You can’t go far in today’s modern world, brimming with screens and input devices (known in the human factors world as “attention attractors”) without witnessing an individual or group engaged in what many of us would call inappropriate use of attention resources. Involving distracted driving alone, the National Safety Council in 2010 reported over a …
One of the most debated aspects of contemporary airmanship is how often and under what conditions should pilots be expected to “hand-fly” their aircraft when so much of the technology on the modern flight deck is designed to control the flight path through automatic channels. Over the course of two decades, the industry has gone …
On the cover of the July 15, 2013 issue of the leading industry trade journal, Aviation Week and Space Technology, I was surprised to read the headline, “Asiana 214: Has Automation Trumped Airmanship?” It not only prompted me to write a letter to the editors but also inspired this blog entry. For the editors and …
When we wrote Automation Airmanship® in the years from 2008 to 2013, we were constantly reminded of the rapid pace of change associated with contemporary aviation, as well as every high-risk/high-reliability endeavor. The book we began writing in 2008 was not the book we published in 2013: too much had changed since 2008 involving advanced …