fireflybob;
This is the dilemma, is not it? Many lay people have this impression that everything is automatic! Great surprise is often expressed when I inform such people that 99% of landings are manual!
Yes, it is indeed. And the mythology does not stop with lay people. Such magical thinking can extend right into the upper echelons of management who may know a lot less about aviation and what keeps it safe than they do about marketing, managing share price and negotiating.
Everytime we bring false modesty to a conversation about our profession and what we do in the cockpit we do ourselves a disfavour. While being a professional aviator has had a very rough ride from the corporations beginning with the bean-counters and going all the way to the top in terms of a blas
é dismissal of what professional aircrews do everyday for their employer, the skills, professional ethic and resources we bring first to our passengers and then to our company have not changed either in importance or in necessity. They are just hidden behind a veil of partially intentional misconceptions and a populace otherwise largely informed by television.
Once in a while in occasional cocktail conversations when the subject of jobs, salary and working conditions comes up I say, "airline pilots earn $100,000.00 dollars a minute but you'll never know which one. The rest is for free." The remark is of course intended to elicit comment and we go from there, often ending with a bit more understanding, at least until the glass empties and the eyes glaze over...Public support for airline pilots extends as far as "avoiding crashing" but without the comprehension of what that costs or how it's done. Ignorance can be forgiven but not pronouncement from ignorance.
In the end however, we need never apologize for the time off, the salary, (such as it is at the beginning of the profession), or what remains of the prestige and respect at least in the public's mind, (because it certainly isnt' elsewhere).
Automatic flight has been demonstrated with the B707 fuel-gelling experiment, so it can be done. It just can't be done with weather, terrain and 4000 other transport aircraft sharing the same domestic sky at any one time. To me, something like the "natural biological size" principle comes into play when imagining such systems of control and it might be expressed as a "natural limit to human-managed complexity". Now if machines can carry on an extremely rich conversation with one another regarding the usual factors such as position and speed and they can do that with the predictive power of the same machines which helped the Genome Project along then perhaps true automatic flight will be possible, even right to the parking of the aircraft. Thing is, by that time, other technologies may have obviated the need to use airplanes to travel at all.