SOMERVILLE, Mass. — IN the two weeks since the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, there has been no lack of commentary about the failures and future of piloted aviation — much of it frustratingly ill informed. Planes are already so automated, consensus has it, that it’s only a matter of time before pilots are engineered out of the picture completely. And isn’t the best way to prevent another Andreas Lubitz to replace him with a computer, or a remote pilot, somewhere on the ground? Cue the aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, we are well on our way to a pilotless future.

The problem with this line of thought is that it begins with a false premise: the idea that jetliners today are super-automated machines whose pilots serve merely as backup in case of an emergency. Indeed, the notion of the automatic airplane that “flies itself” is perhaps the most stubborn myth in all of aviation. According to one recent story, pilots on a typical flight spend as little as seven minutes manually piloting their planes. Another story had it at three minutes! Statements like this are highly misleading.

True, these days pilots spend only a short amount of time with their hands on the control column or stick. But that does not mean we aren’t controlling the airplane throughout the entire flight. Our hands might not be steering the airplane directly, as would have been the case in decades past, but almost everything the airplane does is commanded, one way or the other, by the crew. The automation only does what we tell it to do. On the 767 that I fly, there are multiple ways to set up and command any routine climb, descent or change of course. Meanwhile, more than 99 percent of landings, and a full 100 percent of takeoffs, are performed manually.

People might be surprised at how busy a cockpit can become on the most routine flight, even with all of the automation running. There are stretches of low workload during which, to the nonpilot observer, it would seem that very little requires the crew’s attention. But there are also periods of very high workload.