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accidents. The rollout of auto-descent for general aviation fleets is bound to save some lives as well. Navigation systems greatly reduce pilot workload, with departures, arrivals and approaches selectable via simple keystrokes. No more twisting the course, configuring and descending, all while correlating aircraft position with lines on a piece of paper. Moving maps mean that position is never a guessing game.
The increasing danger is that auto- mation dependence will be ingrained into the pilots of tomorrow. The ac- cident record is already testifying to the atrophy of basic flying skills. The company I work for promotes an op- erational paradox: On one hand, they encourage the use of automation as a means to reduce task saturation. On the other, they encourage pilots to rou- tinely disconnect automation in order to maintain basic f lying skills. Over- reliance on automation can greatly increase response times as pilots get
stuck trying to manage computers instead of taking direct control of the aircraft. Yet, the failure to utilize automation can produce mental over- load leading to mistakes in task-satu- rated environments.
A month after I began flying the Caravan, the autopilot failed on a short hop between Hobbs and Carls- bad, New Mexico. I felt an initial pang of panic – there were a few seconds of “what do I do?!” Nearly all of my time prior to the Caravan had been in aircraft without autopilots. It took 40 hours with an autopilot to make me scared of flying without one. The blip of panic only lasted a few mo- ments, but it remains a flight that I vividly remember.
Similarly, I did not fly my first autothrottle-equipped aircraft until I had 5,000 hours. Three months later, I decided to fly an approach manu- ally. I felt a pronounced stab of uncer- tainty. Five thousand hours of paying attention to thrust and airspeed had
8 • TWIN & TURBINE / May 2021
1st Source
Automation is very good at managing certain aspects of flight, but it is lousy
at abstracting solutions to unusual events.