This week in Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT column at Salon.com:
Captain Sully's Legacy, and the Fallacies of Cockpit Automation
On Sully:
"…As the general public sees it, Sullenberger saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and consummate flying skills. As William Langewiesche sees it, the real hero of wasn't captain Sully, but the electronic wizardry of the Airbus A320, which was able to deftly manage its perilous glide pretty much on its own....
…I submit that neither plane nor pilot deserves as much credit as they've been given. The most critical factor was nothing more than plain old luck -- specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger's left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country's largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Sullenberger performed admirably in the face of a serious emergency, as did his jetliner. He needed to be good, but he needed to be lucky as well. He was. Had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a slightly different altitude, or under slightly different weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent, skill, or fly-by-wire technology was going to matter...
...If you could put a hundred crews, flying pretty much any modern airliner, in Sullenberger's exact situation, the results would be more or less the same. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles, talent, or the fail-safe genius of the A320, but to the less glamorous forces of luck and, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism…"
On the Myths of Cockpit Automation:
"…Nothing gets me sputtering more than misunderstandings about cockpit automation -- the idea that modern aircraft essentially fly themselves, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. This is so far from the truth that it's difficult to get my arms around it and begin to explain how. Babysitting a computer? I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm weaving around thunderheads over the Amazon; shooting a VOR approach in Africa in a rainstorm at 4 a.m., or setting up for an ILS in blowing snow and a quarter-mile visibility...
…Never mind the extremes. If I were to take even the most routine, trouble-free, and most "automated" flight, from the preflight planning stage to block-in at the destination, and break it down event by event, explaining each of the hundreds of decisions and inputs made by the crew. A jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route -- a basic, skeletal outline of the flight. But the idea that a jet will "fly itself" to the destination without meaningful input from the crew is preposterous...
…Jetliners are certified for automatic landings, though in practice they are rare. The fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn't need to practice them twice a year in the simulator, or need to consistently review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals. Guess what: an automatic landing is, in most respects, more challenging, more complicated, and more work-intensive than a manual one…
…One of the media's common mistakes is a reliance on aviation academics and bureaucrats, rather than pilots, for its expertise -- professors, directors, consultants, researchers, etc. These people are bright and knowledgeable, but often highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of flying planes. Pilots too are occasionally part of the problem. We paint a caricature of what flying is really like, at the same time undermining our value employees. It's no wonder so many people think pilots are overpaid if we're saying things to the press like, "the plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," to quote an American Ailrines pilot talking to CNN a couple of weeks ago.
…Automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. You might here a surgeon, or a pilot, make a comment about the "simplicity" of a certain procedure. That in no way implies that the layperson could give it a go and be successful, and it does nothing to diminish the knowledge and experience required to perform at that level in the first place. The technology is advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to use it properly, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first..."
The full article is available here:
http://salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009...askthepilot342
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http://salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009...askthepilot341
