ON SECOND THOUGHT
On Second Thought is a monthly, live-streamed aviation safety video series. Eachhour-long episode dissects real-world Human Factor Behaviors to identify why pilots continue to make harmful decisions that put themselves and passengers in harm’s way. And most important, this series offers practical personal develop solutions to improve one’s Aeronautical Decision Making skills.
PRESENTERS: JOLIE LUCAS & HARVEY MADISON
ON SECOND THOUGHT
When Automation Becomes the Risk
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Modern aviation relies heavily on automation to reduce workload and increase capability—but automation can also introduce new risks when it is misunderstood or over‑trusted.
Aviators encounter automation traps through avionics modes and flight management systems. Maintainers face them through software‑driven diagnostics and automated test equipment. Controllers and UAS operators rely on increasingly complex traffic‑management tools. This episode explores how automation affects attention, trust, and complacency, and how aviators in every role can remain actively engaged rather than passively reliant on technology. For aviation maintenance technicians (AMTs), this includes software-driven diagnostics, automated test equipment, and system logic that must be questioned, not assumed.
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Welcome everybody to episode number three of On Second Thought when Automation Becomes the Risk. I'm Harvey Madison, instructional designer for a major and very good reputation uh flight training and uh simulator manufacturer here in the great old US of A. And Jolie Lucas, my co-host, is here. Uh Mooney, owner and driver, psychotherapist extraordinaire. How are things out in California?
SPEAKER_00It is hot, hot, hot here at the beach. It's over 80 degrees. So it's uh pretty 80 degrees.
SPEAKER_01She says to the guy in Texas.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I had the pleasure of speaking to the National Gay Pilots Association on Monday, and that was fantastic using some of the episode materials from one and two. So welcome everybody. We are super glad that you're here.
SPEAKER_01Uh, and uh I by the way, I don't know if you knew, but I actually listened to your, I attended your uh presentation and uh the other night, and it was absolutely fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. So we want to say thank you to Avemco, who is our premier sponsor. And what we love about them is it's one-stop shopping. Whether you're looking for, you know, uh in insurance for your airplane, whether you're a renter, flying club, CFI, all that good stuff. Call the number that's on the screen. And if you tell them that on Second Thought sent you, then you are eligible for a fantastic discount.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Love us some of them co. Uh, I think my dad's been with them for about 300 years, which is interesting because the airplane was invented, what, 1903? Anyhow, uh, also, uh, in addition uh to the fantastic savings that if the mouse curse, there we go, we'll show up. There we go. In addition to getting a wonderful discount, uh, tonight is uh uh just like with every episode, uh, eligible for wings credit. And so if you are a pilot who wants to get wings credit, you can take the quiz after the show and you'll get wings credit. If you are uh an AMT, you can also get credit uh uh through but well get AMT credit as well. They told me not to call it Wings Credit, but uh you know, the AMT version of Wings Credit. Uh if you go to our webpage, which you're on right now, on secondthought.me, uh, and go to the menu, you will see uh a menu full of ways to find out all about Shol Lee and I, uh way uh things to find out about the show itself, how to get uh that wings credit, and actually take the quiz. And also, if you look down on the lower right hand corner of that screen, you will see a little icon with a person silhouette in there. We want you to join the conversation. That's how you do it. You can ask us questions. And Jolie has been absolutely magnificent about uh keeping up with and providing material for our newsletter, and that's where we will address all of uh your questions or your comments. If you want to give us glowing comments, that that would be absolutely fantastic. Uh, there are a couple of people uh that I spoke with recently uh who are instructors from around uh the country uh just last week, as a matter of fact, who said that they will be highly critical. And I said, go ahead, bring it on. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00So we've landed on 100% focus on human factors. And again, we are not here to blame people, we are just here to explain if you have the big gray meatloaf between your ears, you have a human brain, these things apply to you, and we are thrilled to be uh one of the few series that is focused 100% on human factors. We are super glad you're here. Whether you are a pilot, a controller, a mechanic, a right seat companion, um uh CFI, whatever it might be, we are so happy you're here. Some of the most dangerous moments in modern aviation don't happen typically during chaos. They happen when everything seems perfectly normal. Your airplane's trimmed, flight director bars are centered, all your engine gauges are in the green, and if you're a mechanic, your maintenance software says no fault found. If you're ATC, then it looks like your traffic display is pretty quiet. So nothing feels urgent, nothing feels wrong, and that's exactly when attention begins to narrow.
