On the Boeing I fly, I can set up an automatic climb or descent in any of about seven different ways, depending on what’s needed. It needs to be instructed when, where, and how to perform its tasks. The automation only does what we tell it to do. Our hands might not be steering the airplane directly, as would have been the case in the 1930s, but almost everything the airplane does is commanded, one way or the other, by the pilots. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use the technology.”Īnd what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean anyway? Contrary to what people are led to believe, flying remains very hands-on operation, with tremendous amounts of input from the crew. “But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. “Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology,” wrote the surgeon and author Atul Gawande in a 2011 issue of The New Yorker. It has vastly improved their capabilities, and certain tasks have been simplified, but a plane can no more “fly itself” than a modern operating room can perform an organ transplant “by itself.” Essentially, high-tech cockpit equipment assists pilots in the way that high-tech medical equipment assists physicians and surgeons. The best analogy, I think, is one that compares flying to medicine. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology. Cue yet another aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, without a doubt, a pilotless future is just around the corner. Reporters, most of whom have limited background knowledge of the topic, have a bad habit of taking at face value the claims of researchers and academics who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the day-to-day operational realities of commercial flying.

Airbus pilots, the story continued, spend even less time at the controls.Ĭonfident assertions like these appear in the media all the time, to the point where they’re taken for granted. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times not long ago, you would have read how Boeing pilots spend “just seven minutes” piloting their planes during a typical flight. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn’t know better, and would allow such a statement to be published, shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn’t just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. That’s about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot’s job I’ve ever heard. Indeed, the notion of the automatic airplane that “essentially flies itself” is perhaps the most aggravating and stubborn myth in all of aviation.įor example, in a 2012 Wired magazine story on robotics, a reporter had this to say: “A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot, just in case.” The biggest problem with this line of thought is that it begins with a false premise: the idea that jetliners are superautomated machines, with pilots on hand merely to play a backup role in case of trouble. You’ve heard it a million times: modern aircraft are flown by computer, and in some not-too-distant future, pilots will be engineered out of the picture altogether.

Commercial plane cockpit