Olia Lialina on Sun, 17 Mar 2019 17:22:14 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> rage against the machine |
According to NY Times, 737 MAX 8 pilots were trained on (their own?) iPads.
What's next? Bring your own cockpit? Like suggested for car sharing interfaces by excited UX students all over the world these days.
Such news scare me more than all the AI horror stories together. This banalization or "desktopization"* of high responsibily jobs should be seriously questioned. Even when it is technically possible, even if “magic pane of glass” has more processing power when onboard computer, even if flight deck software is written in _javascript_, these are not sufficient reasons for a pilot to have it open in one of her browser tabs, even for training.
may complex systems stay complex in the eyes of their operators
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/boeing-max-flight-simulator-ethiopia-lion-air.html?action="">
"For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features. But in the case of the Max, many pilots with 737 experience learned about the plane on an iPad."
" But Boeing isn’t planning to overhaul its training procedures. And neither the F.A.A., nor the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, are proposing additional simulator training for pilots, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Instead, the regulators and Boeing agree that the best way to inform pilots about the new software is through additional computer-based training, which can be done on their personal computers."
*in 2014 i wrote about desktopization of remote piloted aircrafts for Interface Critique http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
i was rereading today this 5 y. o. article about a decade old accident
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash/amp
following are parts of IV. Flying Robots and the article's final statement
It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.
[... ]
Wiener pointed out that the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high. Nadine Sarter, an industrial engineer at the University of Michigan, and one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, made the same point to me in a different way: “Look, as automation level goes up, the help provided goes up, workload is lowered, and all the expected benefits are achieved. But then if the automation in some way fails, there is a significant price to pay. We need to think about whether there is a level where you get considerable benefits from the automation but if something goes wrong the pilot can still handle it.”
Sarter has been questioning this for years and recently participated in a major F.A.A. study of automation usage, released in the fall of 2013, that came to similar conclusions. The problem is that beneath the surface simplicity of glass cockpits, and the ease of fly-by-wire control, the designs are in fact bewilderingly baroque—all the more so because most functions lie beyond view. Pilots can get confused to an extent they never would have in more basic airplanes. When I mentioned the inherent complexity to Delmar Fadden, a former chief of cockpit technology at Boeing, he emphatically denied that it posed a problem, as did the engineers I spoke to at Airbus. Airplane manufacturers cannot admit to serious issues with their machines, because of the liability involved, but I did not doubt their sincerity. Fadden did say that once capabilities are added to an aircraft system, particularly to the flight-management computer, because of certification requirements they become impossibly expensive to remove. And yes, if neither removed nor used, they lurk in the depths unseen. But that was as far as he would go.
Sarter has written extensively about “automation surprises,” often related to control modes that the pilot does not fully understand or that the airplane may have switched into autonomously, perhaps with an annunciation but without the pilot’s awareness. Such surprises certainly added to the confusion aboard Air France 447. One of the more common questions asked in cockpits today is “What’s it doing now?” Robert’s “We don’t understand anything!” was an extreme version of the same. Sarter said, “We now have this systemic problem with complexity, and it does not involve just one manufacturer. I could easily list 10 or more incidents from either manufacturer where the problem was related to automation and confusion. Complexity means you have a large number of subcomponents and they interact in sometimes unexpected ways. Pilots don’t know, because they haven’t experienced the fringe conditions that are built into the system.
[... ]
At a time when accidents are extremely rare, each one becomes a one-off event, unlikely to be repeated in detail. Next time it will be some other airline, some other culture, and some other failure—but it will almost certainly involve automation and will perplex us when it occurs. Over time the automation will expand to handle in-flight failures and emergencies, and as the safety record improves, pilots will gradually be squeezed from the cockpit altogether. The dynamic has become inevitable. There will still be accidents, but at some point we will have only the machines to blame.
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