SPEAKER_01Okay, now we're in my comfort zone because I'm just getting conversational now. This is this is what I do. Okay, so automation has absolutely made aviation safer. No one, I I can't think of anybody who would dispute that. That's not controversial. It improves precision, it reduces workload, and allows us humans, us fallible humans, to manage systems that would otherwise be impossible to operate. Ask any military generation six jet fighter pilot. Those airplanes are not aerodynamically stable. No human, I don't care if you're Chuck Yeager, can keep those things in the air without automation. Those, a high amount of automation. For us, not nearly as much, but still. Um it uh uh it makes things, particularly for for you, uh Class Bravo, IFR, arrival and approach uh pilots out there a lot easier, a lot more manageable. But it changes something subtle in us. The human brain allocates attention. It says, okay, here are the things, here's how much attention I have, here's how much I'm gonna allocate to this, here's how much I'm gonna allocate to this. And it's a zero-sum game, folks. If you're if if you're putting a certain amount over here, you only have a certain amount left. And so when workload drops, because you have automation, because you've got that beautiful glass cockpit, you don't have to focus as you or you don't have to attend your your attention nearly as much. And so your vigilance goes down. Well, with vigilance dropping off, you tend to stop actively controlling a system, in this case, a flight, an aircraft, and you start supervising it. And you think, well, yeah, I've got my scan down. I watch and make sure everything's okay. But it's really, really subtle, folks. Supervision can feel like control, but it's not. Something slowly begins to drift.
SPEAKER_00You're absolutely right. You nailed it, Harvey. And so tonight isn't about whether automation is good or bad. We know that automation is good. Tonight's about what automation does to your brain, what it does to us humans. Because whether you're flying an airplane, separating traffic, maintaining an airplane, right seat, companion that's not a pilot. Uh, what we'll be learning tonight is how the automation changes our brain. It shapes how we monitor and interpret data. And then it also has a way of lulling the brain into a place where we might not notice some subtle changes, and that's where we can get into some trouble. So I'm going to start with the psychology part. Again, we love automation, um, but it does change our brains, as we mentioned earlier, when we have increased automation that that decreases our workload in the cockpit or in the office or in the control tower. And what happens is when the automation increases, then it reduces workload, it reduces our vigilance, our capacity, and our monitoring. So as you can see from the slide, our attention is sort of up and down. It's a little bit um surprising, maybe, but you can see the arrow by performance is going up. So as automation goes up, our attention is divided, so there's good and bad, and our performance typically goes up. And what that's called is the automation paradox. So again, automation is increasing, workload drops, your performance gets better, you think you're a rock star, mechanic, controller, right seat, non-pilot or pilot, and that all sounds like a win. But as you can see from the slide, performance goes up when workload goes down, and yet your vigilance drops too. What I noticed on the drive home on the 101, coming back, I was on cruise control. And when you're on cruise control, you're not thinking about that you're going 72 miles an hour, which is my personal favorite in the 65. And so what can happen when you're on cruise control in a car or using automation in an airplane, our vigilance drops. So we're not paying attention to is it 71, 72, 73, because the automation is helping with that. So when our vigilance drops, it's not that we're a bad driver, bad pilot, you know, bad mechanic or tower controller. Um, it's not that we're lazy. It's because our brain is efficient. And when effort decreases, the brain economizes your attention. We relax our sampling behavior, which is cross-checking systems. We check less often and we assume more. Before I move on to the next slide, I do want to bring up two concepts that we discover that we discussed in episode one and episode two. In episode one, it was called the habit of attention. So we looked at how humans pay attention. For any of you that miss that, go back and watch it again, take the quiz, and get your wings credit. What we found out about attention and decision making, which was episode two, is they are both state dependent. So that means your nervous system being regulated. Want you to keep that in mind as we continue on. Excuse me, I'm getting over the cold and it's giving me a little bit of um, excuse me, giving me a little bit of congestion. I apologize for that.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01You're just a week behind me. Oh man, it hit everyone.
SPEAKER_00I know, right?
SPEAKER_01It in the comment section.
