Last night, after an eight-hour flight across the North Atlantic ocean, I flew into the world’s busiest airspace, acting as the pilot monitoring. I suddenly found myself perplexed by a right roll into an unexpected course change. My monitoring had obviously failed. The pilot-flying had made a mistake in his automation input, and the result of this man-machine interface error was the all-too-common response from both of us — “What’s it doing now?”
The aspect of that error that I find most fascinating is not how or why it occurred, or what circumstances of task saturation, fatigue, distractions, or countless other factors came together in subtle ways to facilitate the error. The most interesting aspect is how easily and substantially perplexed I became by that unexpected rolling maneuver. My mind seemed to flick into denial — “How did it do that?! That’s not what it’s supposed to be doing!” It was a powerful, emotional, albeit wholly internal, response.
