Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

Author:Tim Harford [Harford, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-04T06:00:00+00:00

Automation

“But what’s happening?”

Flight 447 and the Jennifer Unit: When Human Messiness Protects Us from Computerized Disaster

When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own airplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was shaking so violently that it was hard to read the instruments. An alarm was alternating between a chirruping trill and an automated voice: STALL STALL STALL. His junior copilots were at the controls. In a calm tone, Captain Dubois asked, “What’s happening?”1

Copilot David Robert’s answer was less calm. “We completely lost control of the airplane, and we don’t understand anything! We tried everything!”

Two of those statements were wrong. The crew were in control of the airplane. One simple course of action could have ended the crisis they were facing, and they had not tried it. But David Robert was certainly right on one count: he didn’t understand what was happening.

Air France Flight 447 had begun straightforwardly enough—an on-time takeoff from Rio de Janeiro at 7:29 p.m. on May 31, 2009, bound for Paris. Hindsight suggests the three pilots had their vulnerabilities. Pierre-Cédric Bonin, thirty-two, was young and inexperienced. David Robert, thirty-seven, had more experience, but he had recently become an Air France manager and no longer flew full-time. Captain Marc Dubois, fifty-eight, had experience aplenty, but he’d been touring Rio with an off-duty flight attendant. It was later reported that he had had only an hour’s sleep.

Fortunately, given these potential fragilities, the crew were in charge of one of the most advanced planes in the world, an Airbus 330, legendarily smooth and easy to fly. Like any other modern aircraft, the A330 has an autopilot to keep the plane flying on a programmed route, but it also has a much more sophisticated automation system called fly-by-wire. A traditional airplane gives the pilot direct control of the flaps, rudder, and elevators. This means that the pilot has plenty of latitude to make mistakes. Fly-by-wire is smoother and safer. It inserts itself between the pilot, with all his or her faults, and the plane’s mechanics, its flaps and fins and ailerons. A tactful translator between human and machine, it observes the pilot tugging on the controls, figures out how the pilot wants the plane to move, and executes that maneuver perfectly. It will turn a clumsy movement into a graceful one.

This makes it very hard to crash an A330, and the plane had a superb safety record: there had been no crashes in commercial service in the first fifteen years after it was introduced in 1994. But, paradoxically, there is a risk to building a plane that protects pilots so assiduously from even the tiniest error. It means that when something challenging does occur, the pilots will have very little experience to draw on as they try to meet that challenge.

The challenge facing Flight 447 did not seem especially daunting: thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean just north of the equator. These were not a major problem, although perhaps Captain Dubois was too relaxed when, at 11:02 p.

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