SPEAKER_00No, actually, don't tell us we don't tell us how anything I would like to get better so again, the bias with automation, it's not because we're lazy, uh, it's how the brain learns. Remember from episodes one and two, we talked about how your brain is prediction-driven. Your lower brain in particular has two functions. Uh, one of them is to predict what is going to happen next based on the past and what has happened before, and it tries to protect us. So your brain is constantly developing models based on your past experience in the control tower, in the mechanics bay, in the airplane, or around an airplane. So, what happens is we develop neural pathways. When a system is correct over and over again, our automation is correct over and over again, then we tend to update our expectations that our technology is reliable. And for the most part, it usually is. But once that expectation is reinforced enough times, uh something subtle begins to happen. We don't just trust the system, but we actively start looking, we stop looking for any evidence that doesn't support our belief that it's reliable. So we are filtering out anything that does not help the belief that we have about the system being reliable. So again, reliability reduces any perceived threats of errors or instruments that are not acting correctly. We stop looking for that evidence that it might be wrong. So reduced threat also lowers arousal. And what I mean by that is the brain shifts into let's say fifth gear, where we are not checking as much, we are trusting perhaps too much, and we can lead to some assumptions, and we call that tunnel brain. So most people think that we get tunnel brain, like we talked about in episode one, when when we are under a great deal of stress. What happens is different, actually, most times in a in a plane or in a work setting. Um so we think that tunnel vision happens under stress. So we imagine that you know you're bumping around in the clouds, you got the thunder bumpers, you got some rain going on. Uh, we imagine a controller that is, you know, controlling around JFK or mechanic that's trying to get the airplane out so that the customer can have their plane back. Um, it can also be a right seater that is not a pilot that starts panicking and turbulence. But that's only half the story. There's a study from Wickens and Alexander that is in our course resources, if you want to check it out, that showed years ago that attention tunneling doesn't just happen under overload. It can happen when our attention is strongly drawn to a stable cue. Again, if it's reliable, I start to trust it. If I trust it, it's a stable cue. So again, our brain relaxes, we stop scanning. You know, people stop asking questions like, is the engine supposed to sound this way? We stop sampling the environment and doing our cross checks because the stability gives us this idea that we are safe. So I want to talk a little bit about how we can combat or break tunnel brain. That's really important to do, as you can see from our glowing brain. Um, again, this is not a problem with your brain. We don't fight it with anxiety, we interpret it with structure three ways. Here's your takeaway. Widen your scan. When I was an instrument student with Captain Mike Judge in the LA Basin, he could watch me and he could see when I got fixated in my scan. And he would gently remind me to widen my scan and get back. That's the first step of what we need to do, whether it's your flight director, your traffic display, diagnostic screen, etc. Secondly, we need to do some questioning. We need to question the stable signal. If something looks perfect, you know, at some point you have to go, you know, is this really perfect? Uh, what happens if it's not? Uh, when things are very, very stable, then we need to consider that we are getting a little bit stuck. And thirdly, two brains are better than one. I was talking with um some folks in session today about the idea of curiosity. When we are more relaxed, we're more curious, so we can ask somebody to look at what we're looking at and to tell us, hey, are we on track here? Um, do you see what I see? Does anything look out of parameters? So two brains are better than one. And so we're gonna be checking ourselves out. Am I only looking at one piece of technology? Um, how can I verify that things are really stable? Not that just my brain's a little bit on autopilot, and make sure that we are using all available tools, which means our partners, our folks at work, you know, folks uh that have the ability in the airplane with us to be looking at data and telling us what they're seeing. And we're curious. So I'm gonna talk about being out of the loop. And this is from a human factors researcher, and they describe something called out-of-the-loop performance problem, and it happens when humans supervise automation, we're just sitting back and looking at it and observing it instead of directly controlling it. So to us, monitoring feels like engagement, but cognitively it's different. When we're flying, controlling, diagnosing, or sequencing traffic, the brain is continuously sampling the environment. But when automation takes over to start sampling the environment, then I go from an actor to the acted upon. Another way to look at it is I go from the actor to the observer, and the observer naturally just sort of samples less. So another study that we that we uh got this information from is in the course resources again, and it talked about how automation increases our ability to scan and and and widen our attention at first, but then what happens is we take a seat back, and that our abilities that were once sharp are now decreased or dull. So we see that our workload has dropped and our attention gets narrow and has a habit of getting fixated. So I want to tie together the psychology part because that's what I've been doing all week and uh what I'm doing here tonight. I want you to remember these bullet points that are on the screen, that your brain, particularly your low brain, that handles fight, flight, and freeze, is tremendously prediction driven. So it will go back to the past. And if your autopilot has always worked in the past, then you're gonna make some assumptions that it's going to continue to work in the future or in the present. That is an indication that our attention is narrowing towards what's right, and we tend to filter out what's wrong. It's like somebody that has a pretty bad headache, and they think, I want to watch my favorite episode of The Pit or some other show. And so they have a pretty bad headache when they start watching the episode, and then during the episode, they don't feel anything at all. And then when the episode is over, then you think, My headache is back, it was never gone. You just weren't paying attention to those cues anymore. So trust grows as reliability increases. The more that we have a neural pathway that says this is gonna work, then we believe it more and more. And we really, really have to work on um staying situationally aware and not getting lulled into our uh attention being very weak because we really are feeling like the system is going well. So now we're um finished with that part of the psychology. And I want you to really remember to stay curious in your marriages, in your relationships. Relationships with your kids in the airplane, again, any setting, the more that we can stay curious, we're using the top part of our brain that we don't share with our golden retriever, and we're more likely to have a great experience.
