SkyHigh

The debate over the current situation regarding modern airline pilots as computer jockeys is over.

On the Wednesday night episode of the Colbert Report MIT Associate professor and former US Navy fighter pilot DR. Missy Cummings described the current state of commercial passenger travel as "semi autonomous" essentially computer flown planes with pilots monitoring. She also mentioned that in Europe airliners are flown using far more automation. She calls it a "cultural issue" and that we are not "more open to it" in the US. Soon though, I bet.

In reference to airlines in America she said:

"Planes take off every day in America without pilots ever having to touch the controls"

I guess those must be Airbus pilots.

I wonder how long she estimates that it will be before passenger carrying airliners are completely ground controlled? Not long I gathered. Oh yea and she has ties to Boeing. Automation is steadily taking over the plane. A national top expert on automation has declared that it is already here. Debate is over !

Pilot wages are dropping in part because modern planes no not need the same skill level as they did in the past.

Skyhigh

The following has been taken from Wikipedia:

Mary (Missy) Cummings is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the United States Navy's first female fighter pilots.

She is currently the Boeing Associate Professor in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Humans and Automation Lab.

Her research interests include human interaction with autonomous vehicle systems, humans and automation, decision support, human-computer interaction, and the ethical and social impact of technology. She has published papers[1] on the role of human operators in system control loops.

Grumble

Yawn... from a woman with a chip on her shoulder.

I'll worry about the automation genie getting out of his bottle about 20 years after UCAV's and UAV's actually become reliable.

rickair7777

That's the thing...it's cheaper to crash a few UAV's than to make them as reliable and redundant as manned passenger systems (airliner+2 pilots+NAS). The military will never have an economic incentive to solve that problem.

Even taking one pilot out of that airliner system would be hideously expensive, since pilots do become incapacitated on occasion.

DeadHead

Why wait,

‪Air France Crash‬‏ - YouTube

oldveedubs

What's the percentage of automated toll booths?

Elvis90

July 29, 2011, 7:39 a.m. EDT

Air France crash report seeks more pilot training

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- A French civil aviation authority on Friday called for additional pilot training and new rules for how pilots take in-flight breaks after completing analysis of flight recorders recovered off the coast of Brazil from the 2009 Air France crash. The recorders, found in May after several ocean searches, showed pilots need better training for manual flight, including recovery from a stall at high altitude, according to the Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, responsible for investigations into civil aviation accidents. The report also concluded regulatory authorities need define additional criteria for periods when the captain in not in the cockpit to ensure better task sharing among co-pilots. Air France flight 447, and Airbus A330, crashed on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 onboard. Airbus is a unit of Europe's EADS.

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The French gov't believes more training and manual flight, with less automation, would have prevented this mishap. Former NWA pilots have experienced this on the A330 and recovered without incident.

N9373M

Just read a similar article put out by the AP where they mention TWICE that the pilots did not let the pax know what was going on. <FACEPALM>.

DeadHead

Co-Pilot Seat Adjustment Accidently Causes Plane to Plunge a Terrifying 7,000 Feet - ABC News

If we have watered down training to the point where pilots don't even know how to adjust their seats without placing an aircraft into steep unrecoverable nose dive, then we are doing something wrong by pushing the technological envelope.

Pilots are paid to think, not fly an aircraft. If there is one dependable thing about technology, it is that it will fail.

Elvis90

Did some research on Missy Cummings...apparently she washed out of F-18 training twice. After the first washout, she appealed to her Congressman who got the Navy to reinstate her in training, where she washed out a second time. With no doubt she was treated unfairly and discriminated against by the male-dominated Navy fighter community, but her skills were likely part of the problem as well. It would be a logical step for her to try and prove that pilots are irrelevant since she failed to progress in her own community, impediments notwithstanding. I think she attained the rank of Navy O-3.

Quote from a book review on "Hornet's Nest":

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"Although she was blatantly ostracized and verbally harassed (a fact that was later admitted by some members of her unit), a Navy Inspector General (IG) team begrudgingly acknowledged only that Cummings had been "professionally distanced" by the members of her airwing."

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It's hard to be successful if you don't have any friends in your work. My Air Force experience is that women & minorities are given special attention by leadership in order to prevent any appearance of discrimination. Maybe that special attention has been brought on due her experiences among others.

Elvis90

Pilot Errors Outlined in 2009 Air France Crash
By ANGELA CHARLTON and ELAINE GANLEY Associated PressToday, 9:51 AM

The crew piloting a doomed Air France jet over the Atlantic did not realize the plane was in a stall, were insufficiently trained in flying manually, and never informed the passengers that anything was wrong before they plunged into the sea, according to new findings released Friday.

