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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.
It depends on the simulation. If you are training for a cross oceanic flight, you would simulate switching out flight crews and long periods where you would normally use auto pilot. The simulation would toss various problems at you to break up what is normally a dry, boring routine so you know how to handle different problems.
Personally, I think we're just a few years away from a fully automatic flying experience.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
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).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593
"Despite the struggles of both pilots to save the aircraft, it was later concluded that if they had just let go of the control column, the autopilot would have automatically taken action to prevent stalling, thus avoiding the accident"
And reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulkovo_Aviation_Enterprise_Flight_612
I'd rather have a computer flying the airplane I am sitting in, than a hairless ape.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Automation fails from time to time, and when it does, pilots are the failsafe. But to be able to do that, they need to stay in practice, and that's the problem being highlighted here: they're getting so little time in control that they're getting out of shape.
Well yes, but pilots help make sure they can go back up again.
Personally, I think we're just a few years away from a fully automatic flying experience.
Me too. Honestly I can't imagine a human surviving as many crashes as our black boxes have.. The combined learning from all of those, as well as the automation we already have ought to be able to out perform a human right to the last moment, when human pilots may have been incapacitated by movements or G-forces. We are getting better and better at explaining to these moving robots how to handle themselves in all sorts of crazy situations.
Just think about the Google Car that has to handle far crazier things then you would ever encounter in the air or on a landing strip. Even impromptu landing strips could be better judged by a computer with all the sensors at its disposal. (And it would be better able to analyze all the data then any human in a panic.)
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
In a crash the fact that is an airbus has to be mentioned. When an airbus behaves under dramatic conditions it becomes a "US Airways plane"!
There are a couple of parts of the flight where the pilot is required to use the automation. The biggest is during cruise in what's known as RVSM airspace, where the vertical separation minimums are reduced from what was standard before RVSM was implemented. There, if your autopilot quits, ATC will send you down below the RVSM floor. RVSM is in use above some altitude in the 48 states and on transAtlantic routes. (I don't recall the exact altitude.)
The other is in flying an instrument approach to very low altitudes, known as a category III approach. IIRC, those must be flown on autopilot in order to continue below category III minimums.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
A human can get an appreciation of velocity even without working pitot tubes, in a middle of a weather system where GPS doesn't work. The flight computer can't handle that, which is why it disconnected and warned in the case of the Air France flight.
In the case of the Hudson River landing, bird strikes took out both engines simultaneously, killing power. Pilot manually switched over to APU. Ironically however, in that case, the computer helped the pilot ditch the plane safely, once it had power again. With just the pilot, or just the flight computers, there would most likely have been dead people in the water.
Especially when you park your DreamLifter at the wrong airport
When Capt Sullenberger landed on the Hudson, the aircraft software worked to prevent his stall. But his flying skill is what safely landed the plane. His knowledge of what the aircraft can and cannot do was critical. He even realized he needed the APU for the computers to continue operating, and turned it on early in the emergency. His actions showed that he understood his plane and how to fly it. Some pilots are forgetting the "fly it" part.
Likewise, the automation is not designed to handle extreme failures of the aircraft. 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.
My son is 13 years old and has been training to be a pilot since he was 11. He has taken off and landed a small airplane (with the PIC in the airplane with him, of course) quite a few times. It just goes to show that landing an airplane isn't as difficult as some people think it is ... it just requires focus and passion. Both of which my son has in spades when he's flying an airplane.
This news story struck me as wonderful news. My son has wanted to be a pilot since he was three years old. If you are one of the lucky few (I am not) who knew what he wanted to be for his whole life, then I envy you as much as I envy my son for having a singular great dream. The notion of drones and computerized pilots scares me because it threatens that dream. Stories in which autopilots and drones are slandered make me happy.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Most future pilots can only dream of training to the level of the famous blue angels (usaf stunt-team),
The Blue Angels are the Navy demonstration team. The USAF demonstration team are called the Thunderbirds.
Having your facts straight may go a long way in not being labeled an ignorant kook for your conspiracy theories. Just saying.
It's kind of expensive to put them in an empty commercial plane just for training. That's why they usually have a more experienced pilot in charge who can take over if necessary. And the argument of having them fly a plane that's not full goes against the "every life is precious" philosophy that most western countries embrace. Sooner or later, they have to make the leap.