SPEAKER_01So uh that was that was really good. And you know, I'm sure a lot of people sitting here watching this are thinking, well, you know, he's he's he's just being nice to his co-host. Uh uh, he already knows everything that Jolie is gonna say. I actually was sitting here thinking, wait a minute, there some things were starting to click. So uh to that point, I want to ask you a question about this. You say, stay curious. One of the things that I have found myself doing when I notice or am told uh uh often uh that I need to be paying uh better attention or more consistent attention is rather than just telling myself that you know I can use curiosity and that actually works really well. Uh, but also I'll try and make like a game out of, you know, for for example, you know, uh a scan in a on a classic steam gauge six-pack. I'm flying uh in VMC, but you know, I'm gonna practice my uh uh my instrument scan, you know, uh where it's where it's hub and spoke with the attitude indicator and try and figure out you know how accurately and uh I can do that, how fast can I do it without becoming inaccurate, you know, that kind of thing. Is there any validity to that? Am I am I fooling myself?
SPEAKER_00Well, you're you're uh you're actually talking about a function of memory, which is we remember things through repetition and association. So that's a little bit different than curiosity, a little bit different brain function. But what we repeat, we we keep it, you know, we keep in our memory. And what we associate with it, if there's a relationship between two instruments in an airplane, if there's a relationship, you meet a couple and and you associate, okay, well, you know, this person's married to that person or their their partners in an airplane. So what you're talking about is a little bit more memory-based than curiosity. Curiosity is a hybrid function. It also means that I need to put back my opinions and my judgments and be curious about how somebody got there. I think I mentioned this in an episode before where I'm super picky about who I fly with. And so if I'm right seat as a pilot and um flying with somebody, then I might ask them when they're doing something I don't quite understand, is like, tell me you're thinking about this on the approach.
SPEAKER_01You know, what the are you doing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, instead of like, what the heck are you doing? Let me take over. So in human relationships, and I think that um what we're talking about is you know, human relationships, research says that if we're interested, available and responsive. So interested and curious are are very much the same thing, but then I'm available to this and that and that I um you know that I can focus on it. So I think you know, I know you pretty well, Harvey. You have a pretty busy mind. And so I think that when you're when you're talking about this curiosity, then I want to know if I don't quite agree with Lena Peak or Richie Peak or you know, where are you intercepted by self, all that good stuff. I want to know how somebody got there with their thinking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So absolutely. Well, I'm glad I asked because uh um I mean, truly, that I mean, that informs me about well, if I'm turning it into a game, I'm I'm performing a memory task. It's a memory task. It's fantastic if you want to remember, you know, if you want to remember but if I want to be curious about what's happening in my airplane right now, right?
SPEAKER_00You know, yeah, you know, little things.
SPEAKER_01So uh okay, and and uh one last question. Actually, you were talking about how the lower brain flight, fight, freeze. There are only three? I thought there were four.
SPEAKER_00Well, you're talking about the amygdalas, which are just located behind our ears, and they're an almond-shaped part of the brain. And it has the four F's, which are fight, flight, freeze, and fornicate. So, what that means is uh males' amygdalas are larger, about 10% larger than females, which they are indicate why men might be more likely to get in a fight or want to run away, um, or want to get busy and procreate.