Based on newly discovered cockpit recordings from the 2009 crash, the French air accident investigation agency is recommending mandatory training for all pilots to help them fly planes manually and handle a high-altitude stall.

The findings show that the two co-pilots were facing faulty speed readings from unreliable sensors and repeated alarm signals, but fail to explain why the pilots responded the way they did.

All 228 people were killed when the Airbus 330, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed as thunderstorms hit over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. It was the worst accident in Air France's history.

"The pilots were in a situation they didn't understand," investigator Alain Bouillard told a news conference.

Questions emerged about the relations among the three pilots and how they shared responsibilities in the crucial final moments of the flight.

The French aviation investigation agency, known by its French acronym BEA, is forming a special group, including aviation experts and physiologists and psychologists, to study the pilots' possible responses to help determine why they did what they did.

The passengers were never told what was happening as Flight 447 went into an aerodynamic stall and then fell for 3½ minutes into the ocean, according to the BEA.

"From what we've been told, nobody realized what was going on. On that level, for my mental and moral comfort I am very pleased to hear this, when you know you had two people on board who were dear to you," said Corinne Soulas, whose 24-year-old daughter Caroline and son-in-law were aboard the flight.

The BEA released a 117-report Friday, based on cockpit voice and data recordings retrieved from the ocean depths in May in an exceptionally long and costly search operation. A final report is expected in early 2012.

"We understood how the accident came about. Now we must learn why it came about," Bouillard said.

The report confirms that external speed sensors obstructed by ice crystals produced irregular speed readings on the plane. Since the accident, Air France has replaced the speed monitors on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft.

The BEA says neither of the co-pilots at the controls had received recent training for manual aircraft handling, or had any high-altitude schooling in case of unreliable air speed readings.

A stall warning sounded numerous times, and once for a full 54 seconds, but the crew made no reference to it in cockpit exchanges before the jet crashed, according to the BEA.

"Aircraft have become so reliable that pilots rarely fly the airplane without all the automation helping them. Then when they get into unusual circumstances, the pilots are really in unfamiliar, unknown territory," said John Goglia, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member and an expert on airline safety.

Pilots are required to fly with autopilot above 24,000 feet.

In a statement, Air France said there was currently no reason to question the crew's technical skills. The airline said the report showed that a series of unlikely failures led up to the stall and crash.

The airline also suggested the aircraft's systems and alarms may have "hindered the crew's understanding of the situation" during the stall, in comments possibly intended to shift some blame for the crash away from its pilots and onto the Airbus jet itself.

Bill Voss, head of the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent aviation safety advocate, said it would be a "tragic mistake" to blame this only on Air France and its training procedures.

"This is an industry problem, this accident could have happened as easily in other airlines," he said. "A whole new generation of pilots have never had the chance to train on the real scenarios that will affect them in the real world."

Another recommendation is to make division of labor clearer when the captain is out of the cockpit.

The captain was on a rest break when the warnings began. It's unclear why the co-pilot at the controls, flying manually in what became the final minutes of the flight, maintained a nose-up input — contrary to the normal procedure to come out of an aerodynamic stall. Normally, the nose should be pointed slightly downward to regain lift in such a stall, often caused because the plane is traveling too slowly.

A basic maneuver for stall recovery, which pilots are taught at the outset of their flight training, is to push the yoke forward and apply full throttle to lower the nose of the plane and build up speed.

This procedure, which can cause the aircraft to quickly lose several thousand feet of altitude, can be dangerous if the plane is near the ground. But with AF447 flying at over 35,000 feet, the risk of that would have been negligible.

The pilots may have been misled by erroneous stall warnings, the SNPL French pilots union said.

In a statement focusing the blame on the equipment and not on the pilots, the union said: "Each time they reacted appropriately, the alarm triggered inside the cockpit, as though they were reacting wrongly. Conversely, each time the pilots pitched the plane up, the alarm shut off, preventing a proper diagnosis of the situation."

The BEA's full report noted that Airbus warned pilots in 2008 that incorrect speed readings from the Pitot tubes could cause erroneous stall warnings.

The BEA's Bouillard maintained that the pilots should have paid attention to the stall warnings. "One must always respect a stall alarm," he said.

At 2 hours, 10 minutes and 5 seconds into the overnight flight, the autopilot and then auto-thrust disengaged when the stall warning sounded twice. The co-pilot at the controls nosed the plane up.

A minute and a half later, the captain arrived, and seconds later, "all the recorded speeds became invalid and the stall warning stopped," the summary says.

The recordings end 4 minutes, 23 seconds after the first stall warning.

No announcement was ever made to passengers.

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Slobodan Lekic in Brussels, Joan Lowy in Washington, Masha MacPherson at Le Bourget, and Greg Keller and Cecile Brisson in Paris contributed to this report.