Controlling Pilot Error: Automation Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are a private pilot and you want to know how an automated plane works, this book can be useful for you. Otherwise, you are going to find better things to invest time and money.
The author seems to be impressed by his new toy (a Boeing 777) and devotes the whole book to tell us the wonders of automation. He writes about some accidents where the problem, of course, was never the design of automation but the behaviour of crewmembers (hindsight bias and bad apple theory). All of the accidents could have been avoided if the crew....easy to say after the accident happened. We all are wonderful prophets of the past.
The moment when I decided to stop reading was when I arrived to the description of an accident in a B-737. The crew, mistakenly, stopped the engine that was working properly instead of the bad one. The author cites Beaty as the source but the conclusions cannot be more different: For this author, the problem was, of course, the crew but Beaty describes an interesting point that, susprisingly, is forgotten by Risukhin: The cockpit design in the initial B-737s put the indicators of one of the engines above the indicators of the other. In that way, it was impossible to know automatically which engine was failing or, in other words, it was a bad design. Risukhin "forgets" this detail in his interest to sell the goodness of automation.
The obvious starting point to any accident research is the supposition that crewmembers are not dumb or crazy and their training is right. If not, we will discover during the research process. Once we accept this starting point, we have to try to know why experienced people commit bad mistakes. I hope Risukhin won't have to learn this at his own cost.
Hindsight -as Risukhin does- is very easy but it is not the right approach and, of course, the automation design, its complexity, unforeseen interactions between systems and lack of adequate training in the depths (not only the operating) of the systems can be under many accidents.
Beaty says another thing: Modern airplanes have converted pilots into supervisors and they can be very easily out of the "loop-of-control" since people are better performing than supervising. That is forgotten quite frequently in the automation design and, of course, you won't find a single word about this issue in the work by Risukhin.
An analysis of automation issues should have been a good idea. A praise trying to hide the bad parts and always pointing to the crew is not.

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With up to 80% of accidents attributed to pilot error, this new series is critically important. It identifies and examines the ten top areas of concern to pilot safety. Each book contains real-life pilot stories drawn from FAA/NASA databases, valuable "save-yourself" techniques and an action agenda of preventive techniques pilots can implement to avoid risks.

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