SPEAKER_01No comment. Um, okay, so um I'm gonna try and stay out of trouble on that one. Okay, so okay, cool. Thank you. I actually have like five other questions, but if if they become relevant while I'm blathering on, I will ask you. So now out of the loop, supervising, excuse me, uh does not equal flying. We kind of hearkened back to that earlier in uh uh in the presentation. So supervision can feel like control, but I want you to think about this. You are a middle manager at a an assembly line plant um in Detroit. You're you're you're making cars, and you're in charge of a team that is responsible for depositing and mounting the engines in inside of all of the all of the frames as as they go down uh the assembly line. Okay. Are you in control of that process? Well, do you supervise it? You tell the workers what to do, you check on it, but your hands are not actually on there. So if all you're doing is supervising all the time, and then suddenly something uh goes wrong, uh, your workers, I don't know, go on strike or something like that. Um then uh do you remember how to uh run the machinery that that does all of that stuff? Well, no, you haven't had to. Now that that's that that metaphor isn't perfect because no one's uh going to be anything more than than highly inconvenienced if uh you know a whole bunch of workers stop showing up to work and uh and a supervisor is standing there trying to remember, okay, I used to know how to how to use this machinery. But when you're on the flight deck and your uh Garmin or your Aspen or whatever, or let's talk about the 800-pound Cap 140 in the room, the autopilot, the original automation, decides uh that it's done for the day. Um and all you have been doing is supervising, but haven't been you haven't really been monitoring that closely. You've you've been lulled into a bit of a sense of trust. Notice I did not say comfort. You have been lulled into a state of trust, then it's going to take you more than a few beats to get back control, get your brain revved back up to remembering everything you need to do, actually performing the task that you need to. Heaven forbid it happens in busy airspace. Uh a lot of people would say, Oh, yeah, it'd be even worse if you were an IMC. I don't know. Uh, busy airspace is busy airspace. Uh to me, anyway. So um, you can't immediately take over what you haven't been mentally tracking. So, mentally tracking things is pretty important. And if your mental model is built on guidance that you've been getting, flight director, anyone, the little you know, pink wings of happiness that say, yes, you're going the right way, or you need to go this way now. Um, rather than actually, you know, checking the things that you had to check when you were taking your check ride, because you weren't allowed to use automation for at least part of it. Um, then before you can take over and uh from the automation, it's not gonna be seamless. You have to reconstruct the situation that you're in right now because you're not aware of it. You've lost situational awareness. Bam, there it is. Drop the mic. Um, and and that delay is really where the risk lives. So let's talk about pilot flying and pilot monitoring. There was a very, very interesting study that was actually the impetus for us putting together this topic for episode three, uh, when automation fails. Um, a study was done of a whole bunch of two pilot crews. Uh, and so you had the pilot flying and the pilot non-flying. And something happens when the pilot flying is happening is is paying attention or believes that they're paying attention to what they need to be paying attention to, and the pilot monitoring is also paying attention to what they think they need to be paying attention to. Here's the interesting thing: they both thought they were paying attention to the same things, and they thought that they were both paying attention to the same things to approximately the same degree of accuracy and capability. Uh they were basically thinking they they had similar sets of situational awareness at the moment. Okay. Uh these pilots were in level D simulators, so just as real as real gets. Uh, and then some automation was failed. The pilot flying was asked to perform a task, the pilot monitoring in a uh in a different episode of uh uh of testing was independently asked to do the same task when the same type of failure in the same situation arose. Who do you think did a better job of quickly and accurately and safely and competently resolving the situation and uh keeping the the flight going as close to uh the the normal plan as possible? It was the pilot monitoring 100% of the time. So the asymmetry there is a safety redundancy. So personally, I can't necessarily back this up with data, though the data might be out there, I just haven't found it yet. I think the fact that we have a pilot flying and a pilot monitoring in modern uh uh uh airlines, uh airliners these days, is one of the biggest reasons that the safety uh record is second to none. I mean, it's just absolutely magnificent. So one pilot isn't quite where they need to be from a safety or from a situational awareness standpoint, they've got the blinders on, they've got the blinders on as they're watching this automated uh uh screen in front of them. They think they're paying attention, but over time, as they have gotten used to relying on this mostly trustworthy piece of equipment, the amount of attention or the things that they are attending to have degraded, they've diminished, they've decayed, but they don't know it. The pilot monitoring, right on it. And this'll really kind of melt your brain, but it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. When the pilot flying and the pilot monitoring changed places, uh the pilot who was flying, who had the blinders on and was now the pilot monitoring, suddenly they were the ones who were on top of everything and