ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York. As is typical of commercial flights these days, the two pilots didn’t have all that much to do during the hour-long trip. The captain, an affable, forty-seven-year-old Floridian named Marvin Renslow, manned the controls briefly during takeoff, guiding the Bombardier Q400 turboprop into the air, then switched on the autopilot. He and his cabin mate, twenty-four-year-old first officer Rebecca Shaw, a newlywed from Seattle, kept an eye on the computer readouts that flickered across the cockpit’s five large LCD screens. They exchanged some messages over the radio with air traffic controllers. They went through a few routine checklists. Mostly, though, they passed the time chatting amiably about this and that—families, careers, colleagues, money—as the turboprop cruised along its northwesterly route at sixteen thousand feet.1
The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the captain’s control yoke began to shudder noisily. The plane’s “stick shaker” had activated, a signal that the turboprop was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall.* The autopilot disconnected, as it’s programmed to do in the event of a stall warning, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing. He jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its air speed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to tip the craft down and gain velocity. The plane’s automatic stall-avoidance system kicked in and attempted to push the yoke forward, but the captain simply redoubled his effort to pull it back toward him. Rather than prevent a stall, Renslow caused one. The Q400 spun out of control, then plummeted. “We’re down,” the captain said, just before the plane slammed into a house in a Buffalo suburb.
The crash, which killed all forty-nine people onboard as well as one person on the ground, should not have happened. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation found no evidence of mechanical problems with the Q400. Some ice had accumulated on the plane, but nothing out of the ordinary for a winter flight. The deicing equipment had operated properly, as had the plane’s other systems. Renslow had had a fairly demanding flight schedule over the preceding two days, and Shaw had been battling a cold, but both pilots seemed lucid and wakeful while in the cockpit. They were well trained, and though the stick shaker took them by surprise, they had plenty of time and airspace to make the adjustments necessary to avoid a stall. The NTSB concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error. Neither Renslow nor Shaw had detected “explicit cues” that a stall warning was imminent, an oversight that suggested “a significant breakdown in their monitoring responsibilities.” Once the warning sounded, the investigators reported, the captain’s response “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.” An executive from the company that operated the flight for Continental, the regional carrier Colgan Air, admitted that the pilots seemed to lack “situational awareness” as the emergency unfolded.2 Had the crew acted appropriately, the plane would likely have landed safely.
The Buffalo crash was not an isolated incident. An eerily similar disaster, with far more casualties, occurred a few months later. On the night of May 31, an Air France Airbus A330 took off from Rio de Janeiro, bound for Paris.3 The jet ran into a storm over the Atlantic about three hours after takeoff. Its air-speed sensors, caked with ice, began giving faulty readings, which caused the autopilot to disengage. Bewildered, the copilot flying the plane, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, yanked back on the control stick. The A330 rose and a loud stall warning sounded, but Bonin continued to pull back heedlessly on the stick. As the plane climbed sharply, it lost velocity. The air-speed sensors began working again, providing the crew with accurate numbers. It should have been clear at this point that the jet was going too slow. Yet Bonin persisted in his mistake at the controls, causing a further deceleration. The jet stalled and began to fall. If Bonin had simply let go of the stick, the A330 might well have righted itself. But he didn’t. The flight crew was suffering what French investigators would later term a “total loss of cognitive control of the situation.” 4 After a few more harrowing seconds, another pilot, David Robert, took over the controls. It was too late. The plane dropped more than thirty thousand feet in three minutes.
“This can’t be happening,” said Robert.
“But what is happening?” replied the still-bewildered Bonin.
Three seconds later, the jet hit the ocean. All 228 crew and passengers died.
