the same fear Caroline Hunt had about the sewing machine, and the same fear the locomotive firemen had about the diesel engine, and the same fear my own union once had about the two-pilot cockpit. It is an honest fear. It is usually wrong.

I seat I began my career in disappeared, but I gained the seat at the front of the airplane. That is what change has almost always looked like, if you stay in your seat long enough to fly through it.