The paradoxes in our quest to find the holy grail of flight safety continued last month with our look into cockpit automation. Even tracing this all the way back to the 1930s when Isaac Asimov wrote science fiction stories about “Robbie” the robot that was programmed to help its human developers, we were left with the conflict of our brain trying to get along well with Robbie and integrate our combined talents into the automated systems in the modern airplane cockpit. We established the need to utilize automation to check our own biases but recent events show that unfamiliarity, overreliance, or failures to monitor and supervise the automation can be just as deadly.

For the full article see the AOPA website at: 
https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2019/july/01/me-and-robbie-part-two?_ga=2.48863203.479779608.1561642025-1107606214.1547390316

Now that we’ve spent the last few months talking about how much flight safety depends on precise use of cockpit instruments to keep our inherent bias off the flight deck, we need to address the weakest link in this chain, our own interface with all those instruments.

For the full article see the AOPA website at: 
https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2019/june/01/me-and-robbie