Re:How Airline Pilots Lost the Basic Skills
by ghaff on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:44PM
(#11261688)
There's some interesting academic research going on about the interactions between humans and computer decision making. One place I know of is the Humans and Autonomy lab at Duke http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/
I saw an interesting panel last year at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium where Missy Cummings from this lab (who used to by a navy fighter pilot) talked about a number of these issues.
That's also partially why we had Asiana 214 - if the pilot at the controls was more skilled at hand flying the aircraft he would not have been so dependent on the autothrottle functionality to manage the speed of the airplane.
I worry deeply about creeping automation not only on the flight deck but in our cars. Although automation is far more responsive and adds greatly to safety in both cases, dependence on automation will breed a new generation of the "Children of the Magenta" [2] who blindly allow the computer to follow the magenta line on the display, either into the ground in an airplane, or into oncoming traffic in a car as they ask themselves "what's it doing now??!"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10