About Air France 447, but it shows how quickly chaos could overtake the cockpit of a plane. The transcript is horrible in its confusion. But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplanes avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of whats going on. Theyll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which cant be trusted? Whats the most pressing threat? Whats going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:09:09 +0000
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