The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (8 page)

Shortly after the war, on a September evening in 1947, the U.S. Army Air Forces conducted an experimental flight that made clear how far autopilots had come. Captain Thomas J. Wells, a military test pilot, taxied a C-54 Skymaster transport plane with a seven-man crew onto a remote runway in Newfoundland. He then let go of the yoke, pushed a button to activate the autopilot, and, as one of his colleagues in the cockpit later recalled, “sat back and put his hands in his lap.”
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The plane took off by itself, automatically adjusting its flaps and throttles and, once airborne, retracting its landing gear. It then flew itself across the Atlantic, following a series of “sequences” that had earlier been programmed into what the crew called its “mechanical brain.” Each sequence was keyed to a particular altitude or mileage reading. The men on the plane hadn’t been told of the flight’s route or destination; the plane maintained its own course by monitoring signals from radio beacons on the ground and on boats at sea. At dawn the following day, the C-54 reached the English coast. Still under the control of the autopilot, it began its descent, lowered its landing gear, lined itself up with an airstrip at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, and executed a perfect landing. Captain Wells then lifted his hands from his lap and parked the plane.

A few weeks after the Skymaster’s landmark trip, a writer with the British aviation magazine
Flight
contemplated the implications. It seemed inevitable, he wrote, that the new generation of autopilots would “dispose of the necessity for carrying navigators, radio operators, and flight engineers” on planes. The machines would render those jobs redundant. Pilots, he allowed, did not seem quite so dispensable. They would, at least for the foreseeable future, continue to be a necessary presence in cockpits, if only “to watch the various clocks and indicators to see that everything is going satisfactorily.”
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I
N 1988
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forty years after the C-54’s Atlantic crossing, the European aerospace consortium Airbus Industrie introduced its A320 passenger jet. The 150-seat plane was a smaller version of the company’s original A300 model, but unlike its conventional and rather drab predecessor, the A320 was a marvel. The first commercial aircraft that could truly be called computerized, it was a harbinger of everything to come in aircraft design. The flight deck would have been unrecognizable to Wiley Post or Lawrence Sperry. It dispensed with the battery of analogue dials and gauges that had long been the visual signature of airplane cockpits. In their place were six glowing glass screens, of the cathode-ray-tube variety, arranged neatly beneath the windscreen. The displays presented the pilots with the latest data and readings from the plane’s network of onboard computers.

The A320’s monitor-wrapped flight deck—its “glass cockpit,” as pilots called it—was not its most distinctive feature. Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center had pioneered, more than ten years earlier, the use of CRT screens for transmitting flight information, and jet makers had begun installing the screens in passenger planes in the late 1970s.
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What really set the A320 apart—and made it, in the words of the American writer and pilot William Langewiesche, “the most audacious civil airplane since the Wright brothers’ Flyer”
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—was its digital fly-by-wire system. Before the A320 arrived, commercial planes still operated mechanically. Their fuselages and wing cavities were rigged with cables, pulleys, and gears, along with a miniature waterworks of hydraulic pipes, pumps, and valves. The controls manipulated by a pilot—the yoke, the throttle levers, the rudder pedals—were linked, by means of the mechanical systems, directly to the moving parts that governed the plane’s orientation, direction, and speed. When the pilot acted, the plane reacted.

To stop a bicycle, you squeeze a lever, which pulls a brake cable, which contracts the arms of a caliper, which presses pads against the tire’s rim. You are, in essence, sending a command—a signal to stop—with your hand, and the brake mechanism carries the manual force of that command all the way to the wheel. Your hand then receives confirmation that your command has been received: you feel, back through the brake lever, the resistance of the caliper, the pressure of the pads against the rim, the skidding of the wheel on the road. That, on a small scale, is what it was like when pilots flew mechanically controlled planes. They became part of the machine, their bodies sensing its workings and feeling its responses, and the machine became a conduit for their will. Such a deep entanglement between human and mechanism was an elemental source of flying’s thrill. It’s what the famous poet-pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry must have had in mind when, in recalling his days flying mail planes in the 1920s, he wrote of how “the machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.”
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The A320’s fly-by-wire system severed the tactile link between pilot and plane. It inserted a digital computer between human command and machine response. When a pilot moved a stick, turned a knob, or pushed a button in the Airbus cockpit, his directive was translated, via a transducer, into an electrical signal that zipped down a wire to a computer, and the computer, following the step-by-step algorithms of its software programs, calculated the various mechanical adjustments required to accomplish the pilot’s wish. The computer then sent its own instructions to the digital processors that governed the workings of the plane’s moving parts. Along with the replacement of mechanical movements by digital signals came a redesign of cockpit controls. The bulky, two-handed yoke that had pulled cables and compressed hydraulic fluids was replaced in the A320 by a small “sidestick” mounted beside the pilot’s seat and gripped by one hand. Along the front console, knobs with small, numerical LED displays allowed the pilot to dial in settings for airspeed, altitude, and heading as inputs to the jet’s computers.

