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Photo: Cirrus Design

At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, pilots like to be pilots because we like to fly airplanes. We take great pride in being the ones to command our craft, to tell them where we want them to go, how fast we want to them to go there and in what configuration to make that journey.

So it's no big surprise that the idea of the airplane taking control and keeping us from doing what we need to do to safely conduct the flight is a scary thought. Airbus, as you probably know, has been the subject of much vitriol over its envelope protection flight control system, which critics argue is too hard to override when things start to go wrong and the pilot has a better idea than the computer.

But there are other, less restrictive ways to keep airplanes sunny side up, and the bottom line is, we need to embrace this technology, the sooner the better, because it's our best bet for keeping pilots from making the kinds of mistakes they keep on making, year after year after year. The safety record, let's face it, is unacceptable. You can talk about incremental improvements in safety, but it's not enough. Our current record of more than a life lost a day in general aviation airplanes has got to change.

And finally, the engine of change is at hand.

As we've pointed out in Flying, the leading cause of airplane fatalities is the pilot losing control, and all of our efforts over the years to prevent these accidents by improving training and educating aviators about the risk have had little discernable effect on the safety record.

There is one obvious solution to the problem: build smarter airplanes, ones that can prevent loss of control accidents, or at least nudge pilots in the right direction when the airplane shows the first signs of leaving controlled flight.

This is not new stuff. Boeing and Airbus have been doing it for decades. The 777, for instance, limits bank angle to 35 degrees, and it will automatically deploy high lift devices to prevent a stall, and its auto throttles will even prevent accidental overspeed, among other protections.

It's high-tech stuff, and until recently, it was high dollar stuff, too. It's also been unavailable in GA except on a small handful of high-end bizjets. Moreover, unlike with technologies like synthetic vision and TAWS, the downward migration of stability augmentation technology has been painfully slow in coming to light jets, turboprops, and piston airplanes.

Until now.

On the night before AirVenture started Cirrus announced that it was going to be outfitting its airplanes with ESP by Garmin, a system that uses the existing autopilot servos to control the airplane when the system senses that the pilot has lost control. ESP, which stands for "Electronic Stability and Protection," should be certified and available soon.

Interestingly, it's not an autopilot function but a full-time augmentation system that is active for the most part only when the pilot is hand flying. It does use the existing autopilot servos, but, again, it is not an autopilot function.

Even though it is a three-letter acronym, ESP is not HAL (the evil computer from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey). The system does not wrest control of the airplane from the pilot, who can disable it or overpower it at any time. It simply moves the controls toward controlled flight, preventing excessive bank and pitch angles. On the first turbine certification, the King Air B200, expected later this year, it will also offer critical angle of attack protection. Cost of the system on the King Air is expected to be around $18,000.

These soon-to-be certified systems are just the beginning. Before long many airplanes will offer stability augmentation because buyers will demand it. In normal flight, it will be completely invisible, like a guiding hand waiting there to help if things start to go wrong.

The technology, if widely implemented, would save many, many lives. And it will make flying safer, much safer. This will be a very good thing for an industry that suffers rightly from a reputation for not being safe enough. It's also a moral imperative, because one life lost in a preventable accident is one life too many.