In the wake of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes of Boeing 737 Max planes, people are thinking about how much of their air travel is handled by software and automated systems –as opposed to the friendly pilots sitting in the cockpit.

Older commercial airliners, such as the Beechcraft 1900, which are still in service mostly as small commuter aircraft, often do not have any autopilot installed. By contrast, modern commercial airliners have automated systems that can augment or even replace pilots’ performance, managing engine power, controlling and navigating the aircraft, and in some cases even completing landings.

Investigations are probing the possible role of automated systems in the 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash in Indonesia and the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash in March 2019. Regardless of those findings, the public may not know how much automation already is part of flying today–nor how much more automated commercial flight will become in the years ahead.

Our research has examined consumers’ willingness to interact with automated systems on all types of vehicles, including aircraft. Most recently, we have begun looking into people’s interest in what is being called “urban air mobility.” This concept involves a system of small two- to four-passenger fully autonomous air taxis that could carry passengers on short trips throughout cities without a human pilot on board.

Side effects of highly automated systems

One problem that arises in planes that have highly automated systems is that the pilots can lose track of what’s actually happening. This is presumably what happened in 2009 when Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Airspeed sensors failed, causing the autopilot to turn itself off, but the pilots weren’t able to figure out what was happening or how to recover.

Some experts also believe that a pilot’s lack of awareness was a factor in the 2009 crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, New York. While approaching the landing, pilots may have missed the fact that the plane was slowing down too much, and again didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.

Pilots who spend a lot of time in the cockpits of planes with highly automated systems may also lose some sharpness at flying planes on their own. The average pilot of a Boeing or Airbus commercial plane manually flies the plane for between three and six minutes of the whole flight–mostly around takeoff, the initial climb to about 1,500 feet, and then landing.