I'm a manager at a world leading flight training company targeting major airlines all around the world, we train cadets from scratch on small aircraft and flight simulators in order to develop these basic skills and beyond (eg: ATPL and HPAT, type specific training etc.). I assist with developing syllabi and ensuring their compliance with numerous safety authorities all over the world. We looked into the Air France disaster to see how we can improve out syllabi to give students the skills to handle these atypical situations. To make a long story, the growing trend for airlines to want to cut costs on training and even remove what they call "unnecessary" training from syllabi is what is leading to this problem. The MPL is the prime example of this, this is my solution:
- Stop treating us like a factory, each student is different and can they can take longer to learn certain concepts. Fixed length integrated courses don't work if they don't have good margins for this.
- English is the language of aviation. If you bring us cadets who can't speak it, we have to teach them english within your timetable which degrades outcomes.
- Redo the MPL and bring back spinning, hand and feet skills etc.
- Whilst the MPL has a heavy focus on simulators, it needs to be a much bigger part of their renewals and professional development in order to re-enforce what they learnt during early stages of their career and training when they start working.
- Some airlines have poor quality control in their recruitment phases, is susceptible to corruption or have too many "token" cadets. Some people just aren't cut out to be pilots, identify this early not late.
- Airline and safety authority audits are a joke, Standards/QA Manager(s) should be mandatory, I've seen our competitors teach students very bad techniques because of a bad instructor or two and it poisons entire batches of students. Auditing needs to be proactive, integrated into systems and workflows and not just a visit a few times a year. to look through paper records or merely reactive in the case of a safety incident.
Remember, the training doesn't stop when the student is finished their course. Operators and manufacturer (Airbus, I'm looking at you) need to stop treating pilots like bus drivers and focusing only on fuel optimisation.
- This is minor but still important. Shock material. We aren't allowed to show students the imagery of air disasters any more. They can be and usually are gruesome by statistically effective, safety incidents in classes that were shown this material were halved compared to classes that weren't.
This opinion is my own and doesn't reflect that of my employer, doing it anonymously because our media policy prohibits these types of comments. I'd love to hear people's feedback on how training could be furthered improved, it's what gets me up in the morning, trying to fight the system.
There are two pilots. I may be wrong here, but one of the pilots will presumably have actual flying experience. And even a pilot who has never flown that specfic type of plane before will have plenty of experience flying large planes.
What alternate sensors, that aren't already in use? GPS? Far less reliable than pitot tubes, due to weather, and that's just one example. Come on, practical engineering please, and not crackpipe dreaming....
And the systems to see the broken engines would be powered by what? Also, the emergency maneuvers have to be programmed in, based on human experience. Humans also have the advantage of being able to generalise and abstracting, able to adapt from one situation to fit into another situation more or less on the fly.
Hudson landing, until the pilot activated the APU, the flight computer was crippled.
Let's face it, automated cars is a fundamentally easier to solve problem, due to far fewer variables and complications, and weaker forces involved.
"The flight computer can't handle that yet. I mean, where comes the human's appreciation of velocity from? Well, three sources: Experience (which is just collected data), knowledge of physical relations (that's the easiest thing to program in), and experience from the senses (which is essentially sensor data). Nothing which could not be replicated in software. The point is that the computer would have to be programmed to estimate missing data from one sensor from available data from other sensors (and also simple check routines to estimate the reliability of data; but I guess they are already built in, to know when to give up control to the pilot). The more sensors are available, the better."
The computer is already programmed to use multiple sensors, such as multiple pitot tubes for example. Despite research, pitot tubes are still the most reliable sensors we have for this application, GPS is way too unreliable. And in case of Air France, all 3 pitot tubes froze over, making the flight computer completely blind(And forget about GPS or other radio based navigational aid in the weather they were in, in the region they were in...)
Also, experience is not just collected data. Experience is the knowledge extracted through sifting and analysis of the collected data, and perhaps generalised and abstracted upon also, to possibly be adapted in whole or part to other situations. A rookie trooper that's gone through training has collected lots of data. But the trooper is still completely inexperienced until he or she has been through the real deal, and seen what works, what didn't work, how it worked, and what can be learned from it. Same thing with pilots. To equate a pilots decision making, you'd need a beefy cluster to handle the expert system, image recognition, processing all the sensor data to give better spatial awareness, and recognize for example an improvised landing strip that is suitable.
Personally, I think we're just a few years away from a fully automatic flying experience.