and rushed in, saved the day, knew exactly what to do. The point being, when you have automation in front of you and you've got a glass screen in front of you, if you've been doing it a long time, uh, or maybe even not, it's up for debate what a long time means, actually. And that piece of equipment has been very, very, very trustworthy. Don't get me wrong, like we said at the beginning of the show, that's a good thing. Automation has absolutely made aviation from GA up uh much, much, much safer. But it comes with its own set, uh unique set of challenges, and this is one of them. We stop thinking as much and we don't even realize it. So speaking of general aviation, uh, and uh we'll move on to the next slide. In general aviation, we have a problem, and you were probably thinking about that while I was talking about the last slide, saying, you know what, uh that's great for for uh uh multi uh uh person multi-pilot crews. I'm a general aviation pilot, I'm usually the only pilot in the airplane, not necessarily the only person, and that's important as we're gonna talk about here shortly, but the only pilot. So you're alone. It's the same for AMTs. Uh, if you're an AMP, uh and and you're I'm not talking about apprentices, apprentices, you know, get a lot more love and care and attention. Um, but uh there's not necessarily somebody always looking over your shoulder. There are checks and uh uh your work is checked. If uh you will ask questions if if you're you know the hairs on on the back of your neck are standing up a little bit because the machine that you just used to uh uh analyze an engine said something weird. Um but there's still that reliance on automation for uh mechanics as well for maintainers. There's automation in air traffic control. Oh my word, uh air traffic control. I I mean one without automation, they're use of binoculars and a handheld radio, you know, or a light gun or something like that. Think about it when uh uh a basic piece of automation uh for air traffic controllers fails. It's a big big deal. So um the attentional shift that's buffered in a two-crew operation gets amplified when your single single pilot operation. Um and that's because this other human redundancy has been removed. Think about it. In an airliner, you've got the automation, the pilot flying, and the pilot not flying. That's three people, people, two people, and a computer that thinks it knows what it's doing, and most of the time it does. All right. So uh the automation goes out when you're the only human pilot, it's you and only you. So um the automation itself doesn't increase the danger. Again, it's redistributing the responsibility. So all of the monitoring responsibility collapses into your brain. One of the first things that ever just absolutely blew my socks off, one of the concepts that I heard of uh in the aviation industry uh came from our uh co-host here, Julie Lucas, uh, when I found out about her Right Seat Ready seminar uh that she gives. Remember, I said, oh gosh, you know, in general aviation, there's usually just one pilot uh on board the aircraft. Okay. Is there a non-pilot companion who's with you often sitting next to you? Well, okay. They can provide awareness if you give them permission to have that awareness, left seaters. Um, you can uh uh they can they can give you all sorts of information, they can provide structure for you when suddenly the automation goes out and you're trying to hold a jillion things in your head at once, but they kind of know the routine uh of what goes on during a flight and can help be a resource for you. Nobody's saying they're a co-pilot, you have to have your pilot certificate to be a pilot, but boy, they can be useful. They can be really useful, they can make the difference between a good day and an expensive day that our sponsor would not care for. Um, so uh the way that I look at it is they are a cognitive safety multiplier. Okay, they are your ace in the hole, and that is redundancy that is put into the system intentionally by the pilot, by the left seater. So left seaters out there, identify your right seaters. And I'm not, I promise I'm not trying to make this a uh an advertisement, but get them in touch with Jolie. She really knows what they're what what she's doing there. So um automation changes every role, like we said, on the flight deck uh for ATC in the hangar. Um, and we can talk about maintenance automation, uh, for example. Uh we've got uh diagnostic computers, uh, and a lot of those diagnostic computers uh have trend indicators, uh they provide uh digital uh logs uh which which can include uh trend algorithms in them, uh inventory systems. Uh and and and I when I say inventory systems with regards to automation, I don't mean, oh, well, this is going to make the business uh uh supply chain move move much much more smoothly. I mean, hey, did we put that part in that aircraft over there? I don't remember. Add watching it fly away. Well, you can you can go and go and check if the automation is doing what it's what it's supposed to, or if the AMT had the foresight to take down a quick note as well, because they want to trust but verify. Old Russian proverb, trust but verify. And so, you know, in limits, if you're analyzing an engine, if you are testing something about an airplane, uh does not necessarily equal all good, just like um pass to flight review does not mean proficient, it's exactly the same thing. So uh it's violation versus drift. So is some parameter that uh an AMT is getting when they they're analyzing uh, I don't know, let's just do something simple like compressions on a piston. You know, is it technically in spec? Well, yeah, but it's that hair on the back of the neck, and it's not coming from the automation. It's coming from the intuition of uh the AP themselves. And they decide, you know what, I I trust this machine, I normally trust this machine. This machine