Licensed photo from Shutterstock. Talking about airmanship in the second decade of the 21st century can open a whole lot of issues that in the last century were largely absent from the discussion. I’ve been studying the dynamic of the human-machine interface in earnest since 2001, the year I transitioned to my first fully-integrated, glass-cockpit airplane. By 2010, I had over 5,000 hours of total flight time between the military and six years at a 121 carrier, had been an aircraft commander and instructor pilot, and the notion of re-evaluating my approach to the profession wasn’t in my cross ..read more

Aviation’s COVID19 era began for me while I was completing my own transition training from an airplane that I had flown for almost 20 years (the McDonnnell-Douglas MD-11) to the Boeing 777. While flying the MD-11, I had been an instructor, check airman, and FAA Designee for a total of 15 years. In short, I went from being at or near the top of skill and technical authority on one complex airlifter, to a complete novice and newcomer on another. This was all made complicated by having flown only tri-jets for over 25 years and spent most of that time on a transport built by a different manufactur ..read more

It’s never been an interest of ours to “pile-on” during the days, weeks, and months following an aviation accident. Our approach is to evaluate the facts and findings, and then view them through the lens of contemporary airmanship. In fact, our book (Automation Airmanship, McGraw-Hill Education, 2012) was written during the aftermath of the Air France 447 accident in June 2009, and we took specific caution during our writing to avoid speculation while the investigators carefully evaluated every available lead during the years that followed that accident. We have patiently stood by since Octobe ..read more

Briefing and Debriefing—the Second Principle of Automation Airmanship®—may be the most undervalued influence in today’s modern cockpit. This blog post looks at how pilots at any level of experience can significantly improve outcomes by re-examining this often overlooked and all too frequently overdone airmanship tool. Any cockpit crewmember with even just a few hundred hours of flight time can speak with authority on how flight briefings often contain too much of the “wrong” information and not enough of the “right” information. In some organizations, this has become so commonplace that the pr ..read more

This is the last in a series of posts that began over a year ago; it’s the last leg of an improvement strategy that has covered the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. If you have not been able to follow the entire series from the beginning, the last 12 month’s posts are available as archives on the home page for this blog. The researcher and futurist Ray Amara famously said, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It’s hard to speculate which emerging technology Mr. Amara had on his mind when he penn ..read more

This is the Tenth in a series of posts that will provide an improvement strategy that covers the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Following this post, there will be one more to close out this series which began just over one year ago, in January 2017. If you have not been able to follow the entire series from the beginning, the last 12 months of posts are available as archives on our blog’s home page. When we complicate our lives with new technologies, we often bury the fundamentals while focusing on the faster, higher, farther aspects of progress. Inevitably this approach ..read more

This is the Ninth in a series of posts that will provide an improvement strategy that covers the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. There’s been a lot written lately about the rapid turnover of the workforce throughout the entire global aviation industry—not a week goes by without some major trade publication making the observation, and claiming to understand the solution to the increasingly dire “global pilot shortage.” Over the past few years, I’ve encountered it in every area of the profession; and on a very personal level, I’ve also had the privilege to administer the fi ..read more

This is the Eigth in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Just a few years ago, we went on the record to update an outdated concept, one that had remained unchanged for decades while our industry had evolved to become the technology- and automation-dominant business that it is today. By combining and updating the concepts of Situation Awareness and Mode Awareness, we made it possible for crews to view these two important aspects of contemporary aviation for what they actually ..read more

This is the Seventh in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Sixty-Nine Million. That’s the number of results that the search engine on my computer generated when I typed in the term “monitoring accidents” just a few minutes ago. I’m thinking that interrogating the world wide web with the same query a year from now will provide several million more, and in the decade to come, tens of millions more on top of those. In the distraction-laden environment that our civilization has c ..read more

This is the Sixth in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Good, effective communication is a constant across high-performance teams in any domain. In Automation Airmanship, we apply this truth to working directly with fellow crewmembers, the technology on the flight deck, and around the flight operation in general (that is, Air Traffic Control, maintenance, dispatch and flight following, mission coordination, etc.). It’s not just a recommendation that individuals and organizat ..read more