Why do pilots still die from not knowing which end is up?
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At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, a study subject is wired for a spin in
the Dynamic Environment Simulator, a centrifuge that excels in inducing spatial
disorientation. (DEPT OF DEFENSE photo)
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(published September 2008 in Air & Space)
On June 26, 2007, while on a training exercise off the Oregon coast, Air National Guard pilot Maj. Gregory D. Young flew his F-15A fighter jet straight into the Pacific Ocean, killing him and destroying the $32 million aircraft. There was no distress call, no attempt to eject and no apparent aircraft malfunction. The weather that day was clear, with calm seas and a nearly cloudless sky. Young was a veteran pilot with 10 years of active service and 2,300 hours of flight time, more than 750 hours of it in F15s. Described as capable, well-respected and well-liked by his colleagues, Young, 34, lived in his hometown of nearby St. Helens, Oregon, with his wife and four children, and was looking forward to the day he could fly for a commercial airline. Until that day, according to fellow squadron members, he was “living the dream.”
As investigators began to sift through the wreckage – what little was left of it – baffled colleagues, family and friends were left to wonder: What might have caused Young to guide his plane straight into the earth at nearly 600 miles per hour? The answer, revealed in an investigative report two months later, was both profoundly unsettling and all too familiar. Young, in the prosaic terminology of the report, “experienced unrecognized [spatial disorientation]” …[that] caused him to misperceive his attitude, altitude, and airspeed. As a result, [he] was clearly unaware of his position and impacted the water.”
In other words: Young never knew what hit him. Despite all the training, all the technology, and all the cumulative experience and knowledge of the effects of flight on human physiology, Young apparently had no idea he was traveling down at a rate approaching 30,000 feet per minute.
Since man first took to the air, the challenge of safely navigating through three-dimensional space has proven a stubbornly vexing problem. Nearly every pilot, no matter what they fly or their level of experience, has experienced a physical sensation that the plane is doing something different than what it actually is. With sufficient visual cues a pilot will generally catch the discrepancy and, if necessary, make a correction. But if left unchecked or if the pilot reacts incorrectly, bad things happen.
Once called pilot vertigo or aviator’s vertigo, spatial disorientation remains a persistent killer. Federal Aviation Administration statistics show that about 15 percent of general aviation accidents are spatial disorientation-related, most of which occur in clouds or at night, and 90 percent of which are fatal. The crash of John F. Kennedy Jr. the night of July 16, 1999 off the island of Martha’s Vineyard, in which he was killed along with his wife and her sister, famously brought attention to the consequences of spatial disorientation. According to one study, the average life expectancy of a non-instrument rated pilot who flies into clouds or instrument conditions is 178 seconds.
A U.S. Air Force review of 633 crashes between 1980-89 showed that 13 percent were spatial-disorientation-related, resulting in 115 deaths and more than $539 million in losses. Among high-performance aircraft, the rate was higher, with 25-30 percent of Air Force fighter crashes being spatial disorientation-related. And in contrast to general aviation accidents, a majority of these occurred in daylight and in visual flight conditions, according to a U.S. Navy study. Like Maj. Young, the average age the pilots involved were 30 years old, with 10 years in the cockpit and 1,500 hours of 1stpilot or instructor time, and to have flown 25 times in the prior three months. All of which shows that no amount of expertise, training or experience immunizes one against the effects of spatial disorientation.
As human beings, we maintain our orientation and posture through our sense of vision; our sense of equilibrium as governed by our vestibular system – that labyrinthine series of ducts and canals located in our inner ear; our muscle-sense or proprioception, sensors in our muscles and joints that inform us of our body’s position (standing up versus sitting down, for example); and our sense of gravity, or what we perceive as up and down. It allows us to walk from our living room to our refrigerator to grab a cold drink. It is a good system, evolved over eons of human evolution, and well-adapted for navigating across terra firma. But it is easily fooled. Consider the sensation of motion while sitting on a train when the train on the adjacent track begins to move. Or the challenge of stepping onto a broken escalator and not trying to time your step. Habit and expectation, as well as physiology, can work to deceive us.
Once we get into the air, things get more complicated.
Early aviators not only faced the challenge of navigating over terrain that looked startlingly different from the air, but were also confronted by an assault to their senses, or “disturbances of equilibrium,” as Orville Wright described them. Up until World War I, most flights were done during the day, limited to short cross-country hops in straight-and-level flight. Few risked flying at night, and fewer still flew into clouds, or at least lived to tell about it.
Research in the 19thand early 20thcenturies by men such as Jean Pierre Flourens, Ernst Mach, Josef Breuer and Robert Barany helped shed light on the vestibular system and its importance in maintaining equilibrium. Barany devised a swivel chair to demonstrate the effects of spatial disorientation. Today, the Barany chair remains the primary tool with which to demonstrate to pilots the effects of spatial disorientation.
