Rebe’s Reviews > The Dangers of Automation in Airliners: Accidents Waiting to Happen > Status Update

“Pilots who bore easily do not make good observers, which these days means they do not make good commercial pilots. Human factors experts are testing for it.” Good idea.

“Then he left the cockpit knowing storm cells where just minutes away.” Where? Really? I’m pained by this book’s editor (did it have an editor?) even as I’m enjoying the content so much.

Fascinating book. The one thing I’d do differently is add more commas in certain places to clarify more complex sentences. Oh, and add a few crash scene photos—so far I haven’t seen any.

2/2 “to do since the very beginning of their flying careers.” How does that happen??

1/2 “Around half of all fatal commercial plane crashes happen between the descent and the landing, making it by far the most dangerous phase of a flight (three times as much as takeoff and the initial climb-out, the second-most dangerous phase). Not all landing-phase crashes occur in bad weather, or even darkness. Some have occurred on gorgeous blue-sky days when pilots failed to execute what they had been trained

This is similar to what I hear about autopilot in cars: if the machine is doing all the work, when it suddenly stops and expects you to take over again, that’s jarring and you’re not going to react immediately because you’re not paying attention the way you would if you’d been driving it yourself. But with planes there’s the added risk of losing your skills through lack of practice thanks to autopilot.

“What if an aircraft manufacturer installs software it believes is making a plane safer, protecting the pilots and passengers, but it appears nowhere in the plane’s manuals?” *eyeing Boeing*

2/2 “they are clueless how to solve it without clear and succinct notification by the plane’s computers.”

2/2 “a pilot must instantly shift from monitor/button-pusher to troubleshooter/problem-solver/flying-ace—and that assumes the pilot has even noticed the warning light. Making that shift… is surprisingly hard to do.”

1/2 “A pilot’s real challenge in modern commercial aviation is pressing the right button at the right time. And… it has got to be the right button every time. No mistakes… Unlike with a modern automated factory, when something goes wrong in the air the operator—the pilot—cannot stop the machinery and investigate. When a plane does something unexpected or a warning light blinks on at 37,000 feet,