In the news today, living and dying

By Dave English

Two big news stories today. One sad one happy. Both involve unique planes and expert pilots that I’ve flown with a few times. The sad one first:

Man Killed in Plane Crash at Covington Airport was Avid Pilot

I flew with Lance Hooley several times in the A320, about 14 years ago, when I was a first officer at the airline we both work at. Worked at I should say, in Lance’s case. That’s hard to write. He was an engaging intelligent pilot. Talked with him last just a few months ago, on a jetbridge taking a jet he had flown in. Yesterday he was flying from Chicago in a super cool homebuilt jet, one that’s been featured in several magazines and online profiles, including this recent cover story:

Looks like he crashed 2,000 feet from the Covington Municipal Airport in Tennessee. A homebuilt jet is far away from a Cessna 150, but Lance was no aviation dilettante. He soloed at age 16 back in 1976, joined the USAF, was a long-time A320 captain, and had built and flown several canard planes. He leaves behind a wife.

The other story is happy. It involves a super cool plane as well, the Perlan II glider. They got to 76,124 feet pressure altitude (74,295 feet GPS altitude) over the mountains of Argentina today. World record. That’s higher than Concorde and U2 flights. In a dang glider!

https://twitter.com/PerlanProject/status/1036343093895811073

I’ve flown with Tim Gardner several times in both ASK-21 and Duo Discus gliders at the Minden, Nevada, airport. Always a pleasure. Learnt a lot about high-performance sailplanes, and reading the clouds. Where I looked out and saw mountains and lakes and clouds — he saw the wind. Try ten left he’d say, and soon we’d start climbing again. That’s Tim getting out the back seat today:

So two pilots. Both competent and experienced, trained and tested many times in the past. Two truly one-of-a-kind airplanes, both very cool and flown successfully many times. Two very different days.

One broke a high altitude record. One tied the low altitude record.

For me, its a way-too-close-and-personal reminder of the rewards and the dangers in flying. Especially flying special aircraft. I have nothing insightful to share, no special words of wisdom. But please enjoy the highs (even if they are less than 76,000 feet) and be very considerate of the dangers. We are risk managers. And what we do as risk managers is important.

I look forward to flying with Tim again. I already miss flying with Lance. Would I fly in a one-of-a-kind jet canard homebuilt? Don’t know. But where, how, do we draw the line?

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think

By Dave English

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 major source of operating problems… The second irony is that the designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator to do the tasks which the designer cannot think how to automate…it means that the operator can be left with an arbitrary collection of tasks, and little thought may have been given to providing support for them.

Physical skills deteriorate when they are not used, particularly the refinements of gain and timing. This means that a formerly experienced operator who has been monitoring an automated process may now be an inexperienced one. If he takes over he may set the process into oscillation…

When manual takeover is needed there is likely to be something wrong with the process, so that unusual actions will be needed to control it, and one can argue that the operator needs to be more rather than less skilled, and less rather than more loaded, than average…

If the human operator is not involved in on-line control he will not have detailed knowledge of the current state of the system. One can ask what limitations this places on the possibility for effective manual takeover, whether for stabilization or shutdown of the process, or for fault diagnosis…

Perhaps the final irony is that it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training.

Driving my new Tesla Model 3 in autopilot mode brings all these ideas to the immediate now. When the automated steering dings and gives up, I have to take over right now, mind 0 to 60, and do something a bit tricky. Lanes merging, lines obscured, or somesuch.

It’s clearly the same in flying. Manual takeover when the automation can’t handle something is very different than happily knowing and agreeing with what’s happening and clicking off the autopilot at your choosing. I wonder if we train enough for the unhappy unchosen manual interventions?

Other than the repeated instructions to hand-fly more, what else can we do as pilots to avoid the ironies of automation?

 

BONUS SING-ALONG SECTION:

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
“Well isn’t this nice…”
And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think

Ironic
Alanis Morissette, 1996

The ironies of automation paper is much older than the Alanis Morissette song. Both are still talked about today. Like this paper: The ironies of automation … still going strong at 30? And the ongoing debate about how ironic her lyrics were: Alanis Morissette recognizes it’s not ironic.

With the automagic off, are you confident?

By Dave English

With autopilot, autothrottles, flight directors, GPS off — are you practised enough?  Really ready?  Comfortable?

Many experts aren’t sure we are. The accident data is worrying. One test-pilot and astronaut with 60-years of flying experience has spoken out about the adverse side effects of automation. He’s noted that Apollo astronauts practised every procedure with and without automation.

“We felt comfortable in our spacecraft, capable of flying them when the automatics failed and confident of returning home. This preparation paid dividends for Apollo 13.”

“Pilots must be confident operating automated aircraft and capable to defer to their hands-on flying skills”

Jim Lovell
Commander Apollo 13

Notice the word he used twice: Confident. Not just OK, or ready, or fine, or proficient — but confident. Are you? The fix is simple, be like an Apollo astronaut, practise every procedure with and without automation.

Am I fully confident? Let’s just say, I’m going to be flying more this week with the Airbus automagic in the Oscar Fox Fox configuration.

Jim Lovell descends from the Command Module simulator at KSC. After maybe doing some autopilot-off work? NASA photo, dated 7 April 1970. Lovell quote from Aerospace, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, June 2015.

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