Ok, so I am in the last month of my career. I have been asked what are the best and worst
parts. The best are the memories of incredible
people and places. The worst are the missed
opportunities. Providence gives us
opportunities and it’s a sin to waste them. As the heir of the greatest
generation my contemporaries and I were bequeathed almost unlimited opportunity
in aviation. We did a lot of good
things, but we could have done better. We
could have more effectively established the partnership between threat
identification and mitigation and standardized operating policy. I regret the part I played in that. Did we leave the industry with the more
opportunities or are they just bigger challenges. I am not sure there is a difference, but I am
sure that we have not adequately prepared the next generation to understand and
meet them. We have taught them to obey
rather than think.
Personally, as I reflect on my career, I have been trying to
access what I have learned from four decades of flying airplanes for a living. It all comes down to this. We have only been marginally successful at
exploiting technology in modern aviation. We have been mostly ineffective in
this area because we now value data (information) over decisions. Since technology is vastly better at
information acquisition and management than humans, we are now working for the
machines. We are now the robots. We don’t use technology to decide what to do,
we do what the machines tell us to do.
This all became clear the other day when our family was in
the car at an intersection when the car in from of us made a left turn with a
red arrow displayed on the traffic light.
The turn was made after the oncoming traffic had cleared and was safe in
every way except that there was a red light (arrow). My family all thought the maneuver was very
dangerous. I asked them why and our
discussion was very revealing.
Just because the light is green is it safe? Is it always unsafe when the light is
red? Can we trust that the light will always
achieve the desired outcome? Does the
stoplight replace decision or just display information? Can a display of information replace human
analysis of the situation? I believe we
would all say no, however what do we practice?
Will the auto pilot always level the airplane at the right altitude? How do we know it's the right altitude? Technology can supply information, and lots
of it, but only humans can provide the context.
Automation can perform complicated tasks accurately and efficiently, but
in what combination. Just yesterday
local teenager was killed when his car rear-ended a semi truck while he was
texting. Is the answer to texting in the
car collision avoidance technology?
Really?
Moreover, aren’t policy and procedure just the written version
of stoplights. Volumes are written that
say do this don’t do that. Go this way,
don’t go that way. Like the stoplight
there is only binary instruction. Red
STOP and green GO is all we get and we must intuit the context. Unfortunately, the “why” behind policy is
usually much more difficult to derive than that of the traffic signal. Often the “why” is simply unknown to the
user. Standardized verbiage at specific
altitudes are a great example of this.
Compliance trumps understanding.
Machines and their instruction manuals are simply
tools. Tools are what have allowed man
to achieve dominion over all other creatures on the planet. Since the dawn of humankind, man has been
using tools to improve their lives, albeit, not without significant collateral
damage. The proliferation of highly
sophisticated tools, i.e. technology, is the greatest threat future generations
of aviators will face. This threat
exists because of the fundamental flaw of machines, binary decision
making. It is all “1’s and 0’s”, a vast
array of little digital stoplights. Until
we move from digital to the next higher level of technology these tools will
all lack the uniquely human concept of “maybe”.
Judgment, or the resolution of “maybe” is where humans out perform
machines. A human, unless he cheats,
cannot beat the computer at chess because it is computation. There are a finite number of moves. Knowing how to write the algorithm for the
computer does not make the programmer a chess player either. It just means he is good at writing
code. The computer is making the
“decisions”. However, when randomness in
introduced into a game such as dice with backgammon or cards with poker the
computer doesn’t do as well. The
computer doesn’t know what will happen, only what might happen. The infinite number of “maybes” in the real
world makes the roll of a dice seem almost boring.
The concept of maybe is the inscrutable link between the one
and the zero. It is the fork in the road. The choices we make are important and the factors
in the real world are often unpredictable and random. This is the difference between risk assessment
and threat management. Risk assessment
is the statistical product of probability and severity. Risk can tell you what the probability of an
event is and how bad it can be. Pretty
cut and dried. Threat management,
however, is the process we use to hopefully adjust (lower) those factors
(probability and severity). The
environment that is aviation is not predictable, therefore, we cannot totally abdicate
the decision making process to technology.
We must use machines and their
instruction manuals for what they are, tools. They are not and should not be
used as a substitute for decision making.
The 787 Dreamliner that I
am about to leave behind is the most sophisticated airliner ever built, but it
is still just an obedient, but fallible machine that will only do what it has
or has not been programmed to do. Flying
the 787 or any other modern airliner is not playing chess with a fixed number
of choices. We are operating in real
time in a capricious and unforgivable environment that can only be tamed by the
magnificence of the human brain. We have
turned the corner. There are no human
pilots that can fly the modern airplane as accurately and efficiently as it can
fly itself. How will we teach tomorrows aviators to
effectively use these incredible machines?
Is the future of aviation really just the deployment of more and better
stoplights? I believe we could have done
better.
