Cockpit crisis

&#62; Cockpit component company Rockwell Collins, for example, made waves at this year’s Paris air show when it talked about developing a “panic button” for commercial airplanes that would give confused and stricken pilots the option of flipping a switch and letting the computer fly the plane to safety. Not surprisingly, the concept drew ridicule from aviators, who are quick to point out that computers are hardly infallible, as anyone who has ever struggled with a crashed Web browser knows.<p>One of the more dangerous things when operating a vehicle is cognitive overload; when shit goes wrong, a bunch of stuff tends to get dumped on you and you can't think fast enough to catch up. A way to let the airplane worry about itself for a minute while the pilots can catch up seems to be a decent way to address this side effect of being a conscious being instead of an automaton.<p>The jab about the unreliability of computers is just that; avionics software is on a much slower release schedule and has a much more fixed set of inputs than a web browser, allowing for a more thorough (or even formal) analysis of its behavior.<p>&#62; “People say it’s impossible to stall an Airbus, right? It has stall-protection systems and it won’t allow you to exceed the maximum angle of attack where a stall would occur,” argues Paul Strachan, an Air Canada pilot who is the head of the company’s pilots’ union. “But that’s not true. If there’s ice on the wing, that whole detection system isn’t accurate to begin with. I would be pretty hesitant to get on a plane with no pilot.”<p>Flight control systems can be built to compensate for all sorts of failures[1] that would pose grave difficulty for human pilots, but nobody's really advocating for completely-autonomous passenger planes. The problem right now is that the autonomous systems to reduce pilot workload and improve safety have failure modes that tend to overload the pilots with information. A working, reliable "panic button" would definitely help pilots get back in front of the plane in an emergency situation, but so would fixing the information overload to allow pilots to prioritize important issues (pitot freezing up, speed indicators unreliable) over side effects (unreliable stall warning, alternate law activation).<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN9f9ycWkOY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN9f9ycWkOY</a>

One possible approach that might have helped in the Air France case might be to let the pilots know what the plane doesn't know, instead of bombarding them with the unsolvable problems it did know.<p>At one point, they were at full thrust, nose-up, and climbing, yet in the heat of a storm of warnings, they failed to recognize that the airframe, engines, wings were all performing exactly as designed, aside from a panicking computer.<p>At that point they had completely lost situational awareness, and held the plane nose-up and falling until it contacted the water. If they had been able to 'step back' and look at the wider situation, they almost certainly should have been able to guesstimate some power settings, trim appropriately to lower the nose to recover to a normal flight attitude and hang on until they could trouble-shoot the frozen pitot tubes that had caused the air data computers to lose airspeed info.

The article doesn't mention near misses. How many stalls occur that crews safely recover their planes from? Can we learn anything from their circumstances?

The whole discussion reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's article "blowup".<p><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_01_22_a_blowup.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_01_22_a_blowup.htm</a>

The quality of these professional pilots is really disturbing. Why would they pull up more when the plane is already in a stall? I'm pretty sure they teach in lesson 2 or 3 of flight school how to recover from stalls by pulling <i>down</i> on the stick.

The super computers are strategically taking out problematic groups of humans, staging machine accidents that the humans cannot recover from manually.<p>I see this as a reoccurring theme in the next 100 years as we get self driving cars, automated food processing, intelligent machines automating everything. We gotta deal with this in a smart way, require by law "Kill computer" switch accessible and known by all operators, to get the computer to stop demanding its own way and just do what the human tells it to do.<p>Though we can't say we weren't warned, Hal saying he can't jeopardize the mission to Wall-E auto computer demanding it's own way over the will of the captain. Is there even a solution to this problem or are we doomed to be pets one day?