Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [70]
Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?
The Airbus A320, the aircraft we were flying as Flight 1549, has a fly-by-wire system, which in essence means the flight controls are moved by sending electrical impulses, rather than having a direct mechanical link between the control stick in the cockpit and the control surfaces on the wings and tail. The fly-by-wire system keeps you from exceeding predetermined values, such as the degree of pitch (how low or high the plane’s nose can be versus the horizon), the bank angle (how steep a turn you can make), and how fast or slow you can go.
Dr. Wiener worried, and I agree, that the paradox of automation is that it often lowers a pilot’s workload when that load is already low. And it sometimes increases the workload in the cockpit when it is already high.
Take, for instance, a last-minute runway change. In the old days, you could easily tune your radio navigation receiver to the frequency for the approach to the different runway. Now it might take ten or twelve presses of buttons on the computer to arrange for a runway change.
For those who believe technology is the answer to everything, Dr. Wiener would offer data to prove that isn’t the case. He said that automated airplanes with the highest technologies do not eliminate errors. They change the nature of the errors that are made. For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely. Consider American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757 flying from Miami to Cali, Colombia, on December 20, 1995. Because two different waypoints (defined points along a flight path) were given the same name and the flight management computer displayed the nearer one as the second choice of the two, the pilots mistakenly selected the more distant one, putting the plane on a collision course with a mountain. Just 4 of the 163 people on the plane survived.
Dr. Wiener is not antitechnology, and neither am I. But technology is no substitute for experience, skill, and judgment.
ONE THING that has always helped make the airline industry strong and safe is the concept that pilots call “captain’s authority.” What that means is we have a measure of autonomy—the ability to make an independent, professional judgment within the framework of professional standards.
The problem today is that pilots are viewed differently. Over the years, we’ve lost a good deal of respect from our management, our fellow employees, the general public. The whole concept of being a pilot has been diminished, and I worry that safety can be compromised as a result. People used to say that airline pilots were one step below astronauts. Now the joke is: We’re one step above bus drivers, but bus drivers have better pensions.
Airline managers seem to second-guess us more often now. There are more challenges. Thirty years ago, it would be unheard of for a mechanic or ramp worker to vociferously disagree with a captain. Now it happens.
I know that some captains don’t represent the best of us. There may be circumstances and times when it is appropriate to challenge a captain. But sometimes we are questioned because others in the airline system want the operation to go more smoothly or be more timely or less costly.
There was a scene in the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can that made me think. Set in the 1960s, and based on a true story, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio