

Airline pilots depend too much on automation, says panel commissioned by FAA - DanielBMarkham
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/19/21537851-airline-pilots-depend-too-much-on-automation-says-panel-commissioned-by-faa?lite

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thatthatis
Before the inevitable "why do we even have pilots anymore" posts, let me share
a story.

The tldr is: we have pilots so there is a trained human for redundancy when
the automatic systems fail.

My father was a pilot, first in the military then commercial. He hated flying
commercial, "it's boring, most days I'm a well paid glorified bus driver,
unless something goes wrong"

He is since retired, but he likes to say "I only earned my paycheck once in my
last 10 years flying".

The story goes, they were just over the Atlantic between Maine and Iceland
when there was an electrical fire that threw out some of the automation and
controls.

His job that day was to manually fly a piece of metal with about 200 people on
board to the nearest airfield where they could land safely and do repairs.

Every other day his job was to run checklists, smile, and drink coffee.

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memracom
Same thing just happened in Kazan Russia. A pilot was on the landing path and
decided that he was too low, too early so he aborted landing, and pulled up
the nose to go around again.

Problem was that he was also too slow at that point to safely pull up. The
result of pulling up the nose was that he lost airspeed, stalled, and plunged
nose first into the runway.

It's counterintuitive to go down and increase airspeed ( or at least remain
level while you gun the engines) and that is why these pilots make this kind
of mistake. They don't have enough practice flying in full control of the
airplane.

An additional factor is age. All of the air force pilots that fought in
various wars from WWII onwards have retired. The world actually relied on
these guys to fly the commercial passenger planes and build the air industry.
Now the industry has to train their own pilots and the gaps are beginning to
show.

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hammerzeit
We're living in an era of unprecedented airplane safety, as no American
airline has had a mainline crash since 2001. I'm speaking largely as an
outsider, but it seems probable that the increased automation has helped
facilitate that trend.

We all have a desire to romanticize and glamorize the jobs we do and resist
the belief we can be augmented by automation and process. Some of the pull
quotes from this article seem to indicate that mentality. To wit, "Now that is
being in command of a system, of wonderful computers that do a great job — but
that isn’t flying."

Just like a good programmer should understand manual memory management even if
he or she always will be writing in Python, I sympathize with the need to
understand the underlying principles. But can we really say safety is at risk?

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snewman
At some point N years from now, we're going to be reading the same article,
but this time about drivers and self-driving cars...

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VLM
I have a couple friends in the biz and whats (carefully, to meet an agenda?)
not discussed is why the automation exists in the first place. Most of their
time and brainpower is expended on what HN would call hacking the system, such
as taking a decade of experience on that route and more than a decade as a
pilot, plus inadequate out of date weather info, plus gossip from other
pilots, plus a close reading of the manuals to request a FL 4000 feet lower
which under these peculiar wx conditions results in lower fuel burn. Or
hacking ATC by figuring out there will be a backlog at the destination because
of weather reports 2000 miles away and experience, so instead of burning 2000
extra dollars of extra fuel in a holding pattern, he decides to burn 1000
extra dollars of fuel getting there before the rush begins. Of course this
kind of stuff requires the cooperation of ATC etc etc its not cowboys and the
wild west, but suffice it to say he does a heck of a lot of thinking about
flying while some automation keeps the wings level or whatever.

Another thing is he has a very maint engineering type job continuously
prioritizing all possible issues while working on the most critical one. This
doesn't mean he flys thru tornados every flight, its more like there has never
been a truly flawless aircraft. He won't take off if there's anything on the
critical list but there's always "something" non critical or needs special
observation because it was just serviced/replaced/needs servicing, basically
he's the partner of the mechanics and has something of a "trust, but verify"
relationship with them.

So its hardly a one way street. Take away the automation and force him to keep
the wings level, manually by hand, for the entire flight, and he is NOT going
to be able to spend 15 minutes putting together enroute weather reports and
pireps and maps and gut level experience with the plane in that climate and on
that route, so that minor rainstorm that turned into a sudden t-storm enroute
kills everyone in a downdraft because he was "too busy flying the plane". Or
the mechanic replaced fuel pump #2 on engine #2 but something went wrong, and
he doesn't have time to watch the pump pressure and temp soar out of control
because he's "too busy flying the plane", setting the engine, then wing on
fire and they ditch in the ocean and everyone dies. So yeah, automation kills
some people, but lack of automation would obviously kill MORE people.

There are also financial issues, where the money you save by efforts at fuel
economy might buy you a TCAS system that prevents a mid-air collision... or
maybe the money saved just buys some crooked exec another Ferrari. Either way
the pilot is going to be required to spend his day on heroic fuel
economization efforts.

As in many areas of the economy, there's a zillion applicants for each job.
Being a programmer in SV is not like any other career in the country. So
there's always some slacking and some slackers, but most pilots are in fact
pretty hard working. The bottom, say, 50% will never, ever get hired by the
majors...

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andrewcooke
is the faa american? how do politics factor into this? isn't there a
"difference of opinion" between boeing and airbus about the amount of
automation that is appropriate?

i see these things discussed from time to time, and i wonder just how neutral
institutions are...

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VLM
In recent years, programmers have come to depend heavily on syntactic sugar.
In the old days programmers flipped switches on a front panel to directly hand
program opcodes in machine code.

However, in recent years, programmers have gone away from front panels and
direct machine language coding. One recent programmer reported on one project,
she only wrote assembly language subroutines seven times during the entire
project.

Several recent programming disasters have coincidentally happened during this
recent fad of syntactic sugar and object orientation and virtual machines.
Surely changing the entire way modern programming is done, would have changed
the outcomes of those very recent individual modern disasters.

A panel, convened by Hacker News, has formed for journalists, managers, and
the general public (no programmers of course) to discuss the safety issues of
modern coding practices, and a possible pr campaign encouraging modern web
developers to use more IBM mainframe BAL basic assembly language, 6502
assembly language, and/or perhaps PDP-8 direct octal machine code to improve
program safety and security in the startup industry.

Some recent reports include "I stole this existing product, wrapped it in
bootstrap, in only 3562 lines of IBM 1620 'cadet' assembly language" and "Show
HN: Tic Tac Toe in 5219 punch cards on 1920 era unit record equipment"

