Avionics News March 2012 - 65

Air France Flight 447 will be a “turning point” in this debate, according to Bill Voss, Flight Safety Foundation president and CEO. “The dirty little secret pilots keep is flying is really easy and fun,” he said. “Flying an airliner is so easy it’s boring. The mental work is what’s missing,” he added, noting the bigger issue is “how to engage the pilot with the aircraft again.” For its part, Air France seems to agree. In a July 29, 2011, press release, the airline maintained, “It is important to understand whether the technical environment, systems and alarms hindered the crew’s understanding of the situation.” Specifically, the airline said at the time, “It should be noted that the misleading stopping and starting of the stall warning alarm, contradicting the actual state of the aircraft, greatly contributed to the crew’s difficulty in analyzing the situation.” Automation is here to stay, because humans can’t fly with the necessary precision and reliability demanded by the increasingly tight economics of airline operations and the congested en route and terminal airspace they must use. For Voss, the challenge is how to force engagement of the flightcrew with the airplane and its systems when the airplane and its sys-

tems are specifically designed to need little from the flightcrew but monitoring. How do pilots mentally stay with the aircraft? “This is the moment in history when we lose that innocence and confront the notion that we have to build something into the job to make it possible for the pilots to stay engaged,” Voss concluded. “The really big question for avionics manufacturers is ‘What can we build that requires some engagement’” by the flightcrew to ensure they remain in the human/machine loop. Answers to that question will involve not only avionics companies, but also airframe manufacturers, certifying authorities and pilot organizations. Thus, the lesson AFR447 teaches avionics manufacturers is not that their products have gone too far toward removing people from being engaged in the aircraft’s operation. Instead, the natural evolution of cockpit automation and avionics systems must now be taken to its next logical level: ensuring flightcrew engagement at all times and helping humans understand what to do and when to do it as aircraft performance expectations aren’t met. Crafting the means to meet this challenge won’t be easy or immediate, but it will and must happen. q

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Avionics News March 2012

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