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Photo: illustration by Robert Goyer

Every year thousands of drivers and passengers in cars are killed in accidents caused in whole or in part by drivers talking or texting on cell phones. And let's face it. This problem is only going to get worse. With my Blackberry, I could, if I wanted to, check my Facebook while tooling down I-35 at 70 mph. I actually see people doing it all the time. Well, I don't think they're checking my FaceBook account, but they're doing some serious thumb typing nonetheless.

As pilots we've had the luxury these past many years of not having a lot of distractions in the cockpit. Sure, many of us have numerous displays in the panel or on our laps staring us in the face while we fly. The good thing is, most of them have aviation information on them. Checking out the engine monitoring page on my Avidyne MFD only gets me more aware and more involved with the flight, not less. There are some distractions available, from iPod jacks to XM Radio, and there's little in the literature on how these things affect safety. My guess is that we're managing the additional risk, if there is one, quite well. 

But I think distractions are going to get more numerous and more complicated within a few years, as clever engineers and marketers figure out ways to connect our GA airplanes with the mobile communications infrastructure, hooking us up with cell phone calls, text messaging, and the internet while increasing our entertainment options. It's only a matter of time. While it will be too costly to be widely adopted at first, as with cell phones, the connected cockpit will come down in price until we're at the point that most of our planes are wired to the web.

There's no doubt that it makes driving less safe. Just how bad is it? Shockingly bad. According to a Carnegie Mellon study, using a cell phone while driving cuts down on one's attentiveness by 37 percent. The association also sited a study by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, which found that cell-phone-distracted drivers react to brake lights 18 percent slower. A number of studies have likened driving while on a cell phone to being like driving while drunk, but worse in some ways. Other studies have found that drivers spend 400 percent more time with their heads down when they're on their cell phones. The results of this divided focus and degraded performance are clear. Overall, drivers who call or text while driving are four times more likely to get into an accident than drivers who don't.

If it sounds like a problem that education will solve, think again. One study found that eighty-four percent of drivers believe that cell phone use while driving is dangerous, but that same study found that 81 percent of those drivers do it anyway.

The idea that pilots are fundamentally different from motorsts is both wrong and missing the point. Pilots are just as capable of this kind of cognitive dissonance and they're just as capable of thinking that they're safe from the kinds of risk they correctly identify for other pilots. And because pilots tend to be busy, successful, high energy people, they tend to be pretty well wired up to begin with too. I'm certainly no exception.

Still, it's not clear just how hazardous cell phones and other electronic distractions will be in light airplanes. Even though flying has risks paticular to it, it's also insulated from one of the greatest risks facing drivers, namely, leaving one's lane and colliding with another vehicle, which is a leading cause of automobile fatalities while being a non-cause in airplanes.

Since we spend so much of our time in cruise, when we are at the least risk from distraction some might say that the risks from cell phone induced distraction are minimal. All but the most idiotic pilots are going to ignore their Palm Pixie buzzing while on short final. At least I think they are.

In cruise, however, those distractions might add up to greater risk than we realize. Most accidents, after all, are really accident chains, starting with something little going wrong and leading to what is often a horrible outcome. By allowing ourselves to be distracted while nothing urgent is happening, we can let all kinds of otherwise manageable events start their dangerous spiral. Will we miss that cylinder head temperature getting too hot while we're emailing the boss? Will we fail to spot that traffic until it's too late while we're uploading a pic to Flickr? Will we continue into deteriorating weather while reading on our iPads a blog on flyingmag.com about the dangers of flying while distracted? The risks, while probably less numerous than distracted drivers face, are nevertheless very real. 

It's something we should take into account before we too quickly embrace the concept of the connected cockpit.