IF YOU want to understand the human consequences of automation, the first place to look is up. Airlines and plane manufacturers, as well as government and military aviation agencies, have been particularly aggressive and especially ingenious in finding ways to shift work from people to machines. What car designers are doing with computers today, aircraft designers did decades ago. And because a single mistake in a cockpit can cost scores of lives and many millions of dollars, a great deal of private and public money has gone into funding psychological and behavioral research on automation’s effects. For decades, scientists and engineers have been studying the ways automation influences the skills, perceptions, thoughts, and actions of pilots. Much of what we know about what happens when people work in concert with computers comes out of this research.
The story of flight automation begins a hundred years ago, on June 18, 1914, in Paris. The day was, by all accounts, a sunny and pleasant one, the blue sky a perfect backdrop for spectacle. A large crowd had gathered along the banks of the Seine, near the Argenteuil bridge in the city’s northwestern fringes, to witness the Concours de la Sécurité en Aéroplane, an aviation competition organized to show off the latest advances in flight safety.5 Nearly sixty planes and pilots took part, demonstrating an impressive assortment of techniques and equipment. Last on the day’s program, flying a Curtiss C-2 biplane, was a handsome American pilot named Lawrence Sperry. Sitting beside him in the C-2’s open cockpit was his French mechanic, Emil Cachin. As Sperry flew past the ranks of spectators and approached the judges’ stand, he let go of the plane’s controls and raised his hands. The crowd roared. The plane was flying itself!
Sperry was just getting started. After swinging the plane around, he took another pass by the reviewing stand, again with his hands in the air. This time, though, he had Cachin climb out of the cockpit and walk along the lower right wing, holding the struts between the wings for support. The plane tilted starboard for a second under the Frenchman’s weight, then immediately righted itself, with no help from Sperry. The crowd roared even louder. Sperry circled around once again. By the time his plane approached the stands for its third pass, not only was Cachin out on the right wing, but Sperry himself had climbed out onto the left wing. The C-2 was flying, steady and true, with no one in the cockpit. The crowd and the judges were dumbfounded. Sperry won the grand prize—fifty thousand francs—and the next day his face beamed from the front pages of newspapers across Europe.
Inside the Curtiss C-2 was the world’s first automatic pilot. Known as a “gyroscopic stabilizer apparatus,” the device had been invented two years earlier by Sperry and his father, the famed American engineer and industrialist Elmer A. Sperry. It consisted of a pair of gyroscopes, one mounted horizontally, the other vertically, installed beneath the pilot’s seat and powered by a wind-driven generator behind the propeller. Spinning at thousands of revolutions a minute, the gyroscopes were able to sense, with remarkable precision, a plane’s orientation along its three axes of rotation—its lateral pitch, longitudinal roll, and vertical yaw. Whenever the plane diverged from its intended attitude, charged metal brushes attached to the gyroscopes would touch contact points on the craft’s frame, completing a circuit. An electric current would flow to the motors operating the plane’s main control panels—the ailerons on the wings and the elevators and rudder on the tail—and the panels would automatically adjust their positions to correct the problem. The horizontal gyroscope kept the plane’s wings steady and its keel even, while the vertical one handled the steering.
It took nearly twenty years of further testing and refinement, much of it carried out under the auspices of the U.S. military, before the gyroscopic autopilot was ready to make its debut in commercial flight. But when it did, the technology still seemed as miraculous as ever. In 1930, a writer from Popular Science gave a breathless account of how an autopilot-equipped plane—“a big tri-motored Ford”—flew “without human aid” during a three-hour trip from Dayton, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. “Four men leaned back at ease in the passenger cabin,” the reporter wrote. “Yet the pilot’s compartment was empty. A metal airman, scarcely larger than an automobile battery, was holding the stick.” 6 When, three years later, the daring American pilot Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world, assisted by a Sperry autopilot that he had nicknamed “Mechanical Mike,” the press heralded a new era in aviation. “The days when human skill alone and an almost bird-like sense of direction enabled a flier to hold his course for long hours through a starless night or a fog are over,” reported the New York Times. “Commercial flying in the future will be automatic.”7
The introduction of the gyroscopic autopilot set the stage for a momentous expansion of aviation’s role in warfare and transport. By taking over much of the manual labor required to keep a plane stable and on course, the device relieved pilots of their constant, exhausting struggle with sticks and pedals, cables and pulleys. That not only alleviated the fatigue aviators endured on long flights; it also freed their hands, their eyes, and, most important, their minds for other, more subtle tasks. They could consult more instruments, make more calculations, solve more problems, and in general think more analytically and creatively about their work. They could fly higher and farther, and with less risk of crashing. They could go out in weather that once would have kept them grounded. And they could undertake intricate maneuvers that would have seemed rash or just plain impossible before. Whether ferrying passengers or dropping bombs, pilots became considerably more versatile and valuable once they had autopilots to help them fly. Their planes changed too: they got bigger, faster, and a whole lot more complicated.
