Technology Cannot Replace Pilots Capt. Sully Sullenberger(*) Last month’s tragic and horrific plane crash in the French Alps has raised an important and unprecedented question: How can we prevent a pilot from intentionally crashing a commercial flight ever again? Some have suggested that we eliminate the risk by eliminating pilots—and rely solely on advanced automation technology. Such thinking is, in part, the result of the ubiquity of technology in our lives. But more significantly, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what pilots do, and what technology can and cannot do. In the nearly half-century I have served as a pilot (much of that as an aviation and safety expert) I have seen tremendous changes in aviation technology. And these changes have dramatically changed the pilot’s job. We have gone from flying entire flights by manually manipulating the controls to flying them using technology for most of the flight and flying manually for only a few minutes. What most laypersons don’t know is that pilots are always the ones flying the plane. It is the pilots who make all the decisions about the flight, selecting the path and the altitude to fly, among many other things. We are constantly flying the airplane with our minds, even if we choose to use some technology to help us move the controls. Technology has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, it is superior to humans in its ability to consistently monitor conditions over an extended period of time, which is why technology is essential in screening passengers before they board a flight. Yet in spite of technology’s continuously improving reliability, anyone who doubts that it can fail at the most inopportune time has likely never used a computer. Technology is also limited in that it can only do what has been foreseen and for which it has been programmed. What this means is that there is still no substitute for what humans bring to the table— perhaps most importantly, through our ability to adapt and innovate. Consider what has been called “the Miracle on the Hudson” – my emergency water landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 after both engines failed as a result of a bird strike. I saw the birds that day just 100 seconds after takeoff, about two seconds before we hit them. They were just over two football field lengths away, but we were traveling at 316 feet per second. There was not enough time or distance to maneuver a jet airplane away from them. And then, it was like a Hitchcock film. We were upon them. I saw the birds fill the windscreen. I could hear the thumps and thuds as we struck them. And as the birds entered the core of both jet engines and began to damage them, I heard terrible noises I’d never heard before. Suddenly, my crew and I had just 208 seconds to do something we had never trained for, and get it right the first time. I knew from experience there were only two runways near us that might be reachable. But I had to be able to look out the window and, from experience on thousands of flights, realize they were a little too far. The only option was the river. The fact that we landed a commercial airliner carrying 155 people on the Hudson River with no engines and no fatalities was not a miracle, however. It was the result of teamwork, skill, in-depth knowledge, and the human judgment that comes from experience. To this day, I know of no technology, even on the horizon, that could have done what we did. But could technology have prevented the terrible Germanwings crash that killed all 150 people aboard? Perhaps. Would it also help prevent the next unanticipated event? Probably not. Like technology, we humans have our limitations. But a team of two professional pilots overcomes many of them because the aviation profession knows how to take a team of experts and create an expert team. By managing workloads and backing each other up, for example, we create a system that is more robust, resilient, and reliable than the sum of its parts. Quite the opposite is true with technology. The more layers are piled into increasingly complex systems, the more failure paths we introduce. We’ve learned that automation does not eliminate errors. Rather, it changes the nature of the errors that are made, and it makes possible new kinds of errors. The bottom line is this: Systems that integrate the best of human abilities and technology are the safest for all concerned. So when we design our systems, we need to assign appropriate roles to the human and technological components. It is best for humans to be the doers and technology to be the monitors, providing decision aids and safeguards. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet—no one thing that will prevent all future tragedies. Flying, like life, is more complicated than that. (*)Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III is a retired US Airways captain, the CBS News Aviation and Safety Expert, speaker, author, and CEO of Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. Learn more at www.sullysullenberger.com. .