No, there will always be guild navigators. The spice must flow.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
In fact, an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) need at least 1,500 hours of practical, i.e. non-simulator flying experience before they can become one. A commercial airline pilot (level below ATP), needs at least 250 hours. And that's not to say "... in his lifetime ...", there are even more restrictions.
Yes, they usually do ALSO train in simulators, but the hours required here must be actual plane-flying.
The problem with long-distance flights is though that most of the time there is really nothing to do for pilot once the plane reaches the cruising altitude and auto-pilot is on (even on smaller planes). You have to watch the skies, the instruments, listen to radio - and that's it. Most of the work is done during take-off and landing (approach).
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.
Don't forget about wind moving in X, Y and Z, ambient temperature, ambient pressure, humidity, precipitation, other objects moving in X, Y AND Z. And as I said, the forces involved in an aircraft flight are greater.
What really twists my noodle is the knowledge that a new pilot, after completing sim training, fly's a real airliner for the first time on a normal commercial flight with a full load of passengers.
Yeah, but that *new* pilot has several hundred hours of flight time (ie: Commercial pilots license by FAA, PLUS an instrument rating, certifying he's able to fly safely in the soup) in other aircraft before an airline will even talk to him.. He trains for MANY in that full-motion simulator for the type aircraft he will fly for the airline before he ever sits in the right seat (First Officer)....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
More automation already means that the pilots gain less experience, including in unforeseen circumstances. That was exactly what the AF447 crew ran into. The juniors didn't catch on and when the old man finally got back, he didn't gain oversight in time either. A veteran pilot would've been able to pull the thing out of its deathly course, provided he'd known what was going on. Worse, the automation will mean there will be less pilots of such veteran ability around.
So this is a bit of a turning point. More automation, and then better work hard on making it able to handle as many situations as possible, not just the common ones. Then give it full authority. Or more emphasis on pilot training, and having them fly often so they keep current. The middle way would be both, which is probably harder to do well.
The summary states that the report calls for more manual flying in the air, though. Which means using less automation. This seems like the wrong way to go about it since it gives more chances for human error. It seems to me that the better solution would be more mandatory yearly simulation time with simulations focusing on how to properly handle auto pilot failures. That way, you keep the pilots in practice without making the passengers any less safe.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
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?
That's not exactly the full crux of what happened. The DC10 had two pilots and one engineer. There was another pilot who happened to be a flight instructor that happened to be a passenger and he went up to the cockpit to assist when the plane lost hydraulics. From my understanding the instructor provided assistance by controlling the throttle but didn't take over. Could the crew have handled themselves? Who knows.
Dennis E. Fitch, an off-duty United Airlines DC-10 flight instructor, was seated in the first class section and, noticing the crew were having trouble controlling the airplane, offered his assistance to the flight attendants. Upon being informed that there was a DC-10 instructor on board, Haynes immediately invited him to the cockpit, hoping his instructional knowledge of the aircraft would help them regain control. Upon entering the cockpit and looking at the hydraulic gauges, Fitch determined that the situation was beyond anything he had ever faced. . . Haynes, still trying to fly the airplane with his control column while simultaneously working the throttles, asked Fitch to work the throttles instead.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Couldn't even be bothered to read between the lines? I read the summary and the article, The natural reaction to stories like this to debate whether automation is a good idea, so I offered my opinion on that matter.
Keyword there being "mostly".
Also, far more extensive than an automated car would need.
The thing is, the aircraft autopilots are not AI's, and are tasked with routine tasks such as stabilising the plane, maintaining a level course etc. Adding decision making beyond "sensor data unavailable, alert pilot and disengage" would require you to carry a cluster on board, and a beefy expert system at the very least, preferably an AI....
It's not about staying in practice. The problem is much more immediate. In order to interact with any system when you're to be part of the control loop, your brain needs to be preset for control. That means you need to know and feel exactly in what state is the system you're going to take control over. It's very hard to maintain this awareness if you're not actually controlling the process. You need to be ahead of the plane, so to speak.
This very same problem is present in all of man-machine interaction when control tasks are involved. This is the reason, for example, that "taking over" a self-driving car while it is underway is pointless: you need to be pretty much driving the car without actually driving it - so you might as well be the driver without the self-driving brouhaha. Otherwise by the time you figure what's going on, you'll be dead. You can only take over a self-driving car when it's stopped. Even then you'll be quite likely to get lost or to execute a wrong turn/maneouver since you're unlikely to know where you are - unless you're on a road you frequent.
