Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?
The Airbus A320, the aircraft we were flying as Flight 1549, has a fly-by-wire system, which in essence means the flight controls are moved by sending electrical impulses, rather than having a direct mechanical link between the control stick in the cockpit and the control surfaces on the wings and tail. The fly-by-wire system keeps you from exceeding predetermined values, such as the degree of pitch (how low or high the plane’s nose can be versus the horizon), the bank angle (how steep a turn you can make), and how fast or slow you can go.
Dr. Wiener worried, and I agree, that the paradox of automation is that it often lowers a pilot’s workload when that load is already low. And it sometimes increases the workload in the cockpit when it is already high.
Take, for instance, a last-minute runway change. In the old days, you could easily tune your radio navigation receiver to the frequency for the approach to the different runway. Now it might take ten or twelve presses of buttons on the computer to arrange for a runway change.
For those who believe technology is the answer to everything, Dr. Wiener would offer data to prove that isn’t the case. He said that automated airplanes with the highest technologies do not eliminate errors. They change the nature of the errors that are made. For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely. Consider American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757 flying from Miami to Cali, Colombia, on December 20, 1995. Because two different waypoints (defined points along a flight path) were given the same name and the flight management computer displayed the nearer one as the second choice of the two, the pilots mistakenly selected the more distant one, putting the plane on a collision course with a mountain. Just 4 of the 163 people on the plane survived.
Dr. Wiener is not antitechnology, and neither am I. But technology is no substitute for experience, skill, and judgment.
ONE THING that has always helped make the airline industry strong and safe is the concept that pilots call “captain’s authority.” What that means is we have a measure of autonomy—the ability to make an independent, professional judgment within the framework of professional standards.
The problem today is that pilots are viewed differently. Over the years, we’ve lost a good deal of respect from our management, our fellow employees, the general public. The whole concept of being a pilot has been diminished, and I worry that safety can be compromised as a result. People used to say that airline pilots were one step below astronauts. Now the joke is: We’re one step above bus drivers, but bus drivers have better pensions.
Airline managers seem to second-guess us more often now. There are more challenges. Thirty years ago, it would be unheard of for a mechanic or ramp worker to vociferously disagree with a captain. Now it happens.
I know that some captains don’t represent the best of us. There may be circumstances and times when it is appropriate to challenge a captain. But sometimes we are questioned because others in the airline system want the operation to go more smoothly or be more timely or less costly.
There was a scene in the 2002 movie
A few years ago, in
In many ways, it’s good that all airlines are more standardized today. There are appropriate procedures and we are bound to follow them. These days there are virtually no cowboys in the skies, ignoring items on their checklists. At the same time, however, I am concerned that compliance alone is not sufficient. Judgment—like Al Slader’s decision—is paramount.
The way the best pilots see it: A captain’s highest duty and obligation is always to safety. As we say it: “We have the power of the parking brake.” The plane will not move until we feel we can operate the aircraft safely.
With authority comes great responsibility. A captain needs leadership skills to take the individuals on his crew and make them feel and perform like a team. It’s a heavy professional burden on the captain to know he may be called upon to tap into the depths of his experience, the breadth of his knowledge, and his ability to think quickly, weighing everything he knows while accounting for what he cannot know.
I long have had great respect for pilots such as Al Haynes, Al Slader, and many others. And I believe that my knowledge and understanding of their actions was of great help to me on Flight 1549 as I made decisions in those tense moments over New York City.
12. THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
NO TWO AIRPORTS are exactly alike. They’re almost like fingerprints in that way. Each one has a different geometry, runway layout, and arrangement of taxiways and terminal buildings. Each one differs in its direction and distance from the city center, and proximity to other landmarks.
I’ve never counted how many different runways I’ve landed on. I couldn’t tell you the exact number of cities I’ve seen from the air. But I try to pay attention to the specific details of a place, and to hold on to a mental picture of the view. It could be helpful the next time I return, even if it’s years later.
When pilots fly regular routes to a certain city, we become very familiar with what the area’s landmarks look like from the air. From as high as twenty-five or thirty thousand feet, we can identify the tallest buildings, the local stadiums, the nearest large bodies of water, the major highways. We know the configurations of the runways, the seasonal weather conditions, and, once on the ground, the best place to get a reasonably healthy lunch in the terminal.
Given the US Airways hub system, I’ve done a lot of flying into Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, so takeoffs and landings in those cities are a pilot’s equivalent of driving your car out of your driveway and through your neighborhood.
On so many flights, I find myself thinking the same thoughts: about how beautiful Earth is—both the natural and the manmade beauty—and how lucky we are to call it our home.
There are many parts of the country I enjoy flying over or into. Approaching St. Louis on a clear day, you can see the 630-foot-tall Gateway Arch from ten miles away and 30,000 feet up. If the sun is at the right angle, you’ll find sunlight glistening off the edge of the arch.
Flying into Las Vegas, in the clear desert air, you can see the Strip from a good distance even in the daytime. At night, it’s a line of some of the brightest lights on the continent, beckoning from eighty miles away.
Seattle is a gorgeous city to fly into. When I was a pilot at PSA, I would sometimes fly up to Seattle from Los Angeles, and I knew by memory the volcanoes in the Cascade Range heading north—Mount McLoughlin, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters, Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier. Each mountain would loom into view, one after the other.
