I discovered aviation at 19 when I won a free hour in a United Airlines DC-10 simulator. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. The realistic bumps and vibrations were enough to make me nervous about crashing. I immediately fell in love with the idea of an office filled with gauges, yokes and throttles. I had discovered not only a pursuit but also a profession.
September 11 happened shortly after I graduated college. I was quickly introduced to the cyclical volatility of the aviation sector. It was a horrible time to start flying, but I began anyway. I enrolled in a few classes at Metro State College of Denver, largely to gain access to their fleet of Frasca training devices. The first entry in my logbook was a block for the entire semester, logged on May 7, 2001.
The Frasca is a basic device with a six-pack used as the primary means to establish aircraft orientation. Gyroscopic precession requires resetting the heading indicator against the compass every 15 minutes. There is no flight director or autopilot. It is a touch more sophisticated than what Lindbergh used to cross the Atlantic. I joined the Metro State Precision Flight team before I had logged any time in an actual aircraft. We ran competitions in the Frasca that utilized altitude, heading, and standard rate turns. If you were off altitude or heading, you accumulated points. Climbs and descents had to occur at exactly 500 fpm or you got more points. Like golf, the lowest score won. It was a fun way to develop instrument flying skills.
I walked into the Centennial Airport for my “intro to flight” in June of that year. I marched up to the counter of the local flight club and told the owner that I was “looking to learn to fly.” She gave me a direct response, “I have an instructor who can teach you…as long as you don’t mind learning from a woman.” Barbara endorsed my first flight and went on to endorse the next few pages as well. I would eventually go through a handful of different instructors (Barbara left for a job at Jeppesen), and I eventually finished my flight training in Los Angeles.
My first flight was in N737XE, a 1977 Cessna 172N. The flight school at the FBO had a dozen 172s – nearly all of them 1970s variants. Six-packs provided basic flight information. Fixed cards and VORs provided for navigation. The radios were analog. The only way you knew when the battery was on was the hum of the gyro spinning up. A good portion of my initial cross-country flights were via pilotage. The VORs were used sparingly and only to verify that I was not transgressing controlled airspace around Denver. Hills, antennas, railroad tracks, and the occasional private airport were used to establish position. Dead reckoning with heading, airspeed, and a clock did the rest. I got pretty good on an E6B. It was old-fashioned in the new millennium, yet a testimony to the possibility of life without digital intervention.
My flight training was on and off for many years. Aviation job opportunities were lousy for the first decade of the millennium. In 2007 – a couple of months after I got my commercial certificate – I landed a job flying Cessna Caravans out of Albuquerque. It had a mechanical flight director, a dual-stack Garmin, an autopilot and a turbine engine. I was in paradise.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
The Caravan is a great aircraft, but the DC-10 had put big iron in my blood. You need multi-engine time to land one of those jobs. The pilot market was finally beginning to open up. It wound up being a slim window of opportunity. The Great Recession was on the horizon as the aftereffects of 9/11 flowed into the financial crisis. The retirement age for airline pilots was extended from 60 to 65, right as the stock market was crashing. Nobody could afford to retire. 2008 saw only a dozen pilots hired for the airlines in the U.S. I managed to be one of them, flying the Beech 1900D around the slopes of Colorado. It was back to no autopilot, sometimes no flight director and a six-pack. Add snow, mountains, ice, and a maintenance department under the thumb of the accountants, and you have a nice start to an ASAP report. The vast majority of my perilous stories come from my time with that little airline.
The first generation iPhone came out at the very beginning of my fledgling career. Buzzing around the Rocky Mountains in the twin Beech, it was clear that the phone in my pocket was the most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment onboard. Regulations required GPWS, so a GPS antenna had been installed in the fleet. It was the only bit of high tech on the otherwise stock Beech Airliner.
The failure rate on checkrides was pretty high. There were a couple of classes where 80 percent were sent packing. My class did pretty well in comparison – a 20 percent washout rate. NDB holds are ridiculous little maneuvers. Doing it while hand-flying a powerful twin takes quite a bit of concentration – and, to be frank, a little good luck. Even Chuck Yeager lost a dogfight every once in a while.