What it really boils down to is something else entirely: people use "common sense" to judge things that they have zero experience with. If you ask "common sense", it would be "cool" to have self-flying planes, self-driving cars, etc. But common sense is precisely the wrong one to make judgment about such things. Reality is quite far from common sense, until you had a chance to experience it just so. The common-sense widely-spread non-specialist thinking about self-controlling systems is usually wildly off-base. Reality is under no obligation to make sense to anyone, so to speak. Thus some things that should be "common-sense-easy" are very far from being so. Self-controlling systems often bring with them a whole lot of extra issues that nobody had any idea of until they've faced them. Aviation industry has only recently went out of automation-related self-denial. 20 years after it was all understood. That's the risk of relying on common sense over facts.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I think automated cars would have to cope with far MORE variables and complications.
Planes receive a unique flightplan and detailed instructions for take of and landing that are steered by a central traffic control to make sure that there won't be any other planes nearby. Thats possible because EVERY plane has to receive instructions from them.
So basically, automated planes would not need to consider other planes. They do in a rather simple way (TCASS) but only as a last line of defense. And even if that emergency system triggers, it sends one plane "up" and the other "down", which are obviously no evasion options for cars. (And blindly going "left" and "right" aren't options either as usually on roads, you have to expect curbs, trenches, more cars in more lanes or pedestrians)
Additionally, all information needed for a plane is already available in electronic maps. Pilots hardly have to react to speed limits posted on traffic signs. (Which my be dirty or partly shielded and all that stuff)
The final proof is even in the summary: We already have commercial airplanes that fly almost completly automated! (having to touch the actual controls no more than 5 times between NY and London is almost completly automatic!) whereas automated cars were unthinkable untill a few years ago and today they're not completly from "experimental" to "testing" stages.
But there is ONE THING that makes autonomous cars safer than planes: Cutting of the engine is a safe failure mode. (Espescially if it can be propagated to surrounding cars by radio, so blindly jumping out of your exploding Tesla onto a busy highway is rather safe when information about an emergency stop has been broadcasted to the cars around and they stop, too)
bickerdyke
A human can get an appreciation of velocity even without working pitot tubes, in a middle of a weather system where GPS doesn't work.
Sorry buddy, you've just killed yourself in exactly the same way the AF pilots killed themselves. Oh the irony. NEXT STUDENT, PLEASE.
Seriously. Your seat-of-the-pants "feel" for a modern jet is precisely what is going to kill you. So let me be clear: if you ever end up as an untrained babbling idiot in a cockpit of a jetliner, trying to save a bunch of souls while the air data is missing, you better keep it straight and level and not mess with anything until you've read the checklists. After you do, and you better be quick about it, you'll know that what you're supposed to do is to set the throttles to a fixed position that depends solely on altitude and desired rate of climb/descent. You'll look those up in a fucking table, and as long as you do, you have a chance to make it. There's going full retard, and it's you.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Just strongly? Why do you think that you have to be instrument rated for flying in poor visibility. Human velocity sense is adapted for the ground. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong when flying if you just rely on your own senses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation
Actually, I have several friends that are Airbus 330 and 321 captains that actually would like to have more control over the plane and less automation. To some degree, they are hamstrung by the company, Airbus Industrie, that is relegating to pilots to "flight management" duties instead of actually "stick and rudder" flying. Most pilots I know lean towards type A and would much rather have control over their plane then hand it over to avionics and flight management systems.
One of the more frequent causes for a deadly airplane crash is a spatial disorientation of the pilot. The vestibular system is distorted in flight and if the visibility is low, there is no chance for a human to determine the current position in space without instruments.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If it were so easy to just automate extreme failures, websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon would go down a lot less often. Unfortunately despite thousands of employees with extreme technical skill, there are still mistakes that bring them down from time-to-time. If we didn't have human SREs or System Administrators, things would be a lot worse. A computer doesn't have the analytics skill of a pilot and never will unless we end up with a singularity.
We don't have strong AI yet and pilots will never just "sit down with a programmer". Automation has to be tested thousands of times across thousands of scenarios in different aircraft and conditions for decades. Even then, there's always the chance that some snippet of code is waiting to kill a plane full of people because it got the wrong set of sensor inputs.
