Advanced Automation

March 2019

Filippo Capuano Captain

B777 (Retired)
www.filippocapuano.eu

Glass Cockpit (Courtesy of Boeing)

Discussing automation today may seem outdated. Technology has

penetrated everyday life and it is increasingly difficult to do without it.
Scholars and experts often praise it. However, it cannot be excluded that the
relationship between man and the machines he builds becomes increasingly
risky, especially in very advanced sectors of industry. Some major disasters,
not only aeronautical, have had as their main cause and often as a
contributing factor the relationship between man and automation.
Technology is at the service of man, but to be able to be so it must have
friendly characteristics and be replaceable at any time by human action. In
recent years the aviation industry has manufactured increasingly
sophisticated aircraft. The Fly-By-Wire technology has now definitively
replaced the older construction techniques and flight controls are no longer
operated by cables. The dozens of instruments that used to crowd the
cockpit have been replaced by a cockpit architecture where information is
transmitted through a few monitors.

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The economic advantages deriving from this approach are numerous. The
advantages are not merely related to the reduction of fuel consumption,
which has always been a conspicuous item in the budget of the airlines, but
also to other aspects, and especially to pilot training. Up to a few decades
ago, a pilot needed at least four months training to learn how to fly a Boeing
707. Today, thanks to advanced technology, a pilot can complete the
simulator training of a B777 in as little as ten days. Without a doubt, this
represents a significant saving. At first glance, therefore, it would seem that
automation only provides unquestionable advantages.
Unfortunately, aeronautical, railway, and nuclear power plant accidents
have proved and continue to prove how those same savings achieved by the
application of powerful computer programs are paid for at a high cost.
Disasters such as the ones involving an A310 in Kathmandu (Nepal, 1992), or
a B757 in Calì (Colombia, 1995), or of Airbus 320 in Strasbourg-Entzheim
(France, 1992) were only among the first accidents to witness the change in
construction techniques and piloting methods.
The incidents and accidents that have occurred since then, which have often
hastily been filed as “pilots' errors”, and more recently those that affected
the B737 Max, call for an increased awareness of how advanced automation
can become a formidable enemy and a safety problem that can leave no way
out. Electronics are able to replace the pilot, driving him away from the
cockpit. Experienced and trained pilots who are familiar with the
surrounding environment have made apparently trivial but incredibly
macroscopic errors which they would hardly have committed in traditional
cockpits.
Automation has generated a new type of accident, thus determining the
need to further define the strong relationship between man and manmade
technology. Piloting Fly-By-Wire and Glass Cockpit aircraft means learning
and applying a new flight method, shifting from a so-called active piloting
role – which is carrying out a continuous control on dozens of parameters
allows to determine the necessary choices for the continuation of the flight
– to an almost passive one, more similar to a programmer and supervisor of
fully automatic systems, where cutting-edge technology determines the
necessary choices.
While on the one hand the pilot of a conventional aircraft decides the action
and acts on the controls according to a pilot-control-aircraft formula, on the
other hand, the pilot finds himself having to monitor the correspondence
between the previously programmed or required action and the action
actually performed by the aircraft, according to a pilot-autoflight system-
control-aircraft formula. The autoflight system is a cluster of hardware and
software that uses a complex set of subsystems mostly unknown and
invisible to pilots.

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Compared to a conventional aircraft that provides immediate and visible
response to the action being commanded and where everything is in the
foreground, the Fly-By-Wire and Glass Cockpit aircraft encourages pilots to
monitor and supervise planned actions. Surveillance is carried out through
the glass cockpit screens and a man-machine-man coded language that
shows the state of the art or the programmed change.
Construction features and soundproofing make the perception of aircraft
movement in space less immediate. If the aircraft's glass cockpit has reduced
training times, on the other hand it has highlighted the need to learn a
mental model of behavior for which no training is enough and where only
adequate time is spent on the plane can help, and certainly not resolve, the
issue of adapting to a new or different piloting mental approach.
In the glass cockpit aircraft, some of the pilot's own qualities, those same
skills that have always been consolidated, are forcefully called into question
by advanced automation, which may appear as docile and controllable, but
actually involves dangerous and unexpected implications. Flying with a Fly-
By-Wire aircraft requires the pilot’s behavioral and mental process to fully
take into account that the controls, buttons, levers and knobs, are program
activators and process switches. It requires full understanding of the fact
that the cockpit architecture, however simple in its presentation, actually
hides complex engineering solutions that obey unknown logics which are not
written on the flight manuals available to pilots. It means believing that a
computer can correctly detect and diagnose a failure and suggest the most
appropriate actions for its resolution.
Electronics have allowed aviation to reach fantastic and unimaginable
automation levels. It is thanks to automation that it has been possible to
design flight profiles within which the airplane protects itself from
overcoming fundamental flight parameters, such as attitude, low and high
speed, excessive turning angles. However, advanced the automation is and
will remain artificial intelligence. What you see on the glass cockpit screens
needs to be accompanied by a good dose of distrust. When automation does
not respond as expected, the pilot risks falling into a confused and
disorientated state from which he can only detach and resume governing
the plane by applying basic piloting skills, provided that automation allows
it. Otherwise it's a disaster.