is the the gray meatloaf uh machine up here, as Julie calls it, is telling me, verify. Um and you may very well find out that your automation has failed, and that's the really insidious uh form of automation failure when you don't necessarily know it's happening because it's subtle, because it happens slowly. Think about what happens to a classic uh airspeed indicator when a pedotube and the static um uh are both clogged up. You know, it it's hard to necessarily tell uh what's happening with it. So now I want to move on to some scenarios. Jolie, will you join me? I want to get your opinion on several of these. And the first one, the first scenario I want to start with is on the flight deck. Um, imagine if you will, it's nighttime. You're an IMC, you're on an ILS approach, the flight director, the happy pink wings are engaged, auto thrust is engaged, autopilot suddenly goes, nope, I'm done, I'm I'm absolutely finished. Uh there's a difference between drift and detection, I think. Or or there there is a subtlety that drift can uh uh has that can prevent detection, I think. So when something slowly happens like that, and let's say you know what, it wasn't the autopilot. Let's say it was the auto thrust, let's say it was something about the thrust. I know most GA airplanes don't have that, but everybody knows what auto thrust is. It's what we wish we had in all of our airplanes. And uh there's no master alarm, there's there's no enunciator, but the airspeed just slowly starts falling off, right? Um that that could be subtle, and that could happen, say, many times over the course of many flights, and it never becomes severe enough a problem for a pilot to pick up on or for there to be any bad consequences, obviously, until the day that there are bad enough consequences. So I want to go back to the question I asked you about, hey Jolie, will play, you know, me playing a game in the cockpit seeing how quickly I can do hub and spoke uh uh scan. Do you told me something very, very interesting. I want to know how the curiosity that you encouraged us to be aware of and maintain and invoke can help in a situation where some form of automation, I just picked auto thrust for this scenario, it could be anything, just slowly starts drifting, you know, and it can happen over the course of many flights. How would that play out? How would that manifest? I've I've just said how it'll happen without curiosity. What would curiosity do to help me on the flight deck when that happens?
SPEAKER_00Well, to me, it sounds like there's two different brain concepts going on in this question. And one can be what's called the normalization of deviance, which means that uh if I wanted to keep my altitude, you know, at 4,000 feet, and then slowly it starts drifting and it's 4,010, 4,020. And so what we can do in that situation is it's like it's only 20 feet. And so that's that normalization of uh deviance. But but um what you're talking about, I believe, is how we can go from this sort of brain function that is just generic and um you know is sitting back to getting ourselves engaged again. So what that means with the curiosity is you're gonna ask some questions like, you know, what's my autopilot doing? What, you know, what are these thrusters of which you speak doing? You know, uh what's my VSI doing? And also remember you've got your non-pilot companions over there that should have an iPad with your foreflight or your flight queue or whatever that you use that has some tools for them to be able to say, oh, you know, our vertical speed, we're going down 400 feet a minute. Is that what you meant to do? So there's that curiosity again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Okay. To that point, uh, I I didn't, I I don't want you to steal too much of your own thunder. I want to move on to the next scenario, which I think is a perfect example. Uh uh VFR to uh a class Charlie airport destination where I think a right seater can really, really uh uh come in uh handy and really help save the day. So imagine, if you will, daytime VMC, uh bonanza, glass cockpit, 15 miles from uh busy class Charlie Airport. Uh and the autopilot's on everything, all the technology is doing what it's supposed to. It's you know, it's organizing the world in front of us, reducing our workload, making everything feel easy, turning off our brains. Um, and suddenly the autopilot, beep, gone. Okay. So almost immediately uh we'll see um attitude and heading information uh become. We let's say that the pilot flying does notice that that is that that's it's not wildly off, but it it is now unreliable. Okay, it's not an emergency, everything's just fine. It's probably not even a pan pan. Uh, but now the pilot has to fly by hand. Oh no. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, but it's a girl pilot on the left there. 7% over there. I think what you're talking about is, and in teaching right seat ready, the companion safety seminar for about 15 years now, is people go from being a passenger to being part of the crew. And so what's nice is if your right seater has gone through right seat ready or pinch hitter sort of training, and or they have some technology with them that is easy for them to remember, like getting familiar with an iPad and your flight stuff, then your right seater can become again part of the crew instead of just being, you know, somebody that is playing Wordle or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And and the the things that occurred to me when I was thinking about this beyond just this particular scenario, are they can notice airspeed trends. Think about what a right seater, a right seat non-pilot companion, has probably done a lot of sat there and observed um uh and absorbed a lot of things without even thinking about it. Yeah, um, and and oftentimes, you know, eventually they do start thinking about it and really start focusing on it.