At an FAA-sponsored safety seminar in Rhode Island recently, program manager Jack Keenan offered me a seat in a Barany chair, a device not unlike a barber’s chair with an ersatz control stick attached. As a small group of other pilots stood around, he placed a blindfold over my eyes. He then began to spin me in the chair to the left, telling me to move the control stick in the direction in which I sensed the spin. I dutifully moved the stick to the left.
As Keenan gently turned the chair, he said to the group, “Your body keeps you alive. We learn to recognize cues from our environment.” The problem, he said, “is that our bodies are meant to walk on earth.” As he spoke, the chair seemed to quit spinning. I moved the stick to the neutral position. Keenan then rattled off a litany of phenomena ready to befall unsuspecting pilots: the leans, the graveyard spiral, the inversion illusion, the elevator illusion, false horizons. As he did so, the chair then seemed to reverse direction, spinning to the right. I moved the stick to the right. There was some tittering among the group. Keenan then pulled off the blindfold, and I saw that the chair had stopped. “Get up carefully,” warned Keenan, helping me to my feet, “you’re still spinning.” Three other volunteers followed my lead. In each case, Keenan first got the chair spinning. After a bit, he then gently brought the chair to a stop. And in each case, the volunteer moved the stick exactly as I did.
As it was later explained to me, the inner ear is designed to detect motion, or rather, acceleration. Thus when the chair began to turn, I sensed it. However, once the turn was stabilized and constant, the fluid in my inner ear returned to equilibrium, and without the benefit of visual cues, I could not tell the difference between the turn and sitting still. So when the chair stopped turning, I sensed it as a turn in the oppositedirection.
Vestibular illusions fall into two categories: somatogyral for spinning illusions (“somato”being Greek for body), and somatogravic for acceleration illusions. The Barany chair demonstrates a basic somatogyral illusion. In the air, a plane in a stable, level turn will feel the same as a plane in straight-and-level flight. If the plane is returned to straight-and-level flight, or if the bank is decreased, a pilot’s natural reaction would be to make a correction that would steepen the actual turn. If at the same time the pilot’s head was tilted – say, reading a map or picking up a pencil – the deception to the vestibular system would be compounded along a third axis, meaning that when the plane returned to straight-and-level flight or the pilot’s head lifted, he or she would sense not only a turn in the opposite direction but a feeling of pitching up or down.
Somatogravic illusions refer to situations in which a plane that begins accelerating will feel the same as one climbing, and a plane decelerating will feel the same as one descending. Because humans are designed to exist on the surface of the earth, where the force of gravity pulling us toward the ground is more or less constant, or 1 G, our vestibular system cannot distinguish the difference between pitch and acceleration. Today’s full-motion simulators take advantage of this fact to create the illusion of flight. For example, as the pilot inside the simulator pod moves the throttles forward for takeoff and sees and feels the “plane” accelerating down the runway, the pod itself begins to tilt up. The motions created by the devices are so realistic, in fact, that people have become airsick without ever leaving the ground.
Within these two categories fall a variety of illusions with picturesque names such as the leans, the graveyard spiral, the Coriolis Illusion, the elevator illusion, the inversion illusion, and the “Giant Hand” illusion (see sidebar).
The limitations of our vestibular system, which cannot detect a roll rate of less than two degrees per second, make it hypothetically possible to be a passenger sitting on an airliner that gently begins a bank, then continues the bank on through a full roll, and never know the difference. And with the benefit of centrifugal force, you could even have a cup of coffee on your tray table and never spill a drop – blissfully oblivious to the aeronautical stunt just completed.
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It was long thought that pilot recruits could be screened for susceptibility to vertigo or trained to resist it. The Ruggles Orientator, introduced in 1917 by inventor William Guy Ruggles, consisted of a seat mounted within a gimbal ring assembly that enabled the candidate to rotate along the pitch, roll and yaw axes. The device was stated to be useful for “developing and training the functions of the semi-circular canals …for training aviators to accustom themselves to any possible position in which they may be moved by the action of an aeroplane while in flight.” It was further claimed that the aviator could be blindfolded “so that the sense of direction may be sensitized without the assistance of the visual senses. In this way the aviator when in fog or intense darkness may be instinctively conscious of his position.”
Unable to live up to these claims, the Ruggles Orientator was quickly abandoned for its designed use, though would later prove a valuable model for future flight simulators.
Around the same time, Elmer Sperry invented the first gyroscopic turn indicator, based on a similar device he invented for use by ships at sea. This joined his gyroscopic compass for what would later be the core of the panel suite for instrument flight. But as late as 1928 the idea of flying solely by reference to instruments or “flying blind” remained as foreign as travel to distant planets. Pilots, a proud lot, were convinced that skill and instinct their most valuable tools.
