CHICAGO — Automation in the cockpit of commercial airliners has flown full circle over the last half century, leading experts to raise concerns about the erosion of manual piloting skills. CHICAGO — Automation in the cockpit of commercial airliners has
CHICAGO — Automation in the cockpit of commercial airliners has flown full circle over the last half century, leading experts to raise concerns about the erosion of manual piloting skills.
The impact of “automation dependency,” creating a potentially dangerous scenario where the pilots are the back-up to the automation, has escaped the attention of most airline passengers as well as many members of Congress responsible for overseeing airline safety, some experts point out.
There is no dispute that automated systems on the flight deck of planes have saved countless lives over the years by acting as the helpful equivalent of a third pilot in the cockpit. In addition, auto-pilot controls can fly planes more efficiently than human pilots, leading to improved savings on fuel burn and better adherence to staying on “fly-quiet” tracks near residential areas around airports, according to experts.
But as the technology has advanced, automation has made it too easy for pilots to become over-dependent on the auto-pilot system, which is not infallible in terms of the risk of providing false information to pilots, the experts said.
While some foreign airlines have revised their policies on the use of automation and strengthened their manual flying instruction during training, pilot training at U.S. carriers has also not kept up with the changes in automation, the experts said.
The U.S. Senate Aviation Subcommittee on Tuesday will hold a hearing to examine how much progress has been made by the Federal Aviation Administration and the airline industry to meet tougher safety requirements mandated by 2010 legislation.
The new rules, which require higher standards for pilot training and a dramatically higher minimum number of flight hours for pilots applying for airline jobs, were established in the wake of the February 2009 crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo, N.Y. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the crash, which killed 50 people, was due to pilot error.
The mistakes that the Colgan captain committed, in response to a low-speed warning system designed to prevent the commuter jet from going into an aeronautical stall, exposed a fatal disconnect between what the pilot expected the plane to do and what it actually was experiencing, officials said.
Concerns run deep in the airline industry that during flight situations that could quickly escalate into full-blown emergencies, pilots would tend to rely too heavily on interacting with computerized flight systems instead of looking out the windshield to point the nose in the right direction, listening to the hum of the engines and flying the plane.
“Automation can dull the discovery of a problem if a crew relies on it too much,” said Tom Peterson, manager of the advanced simulation program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.
“Our instructors teach our students that if some problem develops suddenly, don’t automatically try to reprogram the system. Just go back to the day when you were 16 years old and flying a small Cessna. Hand-fly the plane and look out the window,” Peterson said.
A knee-jerk decision to trouble-shoot automated read-outs appears to have contributed to the fatal crash of Air France flight 447, an Airbus A330 that went into a high-altitude loss of airspeed en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro on June 1, 2009, and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board. The pilots lost control in part because they responded incorrectly to an airspeed indicator failure and misinterpreted the problems that were occurring, the accident investigation determined.
“This issue of lack of awareness of what the aircraft is doing and the lack of understanding about what mode the automation is in are becoming common threads in accidents,” said William Voss, president and chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation.
“It’s amazing how common it is to have a dimension where the pilot is out of sync with what the automation is doing,” said Voss, who is scheduled to testify before the Senate subcommittee. “There is an ongoing degradation of flying skills because on a daily basis pilots simply don’t have to perform a lot of functions.”
“If you came up through a different generation, you’d say, ‘Time out. Turn all the crap off and we’ll see what we have here.’ But more and more, pilots are becoming the back-up to the automation,” he warned.
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He said it would be a lethal mistake for airlines focused on reducing costs to cut corners on the improvements needed in pilot training.
Emirates Airlines, based in Dubai, has added a two-day manual flying class to its training regimen and has substantially updated its rules on when and how automation is used, Voss said, adding that other Middle East airlines are adopting the same change in training philosophy.
“It took accidents to launch people into a fundamental overhaul so pilots will be able to quickly detect when things are not right,” Voss said. “I hope we see a positive reaction from U.S. carriers to get rid of procedures that erode that that capability.”
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