After every airplane crash, investigators hunting for the cause look at all the evidence to try to discover what went wrong. Often it’s mechanical, weather, or human error that causes the crash. For the third category, authorities are increasingly finding that the heavy automation of most commercial planes are leading pilots to lose some of their manual flying expertise. A detailed Associated Press investigation looked at the problem and found:
Pilots’ “automation addiction” has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don’t know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.
Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training, starkly laid out his concerns to the AP:
“We’re seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes…We’re forgetting how to fly.”
The Canadian magazine Macleans also examined the impact of automation and loss-of-control accidents, which has been cited in more than fifty commercial airplane crashes in the last five years. What are some of the causes of these incidents?
Some argue that the sheer complexity of modern flight systems, though designed to improve safety and reliability, can overwhelm even the most experienced pilots when something actually goes wrong. Others say an increasing reliance on automated flight may be dulling pilots’ sense of flying a plane, leaving them ill-equipped to take over in an emergency. Still others question whether pilot-training programs have lagged behind the industry’s rapid technological advances.
Two airplane accidents crystallize the problem with automation: Colgan Air Flight 3407 which killed 50 people outside Buffalo, New York in February 2009 and Air France Flight 447 which killed all 228 people on board in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil in June 2009. In both tragedies, investigators say the crashes could have been possibly avoided if pilots had responded correctly to the emergencies in their cockpits. In the Colgan case, the pilot mistakenly pulled back on the control yoke, instead of pushing forward.
So what can be done to improve the skills of pilots to avoid these types of accidents in the future? More training on the ground in simulators and increased time getting manual flight experience seem to be the answer. When pilots are actually flying, an over-reliance on the autopilot system can be a recipe for dangerous cockpit situations, as described in the AP article:
Airlines are also seeing smaller incidents in which pilots waste precious time repeatedly trying to restart the autopilot or fix other automated systems when what they should be doing is “grasping the controls and flying the airplane,” said Bob Coffman, another member of the FAA pilot training committee and an airline captain.
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