The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (9 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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In 1959, the original Mercury astronauts rebelled against NASA’s plan to remove manual flight controls from spacecraft.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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C
YNICS 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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Today’s pilots don’t wear their planes. They wear their planes’ computers—or perhaps the computers wear the pilots.