[ghjm]

I would like to object to the following statement from the article:

> While lifeguards are taught all the possible signs of a person who is drowning, pilots don’t receive elaborate training on all the things that can go wrong, precisely because the many things that can go wrong so rarely do.

In fact, pilots are given extensive training in the failure modes of their airplanes. When Casner got his private pilot license, he should have been told to memorize the emergency procedures for his airplane. De novo private pilots are not given the same level of training as airplane pilots, but failure modes and "interesting-looking instrument panels" are crucial components of instrument training.

More generally, I don't disagree with his conclusions regarding the problems with cockpit automation, but they are hardly novel - the industry has been aware of this for years. However, the service life of an airliner is measured in decades, and the regulatory environment, for excellent reasons, doesn't allow us to change the avionics on existing airliners without re-certifying the new systems and re-training all the pilots.

Last but not least, I'd like to point out that even if the airplane is on autopilot, there is still plenty for the pilots to do. For example, they are supposed to brief the instrument approach procedure and the missed approach procedure every single time they fly it. A lot of pilots relax this discipline (if you've flown into the same airport hundreds of times, it's hard to argue that re-reading the procedure yet again has much value). But relaxing it to the point of just idly chatting all the way down the glideslope? That's not a problem with the cockpit systems, and it's hard to see how better human factors would have magically turned these incredibly irresponsible people into good pilots.

[frobozz]

I'd also disagree with that same assertion with regard to lifeguards:

Drownings (and near-drownings prevented by a rescue) are pretty uncommon, too. It is precisely because of the rarity that one needs to be trained to spot the problem. If they happened all the time, then it would merely be a matter of the journeyman pointing one out to the apprentice when it happens. Instead, one has to rely on a combination of book study and roleplay.

This is even more the case in a pool situation (as described in the article). I was a lifeguard in a very busy pool for five years, in that time, I performed very few rescues, some of which would better be described as "assistances", only one would have been likely to turn into a drowning without a rescue.

I might add, good lifeguarding is not about watching for signs that someone might be drowning, it's about watching for signs that might precede trouble.

I'm no pilot, so I have no idea how many different things might go wrong on a plane, but I assume by the comparative duration and cost of training that it's a bit more complex than watching people swim. I'd be shocked if pilot training was strictly happy-path. I'd expect (as you state) that they would be assessed on their ability to interpret and react to things going wrong. Otherwise, what's the point of all the instrumentation?

[the_af]

Isn't the argument from the article that the pilots are just idly chatting all the way down because of excessive automation?

If, like the article claims, human error is the leading cause of accidents (and I assume it is implied that distraction is a major factor in human error, though the article doesn't explicitly claim this), isn't mindless automation a major problem that should be addressed? To quote NASA's researcher: "Companies were introducing increasingly specialized automated functions to address particular errors without looking at their over-all effects [...] As it stood, increased automation hadn't reduced human errors on the whole; it had simply changed their form."

I don't know if it's accurate to call these pilots "irresponsible people". Probably it is. But how does this help in reducing accidents?

[gwern]

> Isn't the argument from the article that the pilots are just idly chatting all the way down because of excessive automation?

Yeah, but there seems to be an implicit argument appended: "and this causes more accidents than the automation prevents". I'm not sure about this one. Aren't jet planes ever safer to fly in? I was under the impression that the death rates kept going down. So the backfire effect from this automation can't be too bad or else net safety wouldn't increase.

I think you could turn it into a weaker more valid argument: 'and the mind-wandering sets a bound on how safe air travel can ever get with human pilots because automation itself introduce human error'. But when you make it explicit like that, it starts to look like an argument for taking humans out of the loop entirely...

[LnxPrgr3]

It's definitely worth remembering how rare commercial airline crashes are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents...

There was also drama around a whistleblower being ignored and demoted after bringing up safety concerns about Colgan Air: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/nyregion/04colgan.html?_r=...

Check ride stall recovery is now graded differently too, thanks to this incident: http://www.flyingmag.com/pilots-places/pilots-adventures-mor..., under the belief they could've been making pilots instinctively afraid to lose altitude during stall recovery.

It's also believed the pilots on this flight were fatigued, and performance was impaired. Given how bad humans are at even driving cars while exhausted, it's not surprising it's hard to fly a plane in that condition.

Full disclosure: All but the first link are cited by the same Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407. I immediately recognized the story of this crash because I have a bit of a fascination with how things can go horribly wrong.

This layman also cringed while watching a TV documentary about this flight the moment the reenactment pilot pulled up during a stall warning, and again when the co-pilot retracted the flaps. "Are you trying to crash‽" is what I wanted to yell at my monitor.

[ekianjo]

In the near/mid-term it would probably be a good course of action to have entirely automated airplanes, and "pilots" (or technicians or whatever you would call them) specialized in handling automation failures. That way, there would be no question about what their role is in the plane.

[liotier]

Pilots are all about handling failures - that is pretty much what their whole career is focused on. The normal operation of a modern aircraft is pretty boring - what makes a pilot worth his salary is all the continuous training and drilling that embedded emergency procedures into his mind at the reflex level... It is a lifelong process, regularly updated through new hardware and modified methods in response to incidents.

[eru]

> Isn't the argument from the article that the pilots are just idly chatting all the way down because of excessive automation?

We can make them play computer games that test their attention.

[the_af]

I actually thought something similar while typing my first reply. What if they gave pilots some sort of busywork to keep them engaged? But I guess it wouldn't work; as soon as you identify something as busywork, you stop giving it your full attention.

[eru]

In trains they have busywork to test your attention. (I rode a simulator once, it's like a flight simulator but for locomotives.)

There's a deadman pedal that you need to keep pressed to keep the train moving. Once every half a minute, you need to lift your feet of the pedal. If you fail, the train will soon break and come to a halt.