No, the pilot pulled the stick back the entire time, not forward. As the pitot tubes froze, the entrance first became smaller. This speeds up the air entering, and gave the pilot an overspeed warning. In other words, he thought he was diving. When all speed indication went away, he didn't know what to do, and continued to climb to maximum plane altitude. He didn't level off, he tried to continue to climb higher than the plane can. It then stalled. The pitot tubes cleared early in this event, and the plane correctly warned of stall. The co-pilot in control continued to climb the aircraft, even though diving is the correct solution to a stall. Only when the other pilot realized what the first was doing did they start to correct it, but hit the water before he was able to point the nose down. The pilots were doing everything except looking at the gauges to see what the plane was actually doing.
Automation fails from time to time, and when it does, pilots are the failsafe. But to be able to do that, they need to stay in practice, and that's the problem being highlighted here: they're getting so little time in control that they're getting out of shape.
Right, build or contract a small fleet of trainers (perhaps twin turboprops or two seaters trainers like PC.7s or Tucanos or even set aside an old 737 or something in that class) and make these people fly their ass off once in a while. I'm sure simulators are great learning tools but there is no substitute for taking a plane up and actually practicing things like: engine restarts, flying on one engine, simulating an emergency descent after a rapid decompression or just boning up on basic aerobatics (the value of practical experience is one of a number of reasons the military hasn't replaced exercises like Maple Flag with simulater-only LAN partys). That should take care of any 'bureaucratification' problems your pilots are suffering from.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Drones have a horrible safety record, and are exactly what you are claiming is the fix. In the case of drones since humans rarely get hurt you don't hear about all of the crashes. At least two within the last week have caused damage to people so we heard about those.
The problem is really that people sitting outside expect or demand perfection where it can't really exist, given our current "air lift" flying technology.
Well trained humans combined with computers has gotten us to an extremely good record with safety. Wi To Lo or whoever the pilot in training was from Asiana was not trained and the one guy that was trained on the plane didn't do their job. Computers that should have caught the problem didn't for what ever reason.
Claiming computer guided is the only way is fine until an anomaly wipes out electrical systems. While it would be difficult for a human to land a large passenger plane without electricity at least there is a chance.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
NASA has actually conducted tests with special flight control software that can fly the aircraft using only differential engine power, even in some cases with an engine inoperative. It performed beautifully, much better than a human pilot could. But this is just one of the many unexpected things that can happen to an airplane (and extremely rare at that). You can't program everything into the systems, you still need basic on the spot common sense surprisingly often. As an airline pilot, I can't tell you how many times I've had to keep the plane's automation from doing something completely stupid because of some malfunction in the software.
People often cite the statistic saying that most accidents are caused by pilot error, but those don't include the huge number of malfunctions of automation that were corrected by the pilots and therefore did NOT end up in the statistics.
Don't forget that a bunch of pilots have had that exact "benefit" of being able to judge speed screw them over when they refused to believe the instruments and didn't take action to prevent their plane slamming into the ground. It does work both ways. Planes are getting better and better, and pilots simply are not.
First sorry for my English.
Automation work very well in fully tested conditions and bring many advantage in term of safety, cost and comfort. The problem is that the real life is not always contained into the fully tested conditions, and that even with an massive and continuous development effort, this assertion will never be proved false.
The current state of the aircraft operation is that basically the human endorse the full responsibility to engage the automation, monitor his work, disable it in case it is not appropriate, and manually operate the aircraft. This is manly because the today automation level don't include the capabilities to replace the human for those meta-tasks. But there is technically no reason to not includes them, and I believe that the future automation will take this direction. The consequence is that the human will have even less opportunities to operate an aircraft in sustainables conditions and that the remaining out of tested condition case will be so unmanageables situations that only a few exceptional pilots will eventually be able to survive. Until this extreme level of automation is in operation, we will inevitably see pilot error due to untrained operation like in the AF443, like in Kazan a few day ago, like many others accidents...
What is important to understand here is that the concept of "untrained operation" (or not enough) for an human is not so different from the concept of "untested condition" for an automatic system. From the aircraft essential operations like aerodynamic and motors, this make no difference if the action (or inaction) in from a human or from a computer. The point is to how to know what is the good action to do at each time in the operation. The only solution here it to have a very very depth knowledge in a lot of specific fields, a massive quantity of information to choose from, and a very quick reaction time to analyse all of them. Human brain can archive fantastic things from the eyes of others humans, but have still several hug limitations. He is specifically unable to focus on a task for a long time, sensible to external stress, limited in his precision and repeatability, and usually slow and error prone in untrained operation. An automation yield better result for most of those metrics, but is completely unable to handle untrained operations (out of tested conditions).
