First Officer (Aviation)

This article describes the copilot or copilot of an aircraft. For the copilot or copilot in motorsport see Rallye # Copilot .

Copilot (right) in the cockpit of a Boeing 757

The first officer or co-pilot , also copilot , co-pilot or copilot , ( English : first officer , abbreviated FO or F / O or copilot , also co-pilot ) is the second pilot on board an aircraft and in civil aviation stands in the command hierarchy specified by the airline directly below the pilot in charge (captain , commander) . A special case is the Senior First Officer , who on some long-haul cruising flights takes responsibility for the aircraft when the commander takes a break. This in turn is subordinate to the first officer in the hierarchy, who can then also be called the second officer . Some airlines also use the term “second officer” for pilots in practical training.

If the captain is not present on the ground or is no longer able to act in flight, the co-pilot assumes responsibility for the aircraft, crew and passengers as deputy .

As a rule, the captain is allowed to actively delegate parts of his duties and tasks to the first officer. This applies in particular to the planning and execution of a flight segment and is regular practice with most airlines. The first officer assumes the role of pilot flying and thus control of the control of the aircraft. In this case, the captain assumes the role of pilot not flying , i.e. takes over the radio communication with the ground stations and carries out switching operations at the request of the pilot flying . The commander oversees the safe conduct of the flight; the legal responsibility remains with him. As a rule, the captain and the first officer take turns in the conduct of the flight as a flying pilot during the course of a day of operation in order to distribute the workload evenly and to give everyone the opportunity to remain in practice.

All members of a cockpit crew are equally qualified to conduct flights in normal and abnormal situations. However, the commander is usually the most experienced crew member.

If a first officer is recruited by an airline through takeover from another company or by the military, it may be that he has a higher flight experience than the pilot due to his previous assignments.

For inexperienced co-pilots ( English : low time F / O ), many airlines have special restrictions and safety regulations.

The position of the first officer is traditionally on the right in aircraft and on the left in the cockpit of helicopters . This is legally regulated in Germany in the air traffic regulations .

literature

• Patrick Smith: Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections . Sourcebooks, 2013, ISBN 1-4022-8091-2 , ISBN 978-1-4022-8091-7 .
• Redundancy in the cockpit. In: aerokurier No. 6/2018, pp. 62-65.

Web links

Wiktionary: Kopilot  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Wiktionary: Copilot  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Commons : Copilot  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Tom Harris: How Airline Crews Work . HowStuffWorks.com, June 14, 2001, accessed March 27, 2015.
• Patrick Smith: Patrick Smith's Ask The Pilot: When a Pilot Dies in Flight . AskThePilot.com, accessed March 27, 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Co-pilot, copilot, co-pilot, copilot, the. In: Duden online . Bibliographisches Institut GmbH, accessed on November 15, 2017 . 
2. ↑ copilot. In: thefreedictionary.com. Farlex , Inc., accessed March 30, 2015 . 
3. ↑ co-pilot. In: thefreedictionary.com. Farlex, Inc., accessed March 30, 2015 .