Automatic steering and stabilization tools progressed rapidly during the 1930s, as physicists learned more about aerodynamics and engineers incorporated air-pressure gauges, pneumatic controls, shock absorbers, and other refinements into autopilot mechanisms. The biggest breakthrough came in 1940, when the Sperry Corporation introduced its first electronic model, the A-5. Using vacuum tubes to amplify signals from the gyroscopes, the A-5 was able to make speedier, more precise adjustments and corrections. It could also sense and account for changes in a plane’s velocity and acceleration. Used in conjunction with the latest bombsight technology, the electronic autopilot proved a particular boon to the Allied air campaign in World War II.
Shortly after the war, on a September evening in 1947, the U.S. Army Air Forces conducted an experimental flight that made clear how far autopilots had come. Captain Thomas J. Wells, a military test pilot, taxied a C-54 Skymaster transport plane with a seven-man crew onto a remote runway in Newfoundland. He then let go of the yoke, pushed a button to activate the autopilot, and, as one of his colleagues in the cockpit later recalled, “sat back and put his hands in his lap.”8 The plane took off by itself, automatically adjusting its flaps and throttles and, once airborne, retracting its landing gear. It then flew itself across the Atlantic, following a series of “sequences” that had earlier been programmed into what the crew called its “mechanical brain.” Each sequence was keyed to a particular altitude or mileage reading. The men on the plane hadn’t been told of the flight’s route or destination; the plane maintained its own course by monitoring signals from radio beacons on the ground and on boats at sea. At dawn the following day, the C-54 reached the English coast. Still under the control of the autopilot, it began its descent, lowered its landing gear, lined itself up with an airstrip at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, and executed a perfect landing. Captain Wells then lifted his hands from his lap and parked the plane.
A few weeks after the Skymaster’s landmark trip, a writer with the British aviation magazine Flight contemplated the implications. It seemed inevitable, he wrote, that the new generation of autopilots would “dispose of the necessity for carrying navigators, radio operators, and flight engineers” on planes. The machines would render those jobs redundant. Pilots, he allowed, did not seem quite so dispensable. They would, at least for the foreseeable future, continue to be a necessary presence in cockpits, if only “to watch the various clocks and indicators to see that everything is going satisfactorily.”9
IN 1988, forty years after the C-54’s Atlantic crossing, the European aerospace consortium Airbus Industrie introduced its A320 passenger jet. The 150-seat plane was a smaller version of the company’s original A300 model, but unlike its conventional and rather drab predecessor, the A320 was a marvel. The first commercial aircraft that could truly be called computerized, it was a harbinger of everything to come in aircraft design. The flight deck would have been unrecognizable to Wiley Post or Lawrence Sperry. It dispensed with the battery of analogue dials and gauges that had long been the visual signature of airplane cockpits. In their place were six glowing glass screens, of the cathode-ray-tube variety, arranged neatly beneath the windscreen. The displays presented the pilots with the latest data and readings from the plane’s network of onboard computers.
