NOT TO DETRACT FROM the raw horror and tragic-ness of the Germanwings disaster, but the crash has spawned a sideshow of ill-informed and just plain aggravating conversations, across the whole spectrum of the media, that somebody needs to address. Whether it’s on the human factors side of things (i.e. pilots and mental health), or on the technical part of flying, much of the talk is misleading. As if air travel weren’t misunderstood enough already; certain pundits and correspondents out there are making it worse.
For starters, the crash has touched off a good deal of talk about automation and a pilot’s role in the cockpit. Perhaps one solution to the problem of pilot sabotage, we’re hearing, is to get rid of the pilot altogether. Why not? After all, planes can pretty much fly themselves already, right?
Except, of course, they can’t. As my regular readers are well aware, one of my longest-standing pet peeves has been the mythology of cockpit automation: the exaggerated understanding people have of what cockpit technology is actually capable of, and how pilots interact with that technology. Well apparently the problem is worse than I thought. If I only had a dollar for every time in the past week that I’ve been asked, “How come the control tower didn’t just take over the Germanwings plane by remote control?” Faced with a question like that, which is so absurd, and so not within the realm of commercial aviation reality, it’s all I can do not to stare straight ahead and begin to hum “Amazing Grace,” just to keep from losing my cool. When I explained one person how totally impossible such a thing was, he clearly thought I was lying.
The op-ed pages, meanwhile, are humming with similar claptrap: Flying magazine’s Peter Garrison writing in the Los Angeles Times, for example. “From shortly after takeoff to shortly before touchdown,” explains Garrison, “airplanes fly themselves while pilots talk with controllers and one another and punch data into flight management systems.” Full story...
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For starters, the crash has touched off a good deal of talk about automation and a pilot’s role in the cockpit. Perhaps one solution to the problem of pilot sabotage, we’re hearing, is to get rid of the pilot altogether. Why not? After all, planes can pretty much fly themselves already, right?
Except, of course, they can’t. As my regular readers are well aware, one of my longest-standing pet peeves has been the mythology of cockpit automation: the exaggerated understanding people have of what cockpit technology is actually capable of, and how pilots interact with that technology. Well apparently the problem is worse than I thought. If I only had a dollar for every time in the past week that I’ve been asked, “How come the control tower didn’t just take over the Germanwings plane by remote control?” Faced with a question like that, which is so absurd, and so not within the realm of commercial aviation reality, it’s all I can do not to stare straight ahead and begin to hum “Amazing Grace,” just to keep from losing my cool. When I explained one person how totally impossible such a thing was, he clearly thought I was lying.
The op-ed pages, meanwhile, are humming with similar claptrap: Flying magazine’s Peter Garrison writing in the Los Angeles Times, for example. “From shortly after takeoff to shortly before touchdown,” explains Garrison, “airplanes fly themselves while pilots talk with controllers and one another and punch data into flight management systems.” Full story...
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- Airline pilots 'so reliant on computers they forget how to fly'
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