Come fly with me (Image: Nasowas/Getty Images)

Who’s flying your plane? Pilots’ manual flying skills have become dangerously eroded because they rely too much on automated systems. That’s one conclusion of a leaked report on air safety commissioned by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Based on voluntary incident reports from concerned pilots, crash data and evidence from cockpit observers on more than 9000 flights, the report found that some pilots were “reluctant to intervene” with automated systems or to switch them off in risky situations. Poor training and lack of manual flight experience, it says, meant some pilots had neither the knowledge to keep up to date with changes to automated systems nor the manual skills to take over when flight computers malfunction.

The findings may help explain a spate of recent accidents in which Colgan Air, Air France and Asiana Airlines planes crashed after crews failed to maintain a basic aerodynamic requirement: adequate airspeed to stay airborne.


Technology dependence

The automated systems at issue span the whole gamut of computerised flight aids, including autopilot and automatic control of speed and landing, which save the pilot work that computers are supposedly better at.

Cockpit computers also run safety checks that ensure, for instance, that the plane’s wing always bites into the airflow at the right lift-producing angle.

But the FAA report found that pilots can get “addicted” to the automation – and that that dependence must be combated with fresh training. One reason is that trouble can arise when pilots believe flight parameters are being automatically maintained when, for some reason, they are not.

Fatal stall

In the Asiana crash in San Francisco in July, for instance, the pilots thought the autothrottle was engaged when it wasn’t – so airspeed decreased, leading to a fatal stall.

Reverting to manual flight decks would be unwise, says Mary Cummings, a former US navy pilot who researches aircraft and drone automation engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The take-home message for passengers is that advanced automation has made flying significantly safer so we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she says.

“Pilot training programmes can be improved, but probably the biggest practical change that needs to be made is ensuring that the automation itself is highly reliable.”