The A320’s monitor-wrapped flight deck—its “glass cockpit,” as pilots called it—was not its most distinctive feature. Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center had pioneered, more than ten years earlier, the use of CRT screens for transmitting flight information, and jet makers had begun installing the screens in passenger planes in the late 1970s.10 What really set the A320 apart—and made it, in the words of the American writer and pilot William Langewiesche, “the most audacious civil airplane since the Wright brothers’ Flyer”11—was its digital fly-by-wire system. Before the A320 arrived, commercial planes still operated mechanically. Their fuselages and wing cavities were rigged with cables, pulleys, and gears, along with a miniature waterworks of hydraulic pipes, pumps, and valves. The controls manipulated by a pilot—the yoke, the throttle levers, the rudder pedals—were linked, by means of the mechanical systems, directly to the moving parts that governed the plane’s orientation, direction, and speed. When the pilot acted, the plane reacted.
To stop a bicycle, you squeeze a lever, which pulls a brake cable, which contracts the arms of a caliper, which presses pads against the tire’s rim. You are, in essence, sending a command—a signal to stop—with your hand, and the brake mechanism carries the manual force of that command all the way to the wheel. Your hand then receives confirmation that your command has been received: you feel, back through the brake lever, the resistance of the caliper, the pressure of the pads against the rim, the skidding of the wheel on the road. That, on a small scale, is what it was like when pilots flew mechanically controlled planes. They became part of the machine, their bodies sensing its workings and feeling its responses, and the machine became a conduit for their will. Such a deep entanglement between human and mechanism was an elemental source of flying’s thrill. It’s what the famous poet-pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry must have had in mind when, in recalling his days flying mail planes in the 1920s, he wrote of how “the machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.”12
The A320’s fly-by-wire system severed the tactile link between pilot and plane. It inserted a digital computer between human command and machine response. When a pilot moved a stick, turned a knob, or pushed a button in the Airbus cockpit, his directive was translated, via a transducer, into an electrical signal that zipped down a wire to a computer, and the computer, following the step-by-step algorithms of its software programs, calculated the various mechanical adjustments required to accomplish the pilot’s wish. The computer then sent its own instructions to the digital processors that governed the workings of the plane’s moving parts. Along with the replacement of mechanical movements by digital signals came a redesign of cockpit controls. The bulky, two-handed yoke that had pulled cables and compressed hydraulic fluids was replaced in the A320 by a small “sidestick” mounted beside the pilot’s seat and gripped by one hand. Along the front console, knobs with small, numerical LED displays allowed the pilot to dial in settings for airspeed, altitude, and heading as inputs to the jet’s computers.
After the introduction of the A320, the story of airplanes and the story of computers became one. Every advance in hardware and software, in electronic sensors and controls, in display technologies reverberated through the design of commercial aircraft as manufacturers and airlines pushed the limits of automation. In today’s jet-liners, the autopilots that keep planes stable and on course are just one of many computerized systems. Autothrottles control engine power. Flight management systems gather positioning data from GPS receivers and other sensors and use the information to set or refine a flight path. Collision avoidance systems scan the skies for nearby aircraft. Electronic flight bags store digital copies of the charts and other paperwork that pilots used to carry onboard. Still other computers extend and retract the landing gear, apply the brakes, adjust the cabin pressure, and perform various other functions that had once been in the hands of the crew. To program the computers and monitor their outputs, pilots now use large, colorful flat screens that graphically display data generated by electronic flight instrument systems, along with an assortment of keyboards, keypads, scroll wheels, and other input devices. Computer automation has become “all pervasive” on today’s aircraft, says Don Harris, an aeronautics professor and ergonomics expert. The flight deck “can be thought of as one huge flying computer interface.”13
And what of the modern flyboys and flygirls who, nestled in their high-tech glass cockpits, speed through the air alongside the ghosts of Sperry and Post and Saint-Exupéry? Needless to say, the job of the commercial pilot has lost its aura of romance and adventure. The storied stick-and-rudder man, who flew by a sense of feel, now belongs more to legend than to life. On a typical passenger flight these days, the pilot holds the controls for a grand total of three minutes—a minute or two when taking off and another minute or two when landing. What the pilot spends a whole lot of time doing is checking screens and punching in data. “We’ve gone from a world where automation was a tool to help the pilot control his workload,” observes Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, “to a point where the automation is really the primary flight control system in the aircraft.”14 Writes aviation researcher and FAA advisor Hemant Bhana, “As automation has gained in sophistication, the role of the pilot has shifted toward becoming a monitor or supervisor of the automation.”15 The commercial pilot has become a computer operator. And that, many aviation and automation experts have come to believe, is a problem.
