Mossie Fly
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2021–2026
25:33 · 176K views · May 27, 2019
A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.
HN brings it up in any thread about autopilot, Tesla FSD, self-driving cars and crashes as the classic lecture on automation dependency.
20 comments from Hacker News
"The thing that stands out here the most is the complete lack of control that the crew had over the plane. The crew was managing the computers rather than flying the aircraft ." Perhaps they are "Children of the Magenta": this video ... and I cannot recommend this video enough. I am not a pilot and I have no interest in flying nor any particular interest in aviation, generally ... and I find this talk to be fascinating . EDIT: you can jump to 3:35 where he gives a specific example of a situation where pilots need to choose between automation dependency and dropping down a level of automation. He's a really good speaker and you can tell the audience is very engaged.
I think this lecture ( this video ) should be mandatory for anyone trying to improve flight safety with more automation. I think we're already at diminishing returns, and the only way to eliminate accidents caused by over-reliance on automated systems is to cut the pilot out of the loop entirely. Even in general aviation, the low-hanging fruit is elsewhere. That said, this is still pretty cool, and I could see something like it being one component of a much larger fully automated flight management system. Edit: link should be fixed. If I'm still crushing it, the title of the lecture is "Children of the Magenta Line."
Sounds like Colonel Del Pizzo let himself become a child of the magenta line[1]. (if you haven't seen this amazing talk, you should definitely give it a watch) [1] this video
Bainbridge [1] is interesting, but dated. A more useful version of that discussion from slightly later is "Children of the Magenta", [2] an airline chief pilot talking to his pilots about cockpit automation and how to use it. Requires a basic notion of aviation jargon. There's been progress since then. Although the details are not widely publicized, enough pilots of the F-22, F-35, or the Gripen have talked about what modern fighter cockpit automation is like. The real job of fighter pilots is to fight and win battles, not drive the airplane. A huge amount of effort has been put into simplifying the airplane driving job so the pilot can focus on killing targets. The general idea today is that the pilot puts the pointy end in the right direction and the control systems take care of the details. An F-22 pilot has been quoted as saying that the F-22 is far less fussy than a Cessna as a flying machine. For the F-35, which has a VTOL configuration (B) and a carrier-landing configuration (C), much effort was put into making VTOL landing and carrier landing easy. Not because pilots can't learn to do it, but because training tended to obsess on those tasks. The hard part of Harrier (the only previous successful VTOL fighter) was learning to land the unstable beast without crashing. There were still a lot of Harrier crashes. The hard part of Naval aviator training is landing on a carrier deck. Neither of these tasks has anything to do with the real job of taking a bite out of the enem
There are numerous past examples of this sort of thing. Automation in aviation is really hard to get right. If the automation can fail then the pilots need to be able to perform whatever it was going to do. If the automation fails rarely then the pilots may not get enough practice. But if the automation normally does a better job than the pilots, there’s a tension with letting them get more practice on real flights. A recent(ish) example is the Asiana crash in SF. They had pretty much perfect conditions for a hand-flown visual approach, but they were out of practice, got behind the airplane, and it snowballed. There’s an excellent lecture about this called Children of the Magenta Line. The magenta line being the flight path or direction indicator on an autopilot, and the discussion is about pilots who constantly reconfigure the autopilot to direct the plane instead of just taking over. this video