Airline Complacency

A captain returned to the cockpit after taking a bathroom break and found the first officer facing away from the instruments and talking to a flight attendant. Unnoticed was the fact that the autopilot had disconnected and the plane was in danger of stalling.

The incident is one of more than a dozen in an airline industry report in which the pilots failed to properly monitor the flight, the automation or even the location of their airplane. The report, which came out in 2008, is getting new attention in light of the most conspicuous recent example of pilots not paying attention: The Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination and traveled on for another 150 miles before turning back to the airport last October.

Whether these incidents are symptoms of a larger problem in the cockpit is the subject of a debate among aviation experts: Are airliners so automated that pilots are becoming complacent?

The issue will be on the agenda at a three-day conference in Washington beginning today, when the National Transportation Safety Board considers pilot and air traffic controller professionalism.

“We at the NTSB are continuing to see accidents and incidents like the Northwest 188 event,” said a safety board member, Robert Sumwalt. “Here it shows we have proof that pilots are still not adequately monitoring the aircraft flight path.”

The problem of pilots losing track of some aspect of a flight is not new. It has been around, in fact, almost as long as the technology that allows computers to perform some pilot functions. In 2002, Sumwalt was one three authors of a paper that claimed pilots failed to adequately monitor what the airplane was doing in one-half to three-quarters of the mishaps reviewed. That report was done after several incidents, including one in 1996 when the pilots of a Continental Airlines plane failed to make sure the landing gear had been properly lowered before landing.

“Humans are not good monitors over highly automated...