LAWRENCE SPERRY died in 1923 when his plane crashed into the English Channel. Wiley Post died in 1935 when his plane went down in Alaska. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in 1944 when his plane disappeared over the Mediterranean. Premature death was a routine occupational hazard for pilots during aviation’s early years; romance and adventure carried a high price. Passengers died with alarming frequency too. As the airline industry took shape in the 1920s, the publisher of a U.S. aviation journal called on the government to improve flight safety, noting that “a great many fatal accidents are daily occurring to people carried in airplanes by inexperienced pilots.”16
Air travel’s lethal days are, mercifully, behind us. Flying is safe now, and pretty much everyone involved in the aviation business believes that advances in automation are one of the reasons why. Together with improvements in aircraft design, airline safety routines, crew training, and air traffic control, the mechanization and computerization of flight have contributed to the sharp and steady decline in accidents and deaths over the decades. In the United States and other Western countries, fatal airliner crashes have become exceedingly rare. Of the more than seven billion people who boarded U.S. commercial flights in the ten years from 2002 through 2011, only 153 ended up dying in a wreck, a rate of two deaths for every million passengers. In the ten years from 1962 through 1971, by contrast, 1.3 billion people took flights, and 1,696 of them died, for a rate of 133 deaths per million.17
But this sunny story carries a dark footnote. The overall decline in the number of plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,” says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and one of the world’s leading authorities on automation.18 When onboard computer systems fail to work as intended or other unexpected problems arise during a flight, pilots are forced to take manual control of the plane. Thrust abruptly into a now rare role, they too often make mistakes. The consequences, as the Continental Connection and Air France disasters show, can be catastrophic. Over the last thirty years, dozens of psychologists, engineers, and ergonomics, or “human factors,” researchers have studied what’s gained and lost when pilots share the work of flying with software. They’ve learned that a heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew.”19
Concerns about the unintended side effects of flight automation aren’t new. They date back at least to the early days of glass cockpits and fly-by-wire controls. A 1989 report from NASA’s Ames Research Center noted that as computers had begun to multiply on airplanes during the preceding decade, industry and governmental researchers “developed a growing discomfort that the cockpit may be becoming too automated, and that the steady replacement of human functioning by devices could be a mixed blessing.” Despite a general enthusiasm for computerized flight, many in the airline industry worried that “pilots were becoming over-dependent on automation, that manual flying skills may be deteriorating, and that situational awareness might be suffering.”20
Studies conducted since then have linked many accidents and near misses to breakdowns of automated systems or to “automation-induced errors” on the part of flight crews.21 In 2010, the FAA released preliminary results of a major study of airline flights over the preceding ten years which showed that pilot errors had been involved in nearly two-thirds of all crashes. The research further indicated, according to FAA scientist Kathy Abbott, that automation has made such errors more likely. Pilots can be distracted by their interactions with onboard computers, Abbott said, and they can “abdicate too much responsibility to the automated systems.”22 An extensive 2013 government report on cockpit automation, compiled by an expert panel and drawing on the same FAA data, implicated automation-related problems, such as degraded situational awareness and weakened hand-flying skills, in more than half of recent accidents.23
