Are Flight Engineer Managers at Risk Due to AI?

Supervise and coordinate the activities of air crew members. Supervisors may also perform the same activities as the workers they supervise.

The occupation "First-Line Supervisors of Air Crew Members" has an automation risk of 0.0%, reflecting the highly complex and human-centric nature of the role. The base risk for this field is 0.0%, indicating that current technologies and foreseeable advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are not expected to replace these supervisors' duties. The position requires a blend of real-time decision-making, crisis management, and oversight of both personnel and procedures that go well beyond scripted tasks. The unique environment of air travel, including constantly changing variables such as weather, passenger behavior, and mechanical factors, necessitates an adaptive and empathetic human approach. Furthermore, supervisors act as intermediaries between crew members and higher management, facilitating communication that relies on interpersonal dynamics. Among the tasks within this occupation, the most automatable are likely to include routine administrative functions such as scheduling shifts, monitoring compliance with standardized procedures, and generating periodic reports on crew performance. These tasks involve predictable patterns and repetitive data processing, making them susceptible to some level of automation, though under direct human supervision. However, these areas form only a small fraction of the supervisors’ responsibilities and are usually supportive rather than core to the occupation’s essence. Conversely, the three most automation-resistant tasks for "First-Line Supervisors of Air Crew Members" are real-time conflict resolution, crew training and mentoring, and emergency decision-making. These responsibilities require deep contextual understanding, empathy, nuanced communication, and ethical judgment—skills that AI has not yet mastered. The bottleneck skills setting the bar for automation include advanced leadership (expert level), effective crisis management (expert level), and complex problem-solving (advanced level). These skills depend on emotional intelligence, adaptability, and the ability to synthesize information from unpredictable and rapidly evolving situations, all of which are currently beyond the reach of automation technologies.