Story ID: 031
Don’t Let the Autoflight Bring You Down
By: Chris Lutat
Caption: NASA's ASRS shows a prevalence of pilots still trying to work out their understanding of autoflight during flight
Word Count: 1168
In all of my years of flying, whether as an instructor/evaluator or simply a member of the crew, I’ve never seen a pilot win a fistfight with the autoflight. As I was nearly done writing this article in early May, the NTSB issued its preliminary report on the fatal accident involving a Daher TBM 700, N960LP, near Truckee, California, on March 30, 2024.
In the headline of his report on the release, Gordon Gilbert wrote for AIN that, “the preliminary accident report shows a series of autopilot engagements and disengagements” just prior to the accident.
Here’s the set-up: The airport was closed; the weather was IMC with ceiling and visibility requiring an instrument approach. The PIC was reported by the NTSB to have had 250 hours flying the aircraft. The preliminary report gives few facts beyond these initial findings, and we may never know why this series of apparent actions in the cockpit were taken.
Initial indications suggest that the pilot made several attempts to connect the autoflight while maneuvering the aircraft close to the ground in an area of high terrain, at night, in the weather. Drawing irrefutable conclusions from this information will be a challenge for the NTSB, but its final report will be one that many pilots will be anxiously awaiting. It had the effect of immediately reinforcing for me how important the topic of this article is to contemporary aviation safety.
Inevitably, whether new to flying or a weathered veteran with thousands of hours, every contemporary pilot will confront new technologies designed to increase safety margins and contribute to both efficiency and productivity. We all generally agree that those are good things—and wouldn’t have it any other way.
But unless we work for an organization that has the resources to deal with these advances systematically through training and evaluation programs supported by a rigorous standardization team, many crewmembers are mostly on their own when it comes to smoothly blending traditional airmanship with contemporary automation. Whether adapting to enhanced vision systems like EFVS or SVS augmented with a head-up display (HUD), or the latest mandated communications-navigation-surveillance (CNS) systems and protocols, the amount of knowledge that flight crews need to understand and become proficient with is not going to diminish in the coming years.
Yet few training programs—even the very best in our industry—recognize the need to develop a balanced approach to airmanship that blends proficiency with advanced flight guidance, autoflight systems, and the very stick-and-rudder skills that got many pilots their first flying job.
If you stay committed to a flying career long enough, eventually you will encounter conditions that require autoflight and flight guidance systems to take a backseat to maintain control of the aircraft along a safe flight path. Yet real-world practice opportunities can seem scarce when the aircraft and crew are in revenue operations.
If you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “Yeah, this isn’t a problem,” it may be because you haven’t yet experienced the collision of practical airmanship with onboard automated systems designed to control the aircraft flight path. Sources of aviation safety are plentiful, but you need to go no further than NASA’s ASRS system to assess for yourself the prevalence of incidents and reports of airborne flight crews working out their own understanding of their autoflight systems in real time (just about the worst time to do it).
I recently searched the NASA ASRS database for just one type of situation where disconnecting and manually flying the airplane would be a very safe and wise option—altitude excursions. I put in just two of the many search criteria available on the site.
After selecting “Excursion from assigned altitude” plus “Human Factors/Human-Machine Interface,” my request generated 648 “hits.” Apparently, at least 648 times after an altitude excursion, crews felt compelled to write about it in a NASA report. It may not be the most demanding airmanship challenge of our time, but it can ruin an otherwise fine flying day. It’s representative of a problem that has been plaguing our industry for decades—one which we should all be able to eliminate (mostly, that is) if we work to refine the relationship between the hardware (the aircraft and all of its integrated systems) and the wetware (that’s you and me).
Of course, I am not the only pilot thinking these thoughts—they are indeed shared by many other pilots and now, it seems, they have the attention of the research community and some regulators as well.
ICAO is in the final stages of a years-long study on the waning of “hand flying” (otherwise known as “manual handling” in some circles). It’s one industry study that I’m looking forward to when it is finally published, perhaps later this year. But in a recent trade journal article, the gist of ICAO’s research effort was reported by journalists for Aviation Week & Space Technology.
After studying 30 years’ worth of accidents and major incidents, researchers focused on 77 flight-path-related accidents and more than 300 incidents—finding that 36% had evidence of automation dependency, and the percentage appears to be climbing. In the two decades from 1990 to 2010, the figure was 22%, but it rose to 49% in the decade that followed.
The article states that the study found: “Technical advances in flight deck systems are not being supported with sufficient training or best-practices guidance, leaving many pilots too reliant on automated systems and deficient in fundamental hand-flying skills.”
Our own research and fieldwork bear this out, and in 2013, Convergent Performance stated in our book Automation Airmanship (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013) that pilots and the organizations they fly for should as a matter of routine build mandatory “hand-flying” or “manual handling” opportunities of their aircraft into SOPs. For example, something as simple as requiring an SOP that departures be flown manually as opposed to mandating autopilot engagement at 500 or 1,000 feet could contribute to more balance between proficiency with the autoflight and proficiency with manual flight. How to achieve an optimum balance is open for much debate and should be handled by individual flight departments taking many considerations into account (like, say, prevailing local flying conditions, experience levels, and other safety factors). Policy changes like this can have a real payoff—but follow-up and fine-tuning are key to any policy change.
Our observations and the experiences of veteran pilots everywhere show that the decision to “Fly the Airplane First” is made (and briefed) long before a conflict over control between the pilot and the autoflight forces the choice.
Chris Lutat is managing partner of Convergent Performance, a B777 captain, and co-author of “Automation Airmanship: Nine Principles for Operating Glass Cockpit Aircraft.”
The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by AIN Media Group.