The anecdotal evidence collected through accident reports and surveys gained empirical backing from a rigorous study conducted by Matthew Ebbatson, a young human-factors researcher at Cranfield University, a top U.K. engineering school.24 Frustrated by the lack of hard, objective data on what he termed “the loss of manual flying skills in pilots of highly automated airliners,” Ebbatson set out to fill the gap. He recruited sixty-six veteran pilots from a British airline and had each of them get into a flight simulator and perform a challenging maneuver—bringing a Boeing 737 with a blown engine in for a landing during bad weather. The simulator disabled the plane’s automated systems, forcing the pilot to fly by hand. Some of the pilots did exceptionally well in the test, Ebbatson reported, but many performed poorly, barely exceeding “the limits of acceptability.” Ebbatson then compared detailed measures of each pilot’s performance in the simulator—the pressure exerted on the yoke, the stability of airspeed, the degree of variation in course—with the pilot’s historical flight record. He found a direct correlation between a pilot’s aptitude at the controls and the amount of time the pilot had spent flying without the aid of automation. The correlation was particularly strong with the amount of manual flying done during the preceding two months. The analysis indicated that “manual flying skills decay quite rapidly towards the fringes of ‘tolerable’ performance without relatively frequent practice.” Particularly “vulnerable to decay,” Ebbatson noted, was a pilot’s ability to maintain “airspeed control”—a skill crucial to recognizing, avoiding, and recovering from stalls and other dangerous situations.
It’s no mystery why automation degrades pilot performance. Like many challenging jobs, flying a plane involves a combination of psychomotor skills and cognitive skills—thoughtful action and active thinking. A pilot needs to manipulate tools and instruments with precision while swiftly and accurately making calculations, forecasts, and assessments in his head. And while he goes through these intricate mental and physical maneuvers, he needs to remain vigilant, alert to what’s going on around him and able to distinguish important signals from unimportant ones. He can’t allow himself either to lose focus or to fall victim to tunnel vision. Mastery of such a multifaceted set of skills comes only with rigorous practice. A beginning pilot tends to be clumsy at the controls, pushing and pulling the yoke with more force than necessary. He often has to pause to remember what he should do next, to walk himself methodically through the steps of a process. He has trouble shifting seamlessly between manual and cognitive tasks. When a stressful situation arises, he can easily become overwhelmed or distracted and end up overlooking a critical change in circumstances.
In time, after much rehearsal, the novice gains confidence. He becomes less halting in his work and more precise in his actions. There’s little wasted effort. As his experience continues to deepen, his brain develops so-called mental models—dedicated assemblies of neurons—that allow him to recognize patterns in his surroundings. The models enable him to interpret and react to stimuli intuitively, without getting bogged down in conscious analysis. Eventually, thought and action become seamless. Flying becomes second nature. Years before researchers began to plumb the workings of pilots’ brains, Wiley Post described the experience of expert flight in plain, precise terms. He flew, he said in 1935, “without mental effort, letting my actions be wholly controlled by my subconscious mind.”25 He wasn’t born with that ability. He developed it through hard work.
When computers enter the picture, the nature and the rigor of the work change, as does the learning the work engenders. As software assumes moment-by-moment control of the craft, the pilot is, as we’ve seen, relieved of much manual labor. This reallocation of responsibility can provide an important benefit. It can reduce the pilot’s workload and allow him to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of flight. But there’s a cost. Psychomotor skills get rusty, which can hamper the pilot on those rare but critical occasions when he’s required to take back the controls. There’s growing evidence that recent expansions in the scope of automation also put cognitive skills at risk. When more advanced computers begin to take over planning and analysis functions, such as setting and adjusting a flight plan, the pilot becomes less engaged not only physically but mentally. Because the precision and speed of pattern recognition appear to depend on regular practice, the pilot’s mind may become less agile in interpreting and reacting to fast-changing situations. He may suffer what Ebbatson calls “skill fade” in his mental as well as his motor abilities.
