Safety Spotlight: Automation

I’m confident the FAA, manufacturers, and airlines will work through the issues and advance safety. Look at the remarkable safety progress we’ve made in every element of aviation—commercial, general aviation, military—over the last several decades. We have an independent arm (in the United States, the NTSB) that investigates every fatal accident through a safety lens. All elements of the industry comb through those investigations, gleaning lessons to improve knowledge, training, proficiency, equipment, and decision making, the core elements of safety. Then we come together to discuss and debate the lessons we learned—and we act on them.

The automation issue at the heart of the Lion Air investigation isn’t limited to commercial aircraft and pilots. Advances in automation inside GA cockpits offer powerful navigation, communication, weather avoidance, engine monitoring, and aircraft control support. More—and more accurate—information is available to pilots, enabling better decision making. Advanced and increasingly less expensive autopilots, GPS units, and coupling of those free pilots for more complex cognitive tasks, minimizing stress and mental fatigue. And it took us all awhile to admit it, but computers fly airplanes much more precisely than humans. Exactly as directed.

As cockpits modernize, our approach to flying must evolve. We must gain—and maintain—a thorough understanding of how the automated systems in the aircraft operate and our human interaction. Upgrading to a Cessna CitationJet CE–525S type rating required a paradigm shift in my cockpit task prioritization. Most of my flying is in light piston GA airplanes, specifically a Piper Super Cub and a Navion. In these airplanes, the link between what I intend for the airplane to do, what I instruct it to do, and what it is actually doing is accomplished through hand-eye, stick-and-rudder coordination, and I monitor the basic flying instruments to ensure desired performance. Even the F–15 wasn’t substantially different from these light airplanes in terms of navigation and autopilot automation; the link was primarily through hand-eye coordination and a good instrument scan, with a few basic features for altitude and attitude control.

In the CitationJet, I struggled for the first few hours until I understood how vital it was to recalibrate my mental approach to flying. The automation, while helpful, also could be confusing, and potentially critical errors were easy to make. It took a great deal of effort to understand the profound shift in the elements of interaction between me and the aircraft: what I intend, what I direct, what the airplane is doing, what it will do next and when.

The circumstances surrounding a few accidents in 2018 make me wonder if the pilots’ interaction with automation was involved. In one, a Cessna Citation crashed shortly after takeoff in poor weather. In the CJ type training simulator, I once took off with low weather, inadvertently engaged the wrong altitude function in the flight management system, and the aircraft barreled ahead, not climbing, while I got distracted by some minor malfunction. What I intended to do was not what I directed the aircraft to do, and the aircraft was doing exactly what I directed—flying straight toward rising terrain.

In another instance, a pilot fresh out of upgrade training to his new airplane, and new avionics package, headed home, encountering low weather and poor visibility in mountainous terrain. He lost control of the airplane after, or perhaps during, a missed approach, crashed, and all aboard perished. Fresh out of upgrade; new airplane; new, more complex avionics package; single pilot into some of the most demanding conditions. The pilot was asking a lot of himself, regardless of what the NTSB finds.

Glass panels and avionics advancements coming into our cockpits offer powerful support. The capability also can quickly become overwhelming, confusing, and degrade situational awareness. We must constantly develop our knowledge, training, and proficiency to exploit the advantages of automation, and realize that it requires a different mindset when we fly.

Go fly—and make sure what you demand, what the aircraft is doing, and what the aircraft is about to do are exactly what you intend.AOPA

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