Autopilot babies and paint-by-numbers piloting are not new ideas. Back in 1942 a Marine Corps Major wrote about it. People were calling anything past a gentle bank a stunt. We needed pilots to know the full envelope of flight then — and now. You can’t learn this type of flying out of textbooks … It seems rather silly to be …
Tag: autopilot
Fully Automatic?
Guess what year this newspaper article was published: 1946? 1976? 1996? 2016? Answer: Rain, Fog, Snow! Future Airliner to Go Right Thru: Automatic Devices Will Handle It. Chicago Daily Tribune. 6 June 1946. Yep! 1946. And the next year Time magazine reported on a military aircraft flying from Newfoundland to England under the control of an autopilot programmed on punched …
Your Job Is
“If you want to fly as [traditional pilots] say they do, then go fly gliders, become test pilots, for all I care go to the moon. But flying for the airlines is not supposed to be an adventure. From takeoff to landing, the autopilots handle the controls. This is routine. In a Boeing as much as an Airbus. And they …
Isn’t It Ironic, Don’t You Think
Thirty-five years ago a paper was presented at a conference, titled Ironies of Automation, by Lisanne Bainbridge. It included many insightful ideas: The designer’s view of the human operator may be that the operator is unreliable and inefficient… so should be eliminated from the system. There are two ironies of this attitude. One is that designer errors can be a …
Do Not Become Lazy
Automation complacency, and the need to stay proficient in manual flying are not new ideas. Fifty years ago the chief test pilot of the UK airworthiness authority warned us, in his (clearly) still relevant book Handling the Big Jets. The full quote, from page 316, is: “Do not become lazy in your professional lives. The autopilot is a great comfort, …