Pilots are not blind to automation’s toll. They’ve always been wary about ceding responsibility to machinery. Airmen in World War I, justifiably proud of their skill in maneuvering their planes during dogfights, wanted nothing to do with the fancy Sperry autopilots.26 In 1959, the original Mercury astronauts rebelled against NASA’s plan to remove manual flight controls from spacecraft.27 But aviators’ concerns are more acute now. Even as they praise the enormous gains in flight technology, and acknowledge the safety and efficiency benefits, they worry about the erosion of their talents. As part of his research, Ebbatson surveyed commercial pilots, asking them whether “they felt their manual flying ability had been influenced by the experience of operating a highly automated aircraft.” More than three-fourths reported that “their skills had deteriorated”; just a few felt their skills had improved.28 A 2012 pilot survey conducted by the European Aviation Safety Agency found similarly widespread concerns, with 95 percent of pilots saying that automation tended to erode “basic manual and cognitive flying skills.”29 Rory Kay, a long-time United Airlines captain who until recently served as the top safety official with the Air Line Pilots Association, fears the aviation industry is suffering from “automation addiction.” In a 2011 interview with the Associated Press, he put the problem in stark terms: “We’re forgetting how to fly.”30
CYNICS ARE quick to attribute such fears to self-interest. The real reason for the grumbling about automation, they contend, is that pilots are anxious about the loss of their jobs or the squeezing of their paychecks. And the cynics are right, to a degree. As the writer for Flight magazine predicted back in 1947, automation technology has whittled down the size of flight crews. Sixty years ago, an airliner’s flight deck often had seats for five skilled and well-paid professionals: a navigator, a radio operator, a flight engineer, and a pair of pilots. The radioman lost his chair during the 1950s, as communication systems became more reliable and easier to use. The navigator was pushed off the deck in the 1960s, when inertial navigation systems took over his duties. The flight engineer, whose job involved monitoring a plane’s instrument array and relaying important information to the pilots, kept his seat until the advent of the glass cockpit at the end of the 1970s. Seeking to cut costs following the deregulation of air travel in 1978, American airlines made a push to get rid of the engineer and fly with just a captain and copilot. A bitter battle with pilots’ unions ensued, as the unions mobilized to save the engineer’s job. The fight didn’t end until 1981, when a U.S. presidential commission declared that engineers were no longer necessary for the safe operation of passenger flights. Since then, the two-person flight crew has become the norm—at least for the time being. Some experts, pointing to the success of military drones, have begun suggesting that two pilots may in the end be two too many.31 “A pilotless airliner is going to come,” James Albaugh, a top Boeing executive, told an aviation conference in 2011; “it’s just a question of when.”32
The spread of automation has also been accompanied by a steady decline in the compensation of commercial pilots. While veteran jetliner captains can still pull down salaries close to $200,000, novice pilots today are paid as little as $20,000 a year, sometimes even less. The average starting salary for experienced pilots at major airlines is around $36,000, which, as a Wall Street Journal reporter notes, is “darn low for mid-career professionals.”33 Despite the modest pay, there’s still a popular sense that pilots are overcompensated. An article at the website Salary.com called commercial jet pilots the “most overpaid” professionals in today’s economy, arguing that “many of their tasks are automated” and suggesting their work has become “a bit boring.”34
But pilots’ self-interest, when it comes to matters of automation, goes deeper than employment security and pay, or even their own safety. Every technological advance alters the work they do and the role they play, and that in turn changes how they view themselves and how others see them. Their social status and even their sense of self are in play. So when pilots talk about automation, they’re speaking not just technically but autobiographically. Am I the master of the machine, or its servant? Am I an actor in the world, or an observer? Am I an agent, or an object? “At heart,” MIT technology historian David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo, “debates about control and automation in aircraft are debates about the relative importance of human and machine.” In aviation, as in any field where people work with tools, “technical change and social change are intertwined.”35