Did you get the idea ? Having a slow and error prone human trying to resolve untrained operation is better than having only an automation that will do nothing relevant at all. This is what we commonly call intelligence: trying to solve something new. Just a note: while our human body have evolved to integrate some basic survival action generator in case of emergency situation, there are really not effective for an today aircraft operation; don't mix them with the required intelligence. At this stage you maybe feel the problem: Out of the automation tested conditions, automation is for nothing, and human is a mediocre performer, but we have no other choice yet. Having the pilot trained to replace the automation working into tested conditions is not the solution, because the real problem don't lie into the tested conditions, but outside of them.
Now a level higher. Training a pilot on a unexpected situation is a long process. From a very general point of view, you can decompose this process into some basic parts: 1) recognize the situation; 2) select the appropriate action; 3) do the selected action. In practice this is implemented into a written procedure and the pilot train this procedure. What is important to understand here is that this way of training the pilot is to make an unexpected situation managed more by his experience than by his intelligence, because experience is fast, while intelligence is slow. We essentially try to extend the "tested condition" manageable by his brain, much like we can extend the tested condition of an automate. I predict that in the future, the computers will be less limited than the human brain in the extension of the teste
Sometimes there are failures that aren't on the checklist. The Gimli glider comes to mind where they ran out of gas at 35000 ft. When the all engines out alarm went off, they reached for the checklist and discovered there was no entry as it wasn't supposed to happen. With all engines out they lost all electrical and hydraulic pressure and were informed that a 777 can't glide. Luckily the captain was an accomplished glider pilot and the co-pilot knew of an abandoned airfield and with luck they landed without killing any passengers or people picnicking on the runway (it was being used for car racing) and through luck they picked the least occupied runway and the nose gear failing stopped them quicker then the brakes could.
Imagine being on the ground when suddenly a silent airliner lands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_glider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yes. Fully autonomous flying is fine as long as nothing brakes.
Part of what made the AF crash such a high-stakes affair is that jetliners (AF included) fly up in "coffin corner".
Basically, if you draw a graph where the x-axis is airspeed, and the y-axis is altitude, and plot where the safe alt+airspeed boundaries are, you get a triangle. The far right of the triangle is basically a vertical line -- the maximum allowable velocity of the airframe is basically constant. The triangle starts "near" the origin. And the hypotenuse goes from near the origin to the point of "max speed, max altitude".
It is this point of "max speed, max altitude" that is the coffin corner. The closer you get to that point, the smaller your safe region is. This is because the higher you fly, the faster you HAVE to go in order to maintain sufficient lift in thin air.
It's called "coffin corner" because too fast means an airframe overspeed, and too slow means a stall. Both of these kill you. The coffin gets tighter the closer to maxalt/maxspeed you get.
Of course, the engines get more fuel efficient the further into coffin corner you go. Fuel efficiency is how you make money in this business. So guess where you're going to fly the plane for 10 straight hours.
So, you're flying along at 36,000 feet. Your permissible airspeed range is plus or minus 10kts. Seriously. Then the computers suddenly don't know how fast you're going any more. Whatever they were doing to control your airspeed, attitude, and altitude... they are no longer doing.
You are in coffin corner, you're completely blind, and you have no margin for error.
In the case of the Airbus glass cockpit, the controls have gone into full authority mode (computer isn't smart enough to limit you to a safe flight program), and the electronic haptic feedback in them is now offline.
You're completely fucked.
(As the AF crew discovered)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Actually, it is, and this is the reason that the FAA has requirements for pilots to remain current. They're required to execute a minimum number of take-offs and landings. And any training program worth a shit gives them simulator time, and practice with emergency procedures. I haven't sat in the controls in 20+ years, but maybe these guys aren't getting enough practice now.
Your example with a car is irrelevant. Cars are not planes, and you don't have to stop the plane to take over from an auto-pilot. Frequently, in an aircraft, you'll have more time to figure things out than in an automobile. You don't have to deal with trees, pedestrians, or other solid objects until you get close to the ground.
Just another day in Paradise
What I meant by "it's not about staying in practice" was that the issue with automation has to do with things that happen on a much smaller time scale. It didn't mean that staying in practice is irrelevant. Is is relevant, but you need more than that. Practice demonstrably isn't sufficient in itself.
