Is automation your friend or foe?
What is the difference between a pilot who is new to automation and a pilot who has been around it a lot? The new pilot excitedly says, "Look at what it's doing now!" while the experienced pilot says, "Look, it's doing it again!"
Many of us have been there — we're flying along on the autopilot and all of a sudden the airplane does something we don't expect, or the flight director commands a turn that doesn't make sense. Our response usually starts with a blank look and a "Why did it do that?" or a "Do you have any idea what it's doing?" At that moment we realize we are no longer flying the airplane — the airplane is flying us.
Automation can help you
Automation refers to the replacement of a human function with a machine function — it exists to increase safety and decrease workload. It can range from a friend holding a map for us to an IFR GPS, autopilot, flight management system (FMS), and a copilot. Whatever we have, we need to be able to identify the appropriate level of automation for workload reduction and/or safety enhancement. There is no substitute for knowing our automation. Using automation to its maximum extent can be the most efficient way to fly the aircraft. An example would be using the autopilot to take care of the airplane while you work an in-flight problem — this can be crucial in single-pilot operations. Yes, automation can be our friend.
One of the most important concepts of automation is knowing when to use it and when not to. Ideally you want to know how to perform the most complicated maneuver in your airplane, using all that the automation and the autopilot have to offer. However, you also want to know how to turn it all off and hand-fly the maneuver when things go bad. If you don't have everything backed up with VORs, NDBs, or whatever is available, this can be quite a challenge.
Automation can hurt you
Automation can also be our enemy. What do you do when you get in over your head? When higher levels of automation make your life harder and cause a loss of situational awareness, or there is any confusion about the automation's current mode of operation — remove a level of automation. It can be as simple as moving from lateral navigation (GPS-driven navigation or following an approach course) to VOR course tracking. Evaluate what you know vs. what you think. You can always dial in a heading, a VOR, a course, or whatever you need in a matter of seconds and be on your way. Many times, people get so involved with the automation on the airplane that they forget one of their most important abilities should everything go south: the ability to just fly the airplane. Sometimes our first tendency when we lose some of our automation is to do everything possible to get it back, often to the peril of the airplane and flight path.
Automation at the expense of the situation
I was in the middle of my Cessna Citation X type rating checkride. Everything was going fine — I hadn't done anything stupid yet and the end was in sight. I was cruising down the ILS and I was fairly sure I was going around. Not because I was incompetent, inverted, and miles off course, but because during a type ride you pretty much assume every approach will end with a single-engine go-around while you're on fire. My copilot, Todd, and I had covered the missed approach during our approach briefing and had verified that it was in our FMS. This meant we simply had to follow the flight director command bars as they sequenced through the various waypoints, altitudes, course changes, and headings of the missed approach. We had the missed approach VOR frequency in the backup nav radio and the missed approach altitude in the altitude alerter. I had the Vulcan death grip on the control column, I was automated, and I was ready.
The Boeing 747 sitting on the runway in front of us at minimums and the law of large objects (which dictates that any time you hit a 747 you lose) dictated a go-around. As we approached the hold point I could see the hold depicted on the map display. Great. Then I heard this Homer Simpson-like "Doh!" from the right seat (that's never good) and everything went south. Todd had accidentally erased the hold. The suddenly blank screen mirrored my own blank Rook. Recipe for a failed type ride? Nope. I simply removed a level of automation, put the autopilot in heading mode, and went back to basics by hand-flying the hold — heading outbound and VOR course inbound. Yes, I had lost my automated big-screen guidance for the missed approach, and yes, the autopilot couldn't automatically fly the hold — but I didn't lose any raw-data situational awareness and everything was fine. No deductions on the type ride, because it was exactly what I would do in the real airplane.
Staying automation current
My friend Cheri was talking with a company recently about doing some contract flying in an airplane she had not flown in a while. The company personnel felt pretty comfortable with her and the talk soon turned to how to get her current in the airplane.
What was her concern in this situation? The automation. True, in this case we were talking about an airplane with an all-glass cockpit and extraordinary capabilities, but the concept is the same in a Citation X or a Beech Musketeer (yes, there is a glass-cockpit Mouse out there — I've seen it). Cheri's solution was to request a few hours in the airplane on ground power catching up on the avionics. It comes back pretty fast when you're on the ground with no distractions. But when you are saturated with pilot duties and are busy performing approach chart origami, simply finding the Off button can be a challenge.
