Newsgroups: sci.aeronautics.airliners Path: news From: rdd@cactus.org (Robert Dorsett) Subject: New Scientist article X-Submission-Date: Mon, 7 Dec 92 20:19:54 CST Message-ID: Approved: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM X-Submission-Message-Id: <9212080219.AA19173@cactus.org> Sender: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM Date: 08 Dec 92 15:51:04 PST In article nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writ es: >>Remember that the standard definition of an airline pilot's job is 99.999% >>pute boredom, and 0.001% pure terror (I forget where this quote came from, >>and the ratios may be incorrect) - if this is anything like true, maybe >>human pilots really are on the edge of extinction ? > > _New Scientist_ had an article devoted to this about 3 issues ago. > > Basically they said that as the % of "pilot error" crashes increases > we may already be at the point where more lives would be saved by > pilotless airplanes. I looked through recent issues of _New Scientist_, seeking the article Peter referred to. It appears to be a 2-page essay from the October 17 issue, entitled "Will Accidents Always Happen?" The author of the article, Julian Moxon, has written for FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL for a number of years: his specialty appears to be safety; he's produced a number of good, comprehensive summaries and analyses of various crashes. Peter's comment seemed to suggest Moxon was advocating pilotless aircraft; in the context of previous post, I construed this as along the lines of Bernard Ziegler's "The computer can do it better" rhetoric, and reacted accordingly. :-) Moxon's point, however, is a bit more, well, integrated, and, if anything, far more ambitious. It's less an attack against *pilots*, per se, which has characterized Ziegler's remarks, but more a criticism of the ATC system. His basic point is that most crashes are landing crashes, controlled-flight-into-terrain. Some are caused by ATC malfeasance, some are interface problems. From the concluding remarks: "More worrying is that the skies are becoming increasingly congested, with predictions (despite the recession) of a doubling in air traffic movements over the coming decade. This puts extra pressure on the whole air transport system, not least on the pilots and air traffic controllers in the front line. In general, the system is (or will be) good enough to handle the extra traffic but--the statistics suggest--probably not good enough to prevent crashes like that in Kathmandu. It is as if we have arrived at the bare minimum of accidents. The challenge will be to maintain this minimum, given denser air traffic. "An inevitable question being asked in an increasingly automated world is whether we still need pilots. In many modern aircraft, the entire flight apart from the takeoff can handled by the autopilot, once programmed. But for obvious reasons, this is an emotive subject, which aircraft manufacturers carefully avoid in their official statements. Still, some designers are beginning to think seriously about the possibilities of making the flight crew's role more to do with systems management than flying the aircraft. "This would make the pilot part of a team including the entire air traffic system. Direct communication with the aircraft and its systems would be established by a radio-borne digital data link. This would send information on the aircraft's behavior to the ground and receive navigation data and commands that could be fed directly into its flight management system. Global positioning satellites would meanwhile observe it constantly. "Pilots worry that this would reduce them to little more than highly paid observers monitoring the aircraft's progress through the skies. But that time is a long way off. In the meantime, the focus remains on the behavior of the human brain." Those interested in a more extreme version of this would enjoy David Learmount's interview with Bernard Ziegler, in Flight International, September 23-29, 1992, Pp. 35-36. Ziegler is sort of Airbus's chief priest. --- Robert Dorsett rdd@cactus.org ...cs.utexas.edu!cactus.org!rdd