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Airline Pilots Rely Too Much On Automation, Says Safety Panel
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Nearly all people connected to the aviation industry agree that automation has helped to dramatically improve airline safety over the past 30 years but Tom Costello reports at NBC News that according to a new Federal Aviation Administration report commercial airline pilots rely too much on automation in the cockpit and are losing basic flying skills. Relying too heavily on computer-driven flight decks now poses the biggest threats to airliner safety world-wide, the study concluded. The results can range from degraded manual-flying skills to poor decision-making to possible erosion of confidence among some aviators when automation abruptly malfunctions or disconnects during an emergency. 'Pilots sometimes rely too much on automated systems,' says the report adding that some pilots 'lack sufficient or in-depth knowledge and skills' to properly control their plane's trajectory. Basic piloting errors are thought to have contributed to the crash of an Air France Airbus A330 plane over the Atlantic in 2009, which killed all 228 aboard, as well as a commuter plane crash in Buffalo, NY, that same year. Tom Casey, a retired airline pilot who flew the giant Boeing 777, said he once kept track of how rarely he had to touch the controls on an auto-pilot flight from New York to London. From takeoff to landing, he said he only had to touch the controls seven times. 'There were seven moments when I actually touched the airplane — and the plane flew beautifully,' he said. 'Now that is being in command of a system, of wonderful computers that do a great job — but that isn't flying.' Real flying is exemplified by Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, says Casey, who famously landed his US Airways plane without engines on the Hudson River and saved all the passengers in what came to be known as the 'Miracle on the Hudson.' The new report calls for more manual flying by pilots — in the cockpit and in simulations. The FAA says the agency and industry representatives will work on next steps to make training programs stronger in the interest of safety."
The obvious solution is self-flying planes! Then there won't be a pilot to rely too much on automation.
If you read the summary, you'll notice one of the big problems is when that automation fails. It's great when it removes human error, but if automation fails, you still want human error as minimal as possible... and that means teaching pilots to rely less on automation (which is a very different thing from using less automation).
For example, the situation many years ago in Iowa where the hydraulics failed and the pilot had to steer the plane using only the engine throttles is an example of something that no computer system is designed to do. Yet a veteran pilot managed to pull it off.
That veteran pilot was a passenger that just happened to be on the plane. 99% of pilots would not have been able to pull it off. So what should we do about that?
Option 1: Train 100,000 pilots on a difficult technique that they will likely never use.
Option 2: Have one programmer sit down with that veteran pilot and code up the technique, test it on a simulator, test it on a real plane, and then use a USB thumb drive to update all flight control software on every plane.
automation is not designed to handle extreme failures of the aircraft.
It should be. One of the lessons of TMI was that automating routine stuff only leads to disaster because operators lose the skills they need to handle emergencies. The "extreme failures" are the first thing that should be automated, because those are the events that pilots are least capable of handling properly. ABS in cars is a good example of this. Nobody needs ABS to slow down for a routine traffic light. But ABSes have saved many lives when drivers slammed on the brakes to avoid a collision, or started slipping on ice.