whenever you get on a plane you probably picture the captain as a seasoned pro
with years of experience who will have your aircraft solidly under control at
all times and in most cases you wouldn't be wrong except that the captain might
not actually be flying the plane wait a minute what well there's a tremendous
level of automation that goes into modern jetliners from redundant safety
systems that kick in automatically to fly-by-wire controls that don't directly
connect to the plane's control surfaces these turn the yoke into something less
like a steering wheel and more like an xbox controller and prevent the plane
from making maneuvers the system deems too dangerous but even aside from all
this you may have heard that modern planes can basically fly themselves and
to a large extent this is kind of true you see after the plane takes off a
computerized autopilot will usually take over it works by linking to sensors
attached to the aircraft that track everything altitude wind speed direction
how much the aircraft is banking or if there's turbulence it's kind of like an
airborne version of lane assist features on newer semi-autonomous cars
additionally most modern airliners have a computer called a flight management
system which allows the pilot to enter a flight plan before taking off which
includes the destination airport as well as which waypoints the plane should
reach on the way so after takeoff the autopilot will take all of this
information and control the plane's speed pitch and direction by quickly
calculating how to safely move the plane's control surfaces with no input
from the human pilot required and if air traffic control needs the captain to
make changes in flight the autopilot can help with that too for example to change
the aircraft's heading or direction all the captain has to do in many cases is
to turn a knob to the desired heading and the plane will turn itself newer
planes can even land themselves using the same information and while the
thought of rapidly approaching the ground under the control of a machine is
a little scary the idea is that this kind of automation actually makes planes
safer decisions about how the plane should maneuver can be made more quickly
and with more precision than if a human pilot had to manually fly the entire
time in fact some people have said that they can feel that a plane ride gets
bumpier when a pilot is flying manually and of course fatigue is a real factor
think about how easy it is to zone out on a half hour drive now imagine doing
that on a 12 hour flight six miles off the ground hi karumba however autopilots
aren't perfect obviously they can't react to most emergency situations or
make unexpected adjustments that responsibility still falls on the
captain who is required to monitor what the autopilot is doing and make sure
it's carrying out the correct instructions many pilots don't think of
an autopilot as an entity that flies the plane rather the human pilots still fly
the plane through an automated system and despite the high levels of
automation part of the reason jet pilots still have to go through thousands of
hours of training and flight time is that they need to understand if a
miscommunication between the autopilot and the captain's intention is happening
for example the recent crashes of a pair of new boeing 737s appear to be related
to an issue where an automated system pushed the plane nose down because it
misread sensor data about the plane's angle of attack leading the system to
possibly think the plane was about to stall and in 2013 the well-publicized crash
landing of an asiana flight in san francisco was determined to be the
result of a pilot misunderstanding what mode the plane's autopilot was in
leading the plane to touch down short of the runway so it may not be surprising
that on something as complicated as an airplane computers are capable of
becoming confused just like they're fallible human pilots but the hope is
that as we learn from mishaps and pilots become more accustomed to using
automation flying can continue to get progressively safer speaking of safety
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