Air travel’s lethal days are, mercifully, behind us. Flying is safe now, and pretty much everyone involved in the aviation business believes that advances in automation are one of the reasons why. Together with improvements in aircraft design, airline safety routines, crew training, and air traffic control, the mechanization and computerization of flight have contributed to the sharp and steady decline in accidents and deaths over the decades. In the United States and other Western countries, fatal airliner crashes have become exceedingly rare. Of the more than seven billion people who boarded U.S. commercial flights in the ten years from 2002 through 2011, only 153 ended up dying in a wreck, a rate of two deaths for every million passengers. In the ten years from 1962 through 1971, by contrast, 1.3 billion people took flights, and 1,696 of them died, for a rate of 133 deaths per million.17 But this sunny story carries a dark footnote. The overall decline in the number of plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,” says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and one of the world’s leading authorities on automation. When onboard computer systems fail to work as intended or other unexpected problems arise during a flight, pilots are forced to take manual control of the plane. Thrust abruptly into a now rare role, they too often make mistakes. The consequences, as the Continental Connection and Air France disasters show, can be catastrophic. Over the last thirty years, dozens of psychologists, engineers, and ergonomics, or “human factors,” researchers have studied what’s gained and lost when pilots share the work of flying with software. They’ve learned that a heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew”.
Automation of processes have, for the most part, enabled the betterment of our lives and made many painful tasks easier. However, we now have to consider “deskilling” as an inevitable consequence of automation, where humans would get worst at certain tasks, like flying in the instance of this excerpt.
Relying on computer systems might not be a bad thing. It is only when the system fails and perhaps more input is required from humans where things begin to unravel.