Pilots have always defined themselves by their relationship to their craft. Wilbur Wright, in a 1900 letter to Octave Chanute, another aviation pioneer, said of the pilot’s role, “What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.”36 He was not just voicing a platitude. He was referring to what, at the very dawn of human flight, had already become a crucial tension between the capability of the plane and the capability of the pilot. As the first planes were being built, designers debated how inherently stable an aircraft should be—how strong of a tendency it should have to fly straight and level in all conditions. It might seem that more stability would always be better in a flying machine, but that’s not so. There’s a trade-off between stability and maneuverability. The greater a plane’s stability, the harder it becomes for the pilot to exert control over it. As Mindell explains, “The more stable an aircraft is, the more effort will be required to move it off its point of equilibrium. Hence it will be less controllable. The opposite is also true—the more controllable, or maneuverable, an aircraft, the less stable it will be.”37 The author of a 1910 book on aeronautics reported that the question of equilibrium had become “a controversy dividing aviators into two schools.” On one side were those who argued that equilibrium should “be made automatic to a very large degree”—that it should be built into the plane. On the other side were those who held that equilibrium should be “a matter for the skill of the aviator.”38
Wilbur and Orville Wright were in the latter camp. They believed that a plane should be fundamentally unstable, like a bicycle or even, as Wilbur once suggested, “a fractious horse.”39 That way, the pilot would have as much autonomy and freedom as possible. The brothers incorporated their philosophy into the planes they built, which gave precedence to maneuverability over stability. What the Wrights invented at the start of the twentieth century was, Mindell argues, “not simply an airplane that could fly, but also the very idea of an airplane as a dynamic machine under the control of a human pilot.” 40 Before the engineering decision came an ethical choice: to make the apparatus subservient to the person operating it, an instrument of human talent and volition.
The Wright brothers would lose the equilibrium debate. As planes came to carry passengers and other valuable cargo over long distances, the freedom and virtuosity of the pilot became secondary concerns. Of primary importance were safety and efficiency, and to increase those, it quickly became clear, the pilot’s scope of action had to be constrained and the machine itself invested with more authority. The shift in control was gradual, but every time technology assumed a little more power, pilots felt a little more of themselves slip away. In a quixotic 1957 article opposing attempts to further automate flight, a top fighter-jet test pilot named J. O. Roberts fretted about how autopilots were turning the man in the cockpit into little more than “excess baggage except for monitoring duties.” The pilot, Roberts wrote, has to wonder “whether he is paying his way or not.” 41
But all the gyroscopic, electromechanical, instrumental, and hydraulic innovations only hinted at what digitization would bring. The computer not only changed the character of flight; it changed the character of automation. It circumscribed the pilot’s role to the point where the very idea of “manual control” began to seem anachronistic. If the essence of a pilot’s job consists in sending digital inputs to computers and monitoring computers’ digital outputs—while the computers govern the plane’s moving parts and choose its course—where exactly is the manual control? Even when pilots in computerized planes are pulling yokes or pushing sticks, what they’re often really involved in is a simulation of manual flight. Every action is mediated, filtered through microprocessors. That’s not to say that there aren’t still important skills involved. There are. But the skills have changed, and they’re now applied at a distance, from behind a scrim of software. In many of today’s commercial jets, the flight software can even override the pilots’ inputs during extreme maneuvers. The computer gets the final say. “He didn’t just fly an airplane,” a fellow pilot once said of Wiley Post; “he put it on.” 42 Today’s pilots don’t wear their planes. They wear their planes’ computers—or perhaps the computers wear the pilots.
The transformation that aviation has gone through over the last few decades—the shift from mechanical to digital systems, the proliferation of software and screens, the automation of mental as well as manual work, the blurring of what it means to be a pilot—offers a roadmap for the much broader transformation that society is going through now. The glass cockpit, Don Harris has pointed out, can be thought of as a prototype of a world where “there is computer functionality everywhere.” 43 The experience of pilots also reveals the subtle but often strong connection between the way automated systems are designed and the way the minds and bodies of the people using the systems work. The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.
* A note on terminology: When people talk about a stall, they’re usually referring to a loss of power in an engine. In aviation, a stall refers to a loss of lift in a wing.