Pilot Monitoring

To assume that an aircraft automation system has a will of its own and will try to kill us would be anthropomorphic. Autopilots and other automation systems have not reached that stage of sophistication. Not yet. What can-and too often does-happen, however, is that flight crews turn the flying duties over to the autopilot and relax. With frightening repetition, this ends in disaster.

Editorial Staff

Wednesday, November 16, 2016 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Pilot complacency stemming from over-reliance on automation, rather than automation failure itself, is a primary cause of aircraft accidents due to insufficient "active monitoring" of flight systems.
Effective cockpit management, whether in multi-crew settings with a dedicated Pilot Monitoring (PM) role or in single-pilot operations, demands continuous and disciplined oversight of aircraft performance.
Pilots should treat automation as a "student pilot" requiring constant supervision and intervention, actively "looking for something" rather than passively "looking at something."
When an autopilot behaves unexpectedly, pilots should prioritize incrementally downgrading automation (e.g., to heading or vertical speed mode) instead of immediate full disconnection, allowing time to diagnose problems and maintain some level of assistance.

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In the 1968 classic science fiction movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a computer named HAL operated and monitored a spaceship bound for Jupiter. Everything was fine until the autopilot (HAL) went berserk and killed all but one of the crew. That crewmember survived by killing HAL.