After the introduction of the A320, the story of airplanes and the story of computers became one. Every advance in hardware and software, in electronic sensors and controls, in display technologies reverberated through the design of commercial aircraft as manufacturers and airlines pushed the limits of automation. In today’s jet-liners, the autopilots that keep planes stable and on course are just one of many computerized systems. Autothrottles control engine power. Flight management systems gather positioning data from GPS receivers and other sensors and use the information to set or refine a flight path. Collision avoidance systems scan the skies for nearby aircraft. Electronic flight bags store digital copies of the charts and other paperwork that pilots used to carry onboard. Still other computers extend and retract the landing gear, apply the brakes, adjust the cabin pressure, and perform various other functions that had once been in the hands of the crew. To program the computers and monitor their outputs, pilots now use large, colorful flat screens that graphically display data generated by electronic flight instrument systems, along with an assortment of keyboards, keypads, scroll wheels, and other input devices. Computer automation has become “all pervasive” on today’s aircraft, says Don Harris, an aeronautics professor and ergonomics expert. The flight deck “can be thought of as one huge flying computer interface.”
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And what of the modern flyboys and flygirls who, nestled in their high-tech glass cockpits, speed through the air alongside the ghosts of Sperry and Post and Saint-Exupéry? Needless to say, the job of the commercial pilot has lost its aura of romance and adventure. The storied stick-and-rudder man, who flew by a sense of feel, now belongs more to legend than to life. On a typical passenger flight these days, the pilot holds the controls for a grand total of three minutes—a minute or two when taking off and another minute or two when landing. What the pilot spends a whole lot of time doing is checking screens and punching in data. “We’ve gone from a world where automation was a tool to help the pilot control his workload,” observes Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, “to a point where the automation is really the primary flight control system in the aircraft.”
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Writes aviation researcher and FAA advisor Hemant Bhana, “As automation has gained in sophistication, the role of the pilot has shifted toward becoming a monitor or supervisor of the automation.”
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The commercial pilot has become a computer operator. And that, many aviation and automation experts have come to believe, is a problem.

L
AWRENCE
S
PERRY
died in 1923 when his plane crashed into the English Channel. Wiley Post died in 1935 when his plane went down in Alaska. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in 1944 when his plane disappeared over the Mediterranean. Premature death was a routine occupational hazard for pilots during aviation’s early years; romance and adventure carried a high price. Passengers died with alarming frequency too. As the airline industry took shape in the 1920s, the publisher of a U.S. aviation journal called on the government to improve flight safety, noting that “a great many fatal accidents are daily occurring to people carried in airplanes by inexperienced pilots.”
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Air travel’s lethal days are, mercifully, behind us. Flying is safe now, and pretty much everyone involved in the aviation business believes that advances in automation are one of the reasons why. Together with improvements in aircraft design, airline safety routines, crew training, and air traffic control, the mechanization and computerization of flight have contributed to the sharp and steady decline in accidents and deaths over the decades. In the United States and other Western countries, fatal airliner crashes have become exceedingly rare. Of the more than seven billion people who boarded U.S. commercial flights in the ten years from 2002 through 2011, only 153 ended up dying in a wreck, a rate of two deaths for every million passengers. In the ten years from 1962 through 1971, by contrast, 1.3 billion people took flights, and 1,696 of them died, for a rate of 133 deaths per million.
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But this sunny story carries a dark footnote. The overall decline in the number of plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,” says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and one of the world’s leading authorities on automation.
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When onboard computer systems fail to work as intended or other unexpected problems arise during a flight, pilots are forced to take manual control of the plane. Thrust abruptly into a now rare role, they too often make mistakes. The consequences, as the Continental Connection and Air France disasters show, can be catastrophic. Over the last thirty years, dozens of psychologists, engineers, and ergonomics, or “human factors,” researchers have studied what’s gained and lost when pilots share the work of flying with software. They’ve learned that a heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew.”
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Concerns about the unintended side effects of flight automation aren’t new. They date back at least to the early days of glass cockpits and fly-by-wire controls. A 1989 report from NASA’s Ames Research Center noted that as computers had begun to multiply on airplanes during the preceding decade, industry and governmental researchers “developed a growing discomfort that the cockpit may be becoming too automated, and that the steady replacement of human functioning by devices could be a mixed blessing.” Despite a general enthusiasm for computerized flight, many in the airline industry worried that “pilots were becoming over-dependent on automation, that manual flying skills may be deteriorating, and that situational awareness might be suffering.”
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Studies conducted since then have linked many accidents and near misses to breakdowns of automated systems or to “automation-induced errors” on the part of flight crews.
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In 2010, the FAA released preliminary results of a major study of airline flights over the preceding ten years which showed that pilot errors had been involved in nearly two-thirds of all crashes. The research further indicated, according to FAA scientist Kathy Abbott, that automation has made such errors more likely. Pilots can be distracted by their interactions with onboard computers, Abbott said, and they can “abdicate too much responsibility to the automated systems.”
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An extensive 2013 government report on cockpit automation, compiled by an expert panel and drawing on the same FAA data, implicated automation-related problems, such as degraded situational awareness and weakened hand-flying skills, in more than half of recent accidents.
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