Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Fry Hannah & Fry Hannah

Author:Fry, Hannah & Fry, Hannah [Fry, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9780393635003
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

The company baby

Among the pilots at Air France, Pierre-Cédric Bonin was known as a ‘company baby’.40 He had joined the airline at the tender age of 26, with only a few hundred hours of flying time under his belt, and had grown up in the airline’s fleet of Airbuses. By the time he stepped aboard the fated flight of AF447, aged 32, he had managed to clock up a respectable 2,936 hours in the air, although that still made him by far the least experienced of the three pilots on board.41

None the less, it was Bonin who sat at the controls of Air France flight 447 on 31 May 2009, as took it off from the tarmac of Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport and headed home to Paris.42

This was an Airbus A330, one of the most sophisticated commercial aircraft ever built. Its autopilot system was so advanced that it was practically capable of completing an entire flight unaided, apart from take-off and landing. And even when the pilot was in control, it had a variety of built-in safety features to minimize the risk of ­human error.

But there’s a hidden danger in building an automated system that can safely handle virtually every issue its designers can anticipate. If a pilot is only expected to take over in exceptional circumstances, they’ll no longer maintain the skills they need to operate the system themselves. So they’ll have very little experience to draw on to meet the challenge of an unanticipated emergency.

And that’s what happened with Air France flight 447. Although Bonin had accumulated thousands of hours in an Airbus cockpit, his actual experience of flying an A330 by hand was minimal. His role as a pilot had mostly been to monitor the automatic system. It meant that when the autopilot disengaged during that evening’s flight, Bonin didn’t know how to fly the plane safely.43

The trouble started when ice crystals began to form inside the air-speed sensors built into the fuselage. Unable to take a sensible reading, the autopilot sounded an alarm in the cabin and passed responsibility to the human crew. This in itself was not cause for concern. But when the plane hit a small bump of turbulence, the inexperienced Bonin over-reacted. As the aircraft began to roll gently to the right, Bonin grabbed the side-stick and pulled it to the left. Crucially, at the same time, he pulled back on the stick, sending the aircraft into a dramatically steep climb.44

As the air thinned around the plane, Bonin kept tightly pulling back on the stick until the nose of the aircraft was so high that the air could no longer flow slickly over the wings. The wings effectively became wind-breakers and the aircraft dramatically lost lift, free-falling, nose-up, out of the sky.

Alarms sounded in the cockpit. The captain burst back in from the rest cabin. AF447 was descending towards the ocean at 10,000 feet per minute.

By now, the ice crystals had melted, there was no mechanical malfunction, and the ocean was far enough below them that they could still recover in time.

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