Some days we go flying solely for the purpose of getting proficient. But how often do we do that with our automation? It is tough just to remain flight proficient sometimes, let alone proficient on all the blinking pieces of equipment on the airplane. How do we stay automation proficient?
Try getting to the FBO or the hangar early and going over the automation before you fly. Spend some quality time with the airplane on external power and go through every button and every menu of your automation. (First make sure your avionics have an adequate cooling source and no limitation for running on the ground.) You'll discover things that you never knew were possible. Many times, just realizing that the information you are looking for exists somewhere in your unit is tremendously helpful when you $re under duress. This also helps inspire passenger confidence by avoiding long searches for the On switch.
If your GPS has an external power supply option and simulator mode, unplug it from your airplane and take it home. Play with it while you're watching TV. Think of it as Nintendo for aviation geeks. Or get a CD-ROM simulator from the manufacturer or download a computer desktop learning simulator from the Web and start punching buttons.
What if you fly different airplanes, or even two of the same model with different avionics setups? Quite often a checkout for one airplane covers all the airplanes of that model and most checkouts spend little, if any, time on the avionics differences between airplanes. This can happen anywhere from your FBO to large business jet operations. With a systems problem, chances are pretty high that we have a quick reference checklist to lead us through the situation. However, with automation there isn't always a checklist; it's often more of a see-one, do-one, teach-one atmosphere. By the time we find the manual and the answer (if it's there), the situation has long since passed and we've either survived or not. Fortunately, there can be a solution. Many airplanes have automation cheat sheets or quick reference cards for their equipment. Find yours and stow it where it is handy in flight. Many pilots simply laminate them and attach them to the aircraft checklist. Unfortunately, pilots lose things (I know it's hard to believe) and your cheat sheet may not be readily available to you. Fear not, you can usually get a spare from the manufacturer or even make one yourself.
We don't need no stinkin' automation
While we want to be automation superstars, we do not want to become too dependent upon the automation and get complacent about the rest of our skills. Automation dependency can lead to a loss of pilot proficiency. What if we lose all or part of our automation when we lose a display, the autopilot, flight director, or anything else we normally depend upon? The key is to be proficient both with and without the automation for those times when everything goes haywire.
We all tend to hand-fly or use the things we don't normally use when it's time for our flight review or recurrent training — but try going the extra step and making it part of your normal routine. For example, some folks switch navigation modes every leg on cross-country flights just for practice — do a VOR leg, GPS leg, and heading leg. But know the right time and situation to practice. Don't practice a raw-data, no-flight-director approach during poor weather conditions if you haven't done one in a while; save it for a less demanding situation.
Another way to avoid becoming too dependent on automation is to go cold turkey and fly an airplane with no automation. Not long after I got my Challenger type rating I was invited by my friend Norm to go flying with him in his new Aviat Husky. After weeks of letting an FMS and autopilot run my life I was faced with a new challenge — stick-and-rudder flying. Since I was in the backseat, what limited instruments I had I couldn't see. I had to use the seat of my pants (not a pretty sight), and actually I flew by looking out the window. How cool. No automation here — nothing else was going to fly that airplane but me.
How do it do dat?
Just a few years ago the most complex automation we had in our lives was a flight director, an autopilot, and a VCR. If we had a loran coupled to an autopilot and could record one show while watching another we were pretty excited. We have since gone on to approach-capable GPS units, FMSs, and multifunction displays with unbelievable capabilities. Unfortunately, all this new automation is only as good as its programmer and user — us.
In today's flight environment, we are not only pilots, but we are also automation managers. As sophisticated as some of the automation is today, sometimes we just want to sit down and have a heart to heart with the airplane and ask it if it has a plan. If we have too many things going on in the cockpit, we can remove some of the distractions and use only the things we know (no ejecting of passengers in flight, no matter how distracting or annoying they may be). If we are in doubt about the tools we are using or the plan we are flying, we can take a step back from the situation and evaluate what we know vs. what we think.
The first rule of automation? Know how to turn it on. The most important rule of automation? Know how to turn it off. Aviate, navigate, then automate. Make sure your automation is always your friend.
Marc K. Henegar flies a Boeing 737 for Alaska Airlines.