NextGen
The aircraft I currently fly has enough computers that it’s pointless to count. We have an autopilot, autothrottles, vertical navigation, EGPWS, TCAS, FMS – a never-ending cortege of processing power. The flight controls are fly-by-wire. Higher-level logic prevents aerodynamic stalls and will trim the elevator to compensate for the thrust vector of the wing-mounted engines. FADECs keep the engines from exceeding limitations and will abort a start automatically. Oddly, the flight director cannot capture a VOR. If you really need to track one, you have to twist the heading. The message is clear: Why bother with VORs when you have a dual GPS? Use the flight management computer instead. Ground-based NAVAIDs are a dying breed.
Automation ensures compliance with speed limits below 10,000 feet (an altitude that can be adjusted when flying outside of America). The computers are capable of automatically adjusting speed as flaps are extended. It will yell at you if the gear is not down on short final. It will yell at you if you are about to hit terrain. It will yell at you if you are about to hit another aircraft. There are over 100 different annunciations and verbal alerts to draw the pilots’ attention to a risk that needs to be managed.
There is an old saw that the cockpit of the future will be occupied by a pilot and a dog: the pilot to satisfy regulatory requirements; the dog to bite the pilot if they touch anything. The first American in space was a four-year-old chimpanzee named Ham (Ham the Astrochimp if you believe it). He was trained to press a lever when a blue light flashed. If he failed to respond in 5 seconds, he got an electric shock. A correct response was rewarded with a banana pellet. I feel a kinship with Ham.
“Automation is very good at managing certain aspects of flight, but it is lousy at abstracting solutions to unusual events.”
The Upside of Automation
The accident record clearly demonstrates the positive impact that automation has had on safety. Controlled flight into terrain – historically the bane of the broad pilot community – has all but been eliminated as a cause of crashes following the advent of GPWS. Likewise, the probability of aerial collision has decreased in line with the proliferation of TCAS. Automated lighting systems at large airports are helping to eliminate runway incursions as we speak. Fly-by-wire logic is reducing loss-of-control 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 automation dependence will be ingrained into the pilots of tomorrow. The accident record is already testifying to the atrophy of basic flying skills. The company I work for promotes an operational paradox: On one hand, they encourage the use of automation as a means to reduce task saturation. On the other, they encourage pilots to routinely disconnect automation in order to maintain basic flying 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 overload leading to mistakes in task-saturated environments.
A month after I began flying the Caravan, the autopilot failed on a short hop between Hobbs and Carlsbad, 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 moments, 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 manually. I felt a pronounced stab of uncertainty. Five thousand hours of paying attention to thrust and airspeed had atrophied after only three months of relegating the responsibility to automation. I made the decision to fly at least one manual approach every month. If the thing fails in icing conditions over Mexico, I want it to be no big deal.
Automation and Pilot Error
Automation is very good at managing certain aspects of flight, but it is lousy at abstracting solutions to unusual events. Programmers can account for the obvious stuff, but coding automation for one-in-a-million circumstances is infeasible. Humans are still the better solution – particularly when lives are on the line. As a result, complex problems are often relegated to the pilots. System failures in automation are not routine, but with hundreds of millions of flight hours logged every year, they are a reality. Nearly all of them end with a successful landing, such as my benign autopilot failure. Some of them result in harrowing flight crew heroics, but nobody pays attention unless the airplane ends up in the Hudson.
The 737 Max ordeal is an example of the peril of handing over basic flying duties to computers (particularly when pilots are kept in the dark). “What is it doing now?” becomes the new danger. Technology only reduces workload when pilots are competent at interfacing with the devices. A healthy bit of skepticism can be an asset: Disconnecting automation and hand-flying is almost always the best solution when the computers do something unexpected. The ability to disengage automation is quickly becoming an important skill for pilots to master. This sounds simple, but it can be confusing on sophisticated aircraft. My current aircraft has over a dozen different switches dedicated to disengaging the various automated systems and alerts.
Technology is in the midst of a 30-year revolution. The way we com- municate, consume news, complain about politics, and purchase goods has rapidly evolved. Aviation has been no outlier to this trend. Charles Lindbergh has morphed into Star Trek. Automation allows us (at times) to get away with distractions. It is not an excuse to become lazy. The safety of aviation continues to depend on the competence of operators. The importance of a well-trained pilot continues to be vital. When used properly, automation increases safety. When everything is falling apart, the last line of defense remains the human at the controls.