The only difference between a plane and a car is that the time scales may happen to be two or three orders of magnitude different, if you're lucky. Autopilot disconnect-related CFIT is a classical example of what I'm talking about. By the time the pilot figures out that his idea of what's going on (we're in a safe, controlled flight on autopilot) differs from reality (CFIT-in-progress), it's too late, or there's sufficient panic that has set in that the control responses are not what you've been trained for either (stall recovery, spin recovery, etc.).
It doesn't matter that the pilot has more time to figure it out. They are unaware of their own mental model's divergence from reality. In spite of having been given all that time, they still CFIT because they think they're on autopilot. You'd think this would be pretty obvious, but there's one insidious thing. If you're unaware of it, it will eventually kill you. Your brain's sampling of the state of the environment is highly dependent on how confident one is in their own model's accuracy. If things "feel" like everything is the way you imagine it should be, you'll be tricked by your own brain into "seeing" made-up instrument readings, your sensitivity to increased wind noise will be diminished, etc. I'm dead serious. It takes awareness of this pitfall to be able to force oneself to see how it really is, to make your brain not trick you. When you don't, and you're a pilot, usually a couple hundred people perish with you. This is happening over and over, it's sickening. The reason why it happens with such regularity is that we're dealing with a basic property of our brain's visual interaction with the environment. It's not widely appreciated in nonspecialist circles, unfortunately. We're almost all "broken" like that.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Planes receive a unique flightplan and detailed instructions for take of and landing that are steered by a central traffic control to make sure that there won't be any other planes nearby. Thats possible because EVERY plane has to receive instructions from them.
I'll stop you there because you've just shown you don't know what you are talking about. Even if we just limit the discussion to large commercial aircraft, your claim that each receives a "unique flightplan" is ridiculous. The initial parts of the flightplan (departure) are so UNunique that they print them in books and give them names. A common departure clearance would be something like "United 123 is cleared to [destination], Farmington 3 departure, SHADO (an intersection somewhere on the filed flight plan), then as filed, maintain 3 thousand, departure frequency 123.45". Pretty much every aircraft going the same direction gets the same thing.
When the aircraft gets close to the arrival airport, it will get yet another UNunique approach, by name. "United 123 cross BILBO at 5 thousand, cleared for the ILS 14 right approach". That ILS approach will start at some initial approach fix (maybe BILBO, maybe after) and then bring every aircraft on that approach through the same course. The goal of the approach controller is to get them all lined up at a nice, regular spacing all coming down the same ILS with sufficient spacing that as soon as the preceeding one clears the runway the next one is about to land.
An important thing to know about the system is that even with a filed flight plan and a clearance "as filed", the flight plan does not specify the approach procedure. That bit of critical info isn't known until close to arrival. Usually the last approach controller will tell the pilot "expect the ILS 21" or whatever. The automated weather system may contain that planning information, too, but the pilot is free to ask for something else if he wants it, and he isn't cleared to fly that approach until the words "cleared for ..." come out of the controller's mouth. If communications is lost enroute, the rule is that the pilot can fly any appropriate approach procedure.
The second bit of foo is "steered by a central traffic control". The pilot steers the plane. ATC issues clearances and gives instructions, but the pilot steers. And "center", despite its name, it not a "central control". There are a lot of them, and each "center" (New York Center, for example) is split up into sectors. Since we're currently limiting our context to large commercial passenger aircraft, yes, there will almost certainly be a "center" involved in the flight, but they take over only after the aircraft has gone through the departure controller at the airport, and will hand the flight off to the approach controller for the destination airport (for airports large enough to have their own). For destinations that aren't large enough to have their own approach, or their own control tower, this "central control" will actually cut the aircraft loose to talk on the CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency), so this IFR aircraft on a "unique" flight plan will now have to mix in with all the VFR traffic at the airport, even the student who is up in the pattern practicing landings. See and avoid.
These ATC folk don't make sure there aren't any other planes nearby. Only for IFR traffic (which anything above 10000 feet must be in the US) do they provide traffic separation. They will issue instructions to keep two IFR aircraft apart, but the vertical spacing can be just 1000'. In airspace where VFR flight is permitted, and outside ATC control, it is quite possible for another aircraft to be "nearby" and less than 1000'.
And the final nail? "Thats possible because EVERY plane has to receive instructions from them." It's severe clear outside here this morning. I could drive to the airport and fly off to someplace else where there is commercial service, and the only time I'll have to talk to ATC is when I'm within 5 mi