26 June

The tragedy of AF447, where an Air France jet smashed into the Atlantic, killing everybody on board, is a window into the need for proper automation in flying and driving. The jet crashed because the autopilot cut out due to ice on wind sensors, and the experienced pilots had no idea how to fly at altitude without it. (Because airlines don’t allow pilots to ‘hand-fly’ at altitude for any length of time.) If the pilots had done nothing, leaving the previous settings from the autopilot, everything would have been fine. It’s because they tried to fly the plane manually, that it crashed. Good automation needs ‘hand-off’ between pilot/driver and the autopilot. The moral here isn’t that automation is bad, automated flight is all that's safe at altitude. As an experienced pilot told me: “In the flight levels above 20,000 feet, where the air gets very thin, modern swept wing jets have a very narrow speed range between stall and over speed towards Mach 1. You cannot actually fly them safely by hand for any length of time.” Many more people die on roads. Nearly all of them are dead because humans think they’re better drivers than machines. We don’t need fully automated cars, but we need people to use a much greater amount of driver-assist automation. It also uses less fuel, a human is not capable of the precise throttle regulation an autopilot system uses.