[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.