The     1     (late) season of the travel reality show on Hunan TV     2     (attract) a newfound interest in the special bridge in Croatia among viewers since it was aired.

China and Croatia are far apart, but they    3     (connect) by the ancient Silk Road more than 700 years ago. In 2022, the Pelješac Bridge,     4     (build) by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, was     5     (official) completed and opened to traffic. It connects the northern and southern lands of Croatia,     6     has become a symbol of friendship and cooperation between Croatia and China.

Hai Tao, the head of the company, talked about the changes it has brought     7     local people’s lives. He mentioned that people spent three hours traveling to Dubrovnik, yet now it takes only half an hour    8     (cross) the bridge. It saves time, promotes local tourism development and increases job     9     (opportunity).

The bridge realizes “the centuries-old dream of connecting the south with the rest of Croatia” and its completion “gave the cooperation     10     Croatia and China a completely new dimension,” Croatian Prime Minister told Xinhua.

4 . If you had boarded a passenger plane in 1950, you would have seen five people in the cockpit (驾驶舱): two pilots, a radio operator, a navigator and a flight engineer. Over the years, technical advances have gradually removed the need for the last three, leaving just two pilots. That has been the norm (标准) in commercial aviation for decades.

However, things could be simplified further — one of the two remaining pilots could soon go. Many military aircraft are already manned by a single pilot, and for commercial aviation this would mean stepping into a brave new world.

But how will airlines make this brave innovation come true? One way is to greatly increase automation in the cockpit, devoting more tasks to computers. Another is to shift the same tasks from the cockpit to the ground. “The latter approach seems to be more workable, at least in the short term, because much of what is required already exists,” says Patrick Smith, an airline pilot flying Boeing 767 aircraft. “A trained ground operator could observe a number of flights at once and even fully control the plane remotely if needed.”

It’s true that single-pilot operations could help airlines save money, but there is another reason which makes them quicken their pace for this crucial breakthrough. Boeing predicts a need for 600,000 new pilots in the next two decades, but by some estimates, there will be a deficit (赤字) of at least 34,000 pilots globally by 2025. Reducing the number of pilots on some crews or aircraft could lessen the impact of this.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to a single pilot will be selling the idea to passengers. In 2019, Don Hairis, a professor at Coventry University, conducted a survey on the prospect of flying on an airliner with just one pilot. Just a minority of participants said they’d be willing to take that flight, and the general idea was that removing a pilot increased the possibility of accidents. In the study, Harris concluded that the single-crew airliner would be still probably 20 years away.