ONE day in the not too distant future, so the hoary old story goes, airliners will have only two crew members on the flight deck—a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job will be to feed the dog. The dog’s job will be to bite the pilot if he touches the controls. Despite all the talk about drone-like autonomous passenger planes, cockpit automation is nowhere near capable enough to manage without human pilots on the flight deck. It is doubtful whether the technology—at least, as it is currently configured—will ever let that happen. In theory, modern passenger planes fitted with the latest cockpit automation can fly themselves from take-off to landing. In practice, pilots have to be very much in the loop, ready to intervene (“pick up the slack,” as they say) when flight plans suddenly change, or one or other of the plane's automated systems starts functioning in a reduced operating mode, contributing to the so-called "minimum equipment list". The flight crew then becomes extremely busy. A growing body of evidence indicates that while cockpit automation may be relieving pilots of mundane chores when their workload is actually low (ie, while climbing to altitude and cruising), it is causing bigger headaches than ever when the workload is particularly high (ie, during take-off, descent, approach and landing). Aircrew call it the “automation paradox”. Overall, cockpit automation has been a boon—at least for airlines. It saves fuel, helps with maintenance, reduces the number of crew needed on the flight deck and cuts their training time. To some extent, it also makes it easier for pilots to qualify on other aircraft types, though there are significant differences in control philosophies between Airbus and Boeing.

That aside, the over-arching problem with cockpit automation stems from the way it has been implemented—with flight crew relegated from their traditional role of physically flying the aircraft to becoming essentially systems supervisors. Unquestionably, this has taken its toll on their “stick-and-rudder” skills. Instead of flying their planes, flight crew now spend most of their time in the air programming and monitoring various pieces of equipment (a typical airliner has around 90 automated systems on board), inputting data and checking that everything is working correctly.

Many of today’s younger pilots (especially in the rapidly expanding markets of Asia and the Middle East) have had little opportunity to hone their airmanship in air forces, general aviation or local flying clubs, allowing them to amass long hours of hand-flying various aircraft in all sorts of weather conditions and emergencies. As a result, the tendency among pilots today is to trust a plane’s automation more than their own skill and judgment.

Pilots with Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III’s background are becoming the exception rather than the rule. Captain Sullenberger, readers will recall, carefully ditched his Airbus A320 close to a jetty in the Hudson River in January 2009 without loss of a single life, after the plane had been disabled by a flock of geese while climbing out of LaGuardia airport. It should be pointed out that Sully learned to fly at the age of 16, flew F-4 Phantoms in the air force, and had 40 years and 20,000 hours of mostly hands-on experience when he performed his heroics on the Hudson.

The problem today is that aircrew may log thousands of hours on the flight decks of modern airliners, but their actual hands-on flying experience may amount to mere minutes per flight. When things get frantic—whether through a mistaken input or a sudden runway change by air-traffic control during descent—aircrew can be so preoccupied punching fresh instructions into the flight-management computer that they may fail to notice their airspeed and altitude are falling precipitously.

This reduction in situation awareness, along with the degradation of basic piloting skills and a huge increase in cognitive workload on flight crew are all part of the unintended consequences of cockpit automation. Combined, such human factors can quickly lead to disaster.

America’s two recent fatal air crashes—the Asiana Boeing 777 passenger jet on final approach into San Francisco international airport on July 6th and the United Parcel Service Airbus A300 freighter coming into land at Birmingham airport in Alabama on August 14th—are cases in point. Though investigations have barely begun, both situations point to distractions the pilots faced while trying to take control of the aircraft. In both instances, the pilots seem to have been unaware, until the last few minutes, of their proximity to the ground and of how slowly their planes were flying. Both finished up crashing short of the runway.

In both instances, federal investigators have found little evidence of equipment failure before the crash. They are now focusing more on how the pilots were trained. Babbage was recently shown a training report by a now-retired “standards captain” at United Airways, who had spent five years in Seoul instructing Asiana and Korean Air Lines crew. The account is not for squeamish passengers. The instructor describes how, when checking out even experienced crew, asking them to make a visual approach (ie, using basic head-up flying skills) for a landing “would strike fear into their hearts”—so dependent had they become on the head-down operation of their automated equipment.

It is not hard to see why. Over the past couple of decades, cockpits have evolved beyond recognition. Not only has automation taken over many of the piloting functions, but the way flight information is presented is now vastly different. Out have gone practically all the old analogue dials and gauges that festooned instrument panels on aircraft flight decks—to the left, right, centre, above, below and even behind the pilot. In their place have come a mere handful of liquid-crystal displays that can be made to show all manner of digital flight data.

While this may appear to simplify matters, so-called “glass cockpits” can literally overwhelm pilots by concentrating so much information in a single display, instead of spreading it around dozens of familiar locations within the cockpit. Unlike analogue gauges, the information being displayed on digital screens usually has to share screen space with other data, and not all of it can be displayed at once.

Today's pilots have to know not only what flight information is needed at any given time, but how to find it in the system in order to punch it up on a screen. Having done so, they then have to understand what is being displayed and, more importantly, what is not. Little wonder airline pilots these days spend most of their time head-down, manning the displays and keying numbers into the automated systems, rather than watching what is going on around them—on the instrument panel and through the windscreen.

What can be done to reduce this cognitive overload on pilots? If anywhere, the place to start is the interface between the pilot and the machine.

A better interface design would allow pilots to choose the level of automation they felt most comfortable with—depending on their ability, their experience of the aircraft type and its systems, and the ambient conditions prevailing. If circumstances required the aircraft to be flown by hand and the throttles operated manually, so be it. In short, instead of being fixed in the way it responds to inputs from the crew, cockpit automation ought to be adaptive.

Meanwhile, there are no excuses for permitting pilots to go long periods without performing manual take-offs, departures, approaches and landings—with or without the use of auto-throttles. Also, it needs to be drilled into flight crew that, at low altitude, they really must be in the loop with their hands and feet on the controls at all time, feeling the plane's reactions as it executes its programmed manoeuvres. And if, as Aviation Week pointed out recently, pilots are not sure what the automation is doing at any point, their instinctive reaction should be to turn it off immediately and fly the aircraft by hand.

Why so many airline pilots seem content these days to let the automated systems do so much of the flying for them is a little baffling. After all, taking off and landing manually are the only fun things left for commerical pilots to do. Sully would be saddened.