(February 2012) Increasingly, flight is automatic. Navigation no longer requires an ounce of brains. Auto-pilots climb and descend, hold altitude, track waypoints and execute entire flight plans while idled crews ponder football scores. Autoland systems bring airplanes safely to earth, and even to the decks of aircraft carriers, in zero-zero weather. Only one phase of flight remains uninvaded by automation: the takeoff.
Too difficult? You wouldn’t think so. Certainly the basic act of taking off — throttles forward, hold centerline, rotate — could easily be automated. If there’s any complication, it’s in the element of judgment that arises — very seldom — when an engine fails, a tire blows, a deer strolls onto a darkened runway or some odd and inexplicable thing happens to befuddle and paralyze the pilot. It’s not that a computer could not deal with these eventualities as well as a human can — not always very well, to tell the truth — but rather that the possible vicissitudes of takeoff are so various, and the proper reactions to them so dependent on circumstances, that no program could foresee them all.
