Affiliated Experimental School of Zhuhai No.1 High School, zhuhai, guangdong, China
Email: rubywang.nb@gmail.com
Manuscript received July 11, 2026; accepted August 7, 2026; published August 26, 2026
Abstract—The global aviation industry is struggling with a growing pilot shortage and rising operational costs. For this reason, Single Pilot Operations (SPO) has become one of the most important directions for the future of commercial aviation. This paper focuses on an SPO system architecture that ensures high safety, reliability, and flight efficiency. After analyzing key requirements including air-ground coordination, human-machine task distribution, and full-process flight automation, this paper proposes a four-party collaborative framework that includes the single pilot, an onboard intelligent core system, distributed ground support stations, and a cloud AI decision-making system. This paper also provides detailed designs for the intelligent decision-making module and the distributed ground support system, and evaluates its advantages in safety, efficiency, and scalability. Results show that this architecture can significantly reduce pilot workload, support better global flight decisions, and offer a practical technical plan for real-world SPO applications. At the same time, this study identifies technical and regulatory challenges that may slow down SPO implementation and offers possible solutions.
Keywords—Single pilot operations, System architecture, Air-ground collaboration, Human-machine allocation, AI auxiliary decision-making
Cite: Sichen Wang, "System Architecture Design for Single Pilot Operations," International Journal of Engineering and Technology, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 138-140, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (
CC BY 4.0).
