Originally Posted by
safetypee
Reluctance to 'click click', 'my plane'; the difficulty is in identifying the need to act, that some situations require a change of action.Pilots must consider the 'AP's perception', requires working knowledge, limitations, awareness.
There are two things, and I’m not catching on if we agree or disagree. First, the identification of a need to act, and second, the ready base of skill to fly the plane, if the need happens to be for that. And I think the reluctance comes from an interplay of both. The skills have to be there, hard-baked to a point of casual ease; as I said in another post, if you’re unwilling to use the skills, it’s kind of the same as not having them. So the yearly sim (or maybe several-times-per-yearly, easy VMC into the quiet outstation) does not count. I think of it as an analogy of two “channels” of mental habit/action. In most automation cases, the starting point is with it engaged and in the automation channel, and for all of us, that is the easier way, and the place you spend most of the flight.
Then if something creates a need to fix a situation, it may be of low intensity, and the most appropriate action would be to probably stay in the automation. Let’s say you accidentally double-push a button instead of single push, so it goes in the wrong mode, and you realize it immediately. Just push it again, verify the right mode is up, done. No need for AP off.
Or the case may be severe. Like Flash 604, We’re low to the ground, the AP won’t engage, and after say 2 or 3 tries and bank angle going through 45 degrees, it’s time to fly the plane. It’s an obvious need to shift to the manual mental channel. And to overcome “the reluctance” to climb the ridge from one to the other.
But, (and I think this is an important part) the realization doesn’t come in a single shocking unambiguous announcement (like a FIRE warning), rather it builds up gradually. At the first failed try (and maybe wings are still level) is there a need to shift channels? Probably not, like my double-push example above. Just try again. OK second try, and it’s banking through 20 degrees? Maybe, maybe not, “you’d have to be there to really know.” 3rd try, and banking through 45 degrees? Hopefully all of us are going click-click “my plane” by now. 5th try? People are writing about us on forums decades later. But it’s a sliding scale of time-increasing realization, or the boiling frog like you said. And, when the automation mental channel is worn far deeper and more comfortable, with this sliding increase in need, the light bulb may never go off, as we emotionally grasp harder and harder at doing anything we can within the automation channel, and the panicked tunnel vision narrows down only on that view. The sliding-scale nature of the development allows us to be in denial and reinterpret the severity as a lower level until it’s too late.
So the only way to help that (and this is where the analogy kind of fails) is to have the manual channel also worn as deep and comfortable as we can get it, which would lower the barrier between the two and make the jump feasible at an earlier stage of the development.
Not more training, but improved system alerting that auto-thrust is not available in some circumstances, that attempting to engage AP outside limits gives a 'uh uh' alert, cueing a change in awareness, an awareness which is assumed by others to include every circumstance, but circumstances are rarely as assumed.
Well they already had alerting of what mode was active at the top of the PFD. Sure, even better alerting could be designed after careful study of the exact sequence of cascading events of the accident in question, and programming the plane to recognize that the pilot’s intent may be mismatching their inputs, but that only addresses
this accident. (Though it should still be done).
What about all the future ways that pilots will dream up to fall into other compound cascading confusions that weren’t thought of? It’s just patching one hole in a dynamic pilot-aircraft-environment system where countless others might spring new leaks. It’s just adding more automation patchwork, and misses the fundamental failure that is outside the automation itself, but rather is in the pilot. The failure to recognize the difference between the intended state and the actual state (of the raw data, physical results), and if such exists (more than obviously a quick transient) click-click/ “my plane.” This must never stop being our job until the stick has been replaced by a mouse and we no longer have an interface with the control surfaces.