SPEAKER_00Or what they've been writing down, you know, I always encourage right seaters to have a notebook. And uh with Right Seat Radio, Vemco has provided provided some beautiful notebooks for our right seaters, so that I encourage them to write down uh you know airport information, to write down frequencies. And so if they hear, you know, 6619 or uniform, you know, head on over to 127.72, and the pilot says, yeah, 6619er uniform one two seven point two two, and my right seater has written that down, then they can go, oh, I think I heard this. So yeah, it's it's it's having a partner in the plane, and and so you know, uh as well, right seeders can get a little fixated with technology, but if we're learning about the way that humans use technology and how it conditions us, then I think that we will do better to understand what really happens with automation in the plane.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And and the line that that uh I really like um um that uh I saw in um uh with with relevance to everything that you just said is even though command authority remains with the the the pilot in command, um that doesn't mean that situational awareness isn't distributed. Now, the pilot in command still has the responsibilities that they have, but there's there there's this fantastic resource sitting right next to them.
SPEAKER_00And whether that's in the control cab with other controllers being near you, or whether that again is in the mechanics bay. So to summarize tonight, we've talked about how automation really changes the way that you pay attention. And again, when workload drops, the brain naturally samples less. Stability narrows with attention. So if everything looks pretty good, then our brain goes, cool. I don't really have to double check it. Um monitoring is not the same as controlling. We just talked about that. But supervising puts us, you know, one step back. It's like watching TV instead of being active. And one takeaway that I really want you to all go home with and go back to your real life with is that vigilance has to be intentional. So what I'm doing, what I pay attention to increases. And so I can be curious, I can be skeptical of an automated system. When I got my instrument, it was all steam gauges. You know, I had a VOR, DME, it was all steam gauges. And then when I got my 530 Um W in, it took me a minute to trust that compared to me using my steam gauges. So we have to have a healthy level of skepticism. We also have to have a black cat named Lorelei that's coming to visit.
SPEAKER_01Very important. She has excellent timing.
SPEAKER_00Yes, she's actively cross-checking and keeping her human in the meaningful loop of uh looking and seeing that it's 59 minutes after the hour and that we are ready to conclude.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Uh I the only thing that I really have to say about this is I truly and genuinely learned something tonight, and I think I've got a cute little way to put it. Don't play games, be curious.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Intentional and curious, definitely. So our next she cracks me up. Our next episode is coming up the second Wednesday of every month, and um, we're gonna be talking about the research, about communication.
SPEAKER_01Oh gosh, I am so happy right now to not tell you how brilliant that is.
SPEAKER_00We'll be talking about when everyone heard something different, and so you heard my diet coke going down as well as a few other things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Before we end, I do want to go over some things that are coming up that you might enjoy. So we are teaching right seat ready three times before um before the middle of the year. We'll be teaching right seat ready, March 28, 20th, and 21st at ACI Jet in San Luis Obispo, California. I have one opening left. And then we'll also be teaching um right seat ready and our left seat pilot course at our pilot plus one trainings. We have May 29th and 30th. We will be in the Pilot Proficiency Center at EAA in Wisconsin. And uh the 12th and 13th, we are going to be in Care of Corps Airport, which is in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Before all that, um, Sun and Fun's coming up in April. Harvey and I will both be at Sun and Fun. I'll be presenting for AOPA, and then we have several fun meet and greets with a Vemco and Flying Eyes Optics and METAR maps. And so we look forward to meeting people. And we have uh we do have some OST swag, right, Madison?
SPEAKER_01Well, you're gonna make me get up and get it. Yes, we do.
SPEAKER_00I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_01Here we go.
SPEAKER_00But we do have some on second thought swag that we will make it.
SPEAKER_01You too can. Obviously, the website is on the back, but I this is just a great idea.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and tell everybody what it says in case they think before flight. Think before flight.
SPEAKER_01That's what's in our OST colors, and then on the other side, a very important reminder on second thought.me, hashtag OST. And uh yeah, I've got a gigantic group of those. Uh gigantic couple bags over there. You've got some. Uh also anybody remember you could go to speaking of on second thought.me, the website, and take the quiz and earn FA wings and AMP credits this evening. And uh the website looks like this.
SPEAKER_00Our our premier sponsor of MCO, we appreciate their commitment to safety as sponsoring.
SPEAKER_01Always, always they may be about to start covering cat-related incidents. Uh Jolie. I I I think I heard I think I heard something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, between my Dom and my Advil and my Diet Coke, we're gonna have to talk about a loss, a catastrophic loss.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Okay, the official glitch episode. Yes. Thank you all so much for joining us this evening. Uh, we look forward to seeing you for episode four. Have a wonderful night, Sholie. Have a great night.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Thank you, Harvey. Good night, everybody.