WN TBD: The Price of Automating Aviation
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2019
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg appeared in front of Congress. He was there to answer questions about what his company knew, and when, before two 737 Max airplanes crashed and claimed the lives of 346 people.
But beyond the planes’ technological failures is another key issue: the way pilots react when automated systems go wrong.
Guest: Jon Ostrower, Editor in Chief of The Air Current
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This past summer, John Ostrower went on a test flight. |
| 0:07.9 | He writes about aviation, so this isn't entirely unusual. |
| 0:11.5 | He used to cover it for the Wall Street Journal and now runs a website called the Air Current. |
| 0:16.3 | But the technology that he was testing, that's the amazing part. |
| 0:19.8 | He was in a small private plane, a Piper M600, flying at about 3,000 feet. |
| 0:25.5 | And he was with the company Garmin. |
| 0:27.6 | It makes GPS systems. |
| 0:29.3 | They said, hey, press the button. |
| 0:30.9 | And the button on the dashboard says, emergency auto land. |
| 0:33.5 | You press the button, and it starts talking to you. |
| 0:36.4 | It says, emergency auto land activated. |
| 0:39.0 | Please remain seated. |
| 0:40.5 | We're landing at the nearest airport. |
| 0:42.0 | And the airplane takes over. |
| 0:47.5 | It will fly you to the nearest airport. |
| 0:51.0 | It will fly around weather. |
| 0:52.8 | It will put the flaps down. It will lower the landing |
| 0:55.4 | gear. It will go into a holding pattern to descend if it needs to. It'll find effectively a GPS |
| 1:00.1 | approach to fly the airplane right to the runway. So I'm sitting in this airplane. We're coming |
| 1:07.0 | down through the clouds, pop out underneath the clouds, and we land right on the center line of the runway. |
| 1:17.0 | It all just happens. |
| 1:18.6 | Not a single interaction from a human. |
... |
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