Federal Aviation Administration Archives - Leeham News and Analysis

Three separate but thematically linked analyses from Leeham News and Analysis, published across May 2026, collectively examine automation's expanding role in aviation systems, the economic forces that have historically driven cockpit configuration decisions, and the workforce crisis now threatening industry growth at a structural level. Together they form a coherent argument: aviation's recurring pattern of using technology to reduce human labor requirements carries deep precedent, and the industry is once again approaching a critical inflection point.

The most technically specific of the three pieces details the FAA's Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories framework, articulated through a four-phase deployment architecture. Phase 1 confines automation to data aggregation and decision support with no control authority. Phase 2 permits advisory authority at non-towered airports where no human controller is present. Phase 3 introduces certified advisory authority at staffed facilities, explicitly authorized by regulatory architecture, with pilots and controllers executing the system's output. Phase 4 represents full NAS infrastructure integration with real-time flight path coordination authority. The analysis draws on ACAS X as the clearest operational precedent for Phase 3 deployment, noting that the cockpit itself functions as the "staffed facility" in that construct, and that during an active conflict event the Resolution Advisory legally overrides an ATC clearance. The framework's credibility rests on what the author identifies as architectural discipline: bounded scope, bounded time, bounded authority, conditional on equipage, and verification scaled to the safety stakes. For instrument-rated pilots operating under IFR, understanding where SMART sits in this hierarchy matters practically—Phase 3 authority, if extended to ground-based systems, would carry the same mandatory compliance weight that TCAS RAs currently carry in the cockpit.

The 767 piece provides the historical template for why automation decisions in aviation are inseparable from economics. By the late 1970s, Boeing and its airline customers fought openly over whether the 767 could be certified for two-person crew operations, with the financial calculus entirely on the side of elimination of the flight engineer. Labor cost savings compounded across fleet-wide annual flight hours into figures that made the engineering battle also a financial one. The FAA ultimately approved two-crew certification, and only one carrier—Ansett Airlines of Australia—ever took delivery of a three-person configured 767. The concurrent 757/767 common type rating further amplified the economic benefit by enabling cross-utilization of pilots across narrowbody and widebody fleets, a scheduling advantage that remains structurally significant to airline network planning to this day. That decision established a model that subsequent programs followed: automation absorbs complexity, headcount decreases, and regulatory architecture eventually ratifies what economics demanded. Pilots flying glass-cockpit aircraft on reduced crew complements are operating in the direct downstream consequence of that 1970s battle.

The workforce shortage series, the third of the group, frames both automation arguments in a different kind of urgency. Leeham's reporting notes that no major aviation or aerospace policy organization has yet quantified the industry-wide cost of workforce shortfalls, though early academic concern is rising and partial estimates suggest tens of billions in unrealized economic output. The series argues that industry efforts remain fragmented—organizations inspire interest in aviation careers but fail to coordinate a unified pipeline from early education through career entry, while other industries have long institutionalized exactly that kind of structured development pathway. The proposed remedy centers on industry-wide collaboration, organized investment in career programs, and cultural change rather than continued reliance on government action. For airline operators, regional carriers, and business aviation flight departments already experiencing difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified pilots, mechanics, and dispatchers, the analysis reflects conditions already visible at the operational level: training pipelines constrained by instructor shortages, maintenance deferrals influenced by AMT availability, and dispatch operations stretched thin.

Read as a set, the three Leeham analyses describe an industry simultaneously automating its way toward reduced human control requirements and struggling to attract the human workforce those same systems still require to function safely. The SMART framework's Phase 4 ambition—NAS infrastructure integration with real-time routing authority—implies a future where fewer controllers manage more traffic. The 767's crew reduction history demonstrates that once economic logic and regulatory architecture align, the reduction becomes permanent. And the workforce shortage reporting suggests that if aviation fails to build a functioning career pipeline now, it will face pressure to accelerate automation not because technology is ready, but because human labor is scarce. Professional pilots and aviation operators have a direct institutional interest in how those pressures resolve, because the architecture of authority—who commands, who advises, who executes—is precisely what is being renegotiated across all three of these concurrent debates.