Pilotage

Thank goodness Bill Gates, zillionaire owner of Microsoft, is frugal. Gates is said to fly the airlines on business trips. Forget a Microsoft corporate jet (maybe he couldn't find one with enough Windows), or even chartering. This guy, who could buy an entire airline if he wanted, reportedly doesn't even fly first class. He books steerage, back of the bus, the cheap seats.

My fear is that Gates will decide he has enough money to fly around in his own airplane. One day he'll look at the panel with its hybrid blend of electronic and mechanical instruments and equipment, and before the airplane has landed he will have devised a plan for replacing everything up there with a couple of laptops running TSO'd Microsoft software.

I've been thinking about Bill Gates because I've just spent two days learning to live with a slick new laptop computer that has brains manufactured by his company. But I've come to the conclusion that, even though my children didn't come with a Help icon tattooed on their foreheads, it's often easier to trouble-shoot problems with them than it is with my new computer. And that got me thinking: do we really want our airplanes to go the way of personal computers?

I realize I may be perceived as a technological stegosaurus by suggesting that perhaps there is a limit to how far we want to go in replacing hardware in airplanes and hands-on flying with software-driven functions and controls. Then again, maybe I'm not so far off base. A recent study of cockpit automation in airliners identified 51 concerns about over-automation that the researchers say should be addressed. In general, the concerns have to do with a curious irony of technology — the incredible complexity of aviation software makes flying a glass cockpit airplane so effortless and automatic that the pilots too easily can slip out of the information loop. At that point the software is making the important decisions — or, more ominously, not making them.

My concern is that my struggle to learn a new computer is similar to what pilots of general aviation airplanes with computerized cockpits would experience. The first problem I encountered was a lack of organized, easy-to-follow instructions. It didn't take me long to screw things up by installing modem software that, I later found out, I shouldn't have installed. I had to take the machine back to the dealer, where a technician performed a secret ritual and got it working again.

Next I attempted to connect my laptop to a full-size external monitor and keyboard, using an optional docking device that I had purchased for a tidy sum. The external monitor showed the programs booting up, the nice blue Windows opening page — and then nothing but an undulating mass of color. After taking every side street I could find in my software folders, and — as a last resort — thumbing through the various manuals supplied with the machine, I gave up and telephoned the computer manufacturer's 24-hour help line.

A recorded voice (computer-generated, I suppose) instructed me to enter the six-digit registration number stamped on the bottom of the computer. All I found was a nine-digit number. I hung on the line until all the automated options had been exhausted and a living, breathing voice answered.

"Registration number, please," asked the human help provider, who identified herself as Natalie.

I read it to her and explained that I would have punched it in but the voice had asked for a six-digit number.

"Oh, that electronic menu is wrong," she explained nonchalantly. Great, I thought. A leading manufacturer of computers can't even get the instructions straight on a simple automated telephone menu. What's that say about the machine of theirs that I bought? I explained the problem I was having in getting the external monitor to work with the computer.

"How old is the monitor?" she asked.

"Ancient," I said. "Came with a 286 my wife bought 8 years ago. But it works just fine — except with my new computer."

"That's it, then," she said triumphantly. "Your new 800 x 600 computer won't support that old monitor."

"Gee, it would have been nice if someone had tipped me off to the fact that my brash new computer refuses to talk to mature monitors," I grumbled.

Is this what we, or perhaps the next generation of pilots, face? Will our cockpits be super-capable but user-hostile? Will we have to troubleshoot software problems in flight? Will the instructions be obscure, and the manufacturers unavailable?

Laptop-based light-aircraft panels are flying now, primarily as experimental setups. Software gurus see wonderful opportunity in the heavy, single-purpose mechanical devices we usually fly with now. They are right to strive for far greater capability with less weight and lower overall cost. That is the promise of computerization. It's already in our small airplanes, primarily in area navigation computers, microprocessor-based engine monitors, fuel computers, and electronic displays.

But even these independent devices are not exactly easy to use, especially if you don't fly with them frequently.

So, Mr. Gates, have some peanuts and enjoy your flight. And ponder with us whether, keyboard and mouse in hand, we should jump headlong into becoming software managers whose computers happen to have wings.