News Section | Physics
Airline pilots’ ‘automation addiction’ making them forget how to fly
Airline pilots are “forgetting how to fly” due to becoming excessively reliant on cockpit computers, aviation experts have warned.
A draft study found pilots can “abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems” resulting in significantly weaker flying skills.
Both airlines and regulators commonly discourage or even prohibit pilots from turning off their aircraft’s autopilot.
The result has left pilots with significantly less opportunities to maintain their flying proficiency by flying manually.
Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) advisory committee on pilot training, yesterday described the airline industry as suffering from “automation addiction”.
“We”re seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.
“We”re forgetting how to fly,” he added.
The FAA study examined 46 accidents and major incidents, 734 voluntary reports by pilots as well as data from more than 9,000 flights in which a safety official had ridden in the cockpit to observe pilots in action.
It found that in more than 60 per cent of accidents, and 30 per cent of major incidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or made mistakes with automated flight controls.
The research showed increasing pilot errors included not recognising that either the autopilot or the auto-throttle – which controls power to the engines – had disconnected.
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