In 1926, Army Air Corps Capt. William Ocker, who had been experimenting with Sperry’s turn indicator, took a medical exam that included a spin in a Barany chair to test his vestibular system. Experiencing the same spinning illusion, he came to the revelation, writes William Langewiesche in Inside the Sky (Pantheon, 1998), “that instinct is worse than useless in the clouds, that it can induce deadly spirals, and that as a result having gyroscopes is not enough, that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the difficult discipline of an absolute belief in their instruments.” Ocker, with the zeal of a baptist minister, began preaching the necessity of developing procedures and instructional programs in instrument flight. His superiors, however, were not ready to hear this. Twice the Army had Ocker hospitalized to test his sanity (Later, in 1932, a vindicated Ocker coauthored the first treatise on instrument flying, Blind Flying in Theory and Practice).
In 1927, a group of scientists and pilots that included Sperry and a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD aeronautics graduate and Army Air Corps lieutenant named James Doolittle built the first artificial horizon, a gyroscopic device that gave the pilot a pictorial representation of the airplane’s attitude in relation to the horizon. Using it, Doolittle in 1929 made the first flight and landing completely “under the hood,” thus proving the feasibility of instrument flight. Though it would be years for instrument flight to be an every day reality, the panel configuration devised by Doolittle remains the standard in aviation today.
Making trustworthy instruments was one thing, but making pilots trust them was another. At first, pilots reported the instruments only seemed to work in clear weather, that they suddenly went haywire in clouds, indicating turns the pilots were certain the plane was not making. Of course, the instruments worked just fine. The pilots had to be taught to resist their instinct to fly “by the seat of their pants.”
But gradually instrument flight caught on. In the years after World War II, instrument flight training became standard for military and commercial aviation. Procedures were developed, training refined and, with the help of the federal government, an entire system of radar, radio communication and navigation aids were built that truly made all-weather flying safe and practical.
Today, primary flight training for all pilots requires instruction on flight by reference to instruments and recovery from unusual attitudes, in which the flight instructor has the student close his or her eyes while the aircraft goes through a disorienting series of turns, climbs and descents, and then has the student return the plane to straight-and-level flight. Military aviators, in addition to periodic proficiency reviews, attend refresher courses every five years in human physiology that includes training in spatial disorientation.
The limitations of such training, admits Rogers Shaw, a director at the FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute in Oklahoma City, is that the student knows and expects to have to make a correction. Spatial disorientation is so insidious, and the sensations it creates so compelling, that unless you suspected you had a problem, you would never know there was one. Unlike other airborne emergencies – an engine quitting, loss of electrical power, smoke in the cockpit – there’s no principal event to indicate anything is wrong. The pilot may realize something is not quite right, but may react too late, or in a way that aggravates the situation. Or, as in the case of Maj. Young, the pilot may not react at all.
“Unless you’ve been in a Barany chair or experienced it for yourself,” Shaw says of spatial disorientation. “You just don’t know."
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| Coast Guard and US Navy vessels search off Martha's Vineyard for the wreckage of the plane flown by John F. Kennedy Jr. after its disappearance July 16, 1999. |
The investigation of an air crash, says Richard Bunker, of the Massachusetts Aeronautical Commission, who investigated the JFK Jr. crash for the state, is a process of elimination. You start with the airplane. Was the engine working? Was there enough fuel? Was there anything the matter with the airframe? Were all the control mechanisms functioning?
After eliminating structural or mechanical problems, you look at external factors such as weather.
Then the investigation turns to the pilot. You examine their training and experience, their medical history, their life situation and possible extenuating factors. Eventually, Bunker says, the evidence and the circumstances point to “well, maybe we’re looking at spatial disorientation.”
In the case of Kennedy, Bunker says, the pieces came together fairly quickly. Kennedy was not instrument rated. He was flying at night over water with visibility as low as three miles in haze, meaning there were few lights and no visual horizon for outside reference. About 10 miles from the Vineyard, he inexplicably deviated from course and made a number of maneuvers suggesting he may have been lost or disoriented. The final radar track of the plane showed it in a tightening right-handed turn – the telltale sign of a graveyard spiral – that reached a descent rate that exceeded 4,700 feet per minute before the plane impacted the water.
Of course, no one knows for sure. “There are questions we will never be able to answer” Bunker says of the Kennedy crash. “You can’t get inside someone’s head, which is what you really need to do.”
In the case of Maj. Young, it was all over in less than a minute.
Young flew the lead aircraft in formation of two F-15s in an air combat exercise against two F/A-18s over the Pacific Ocean, about 42 nautical miles west of Cape Arch, Oregon. The weather that day was reported as mostly clear, with a scattered layer of clouds between 24,000 feet to 26,000 feet. The visibility was 10 miles or greater, with the horizon discernable in all directions. The water surface was, according to the investigation report, “unusually calm.”
Young (call sign “Grumpy One”) and his wingman, Lt. Col. Paul Fitzgerald (“Grumpy Two”) were line abreast about four miles apart at about 11,000 feet heading toward the two F/A-18s (“Cowboy One” and “Cowboy Two”), which were line abreast about a mile apart at 15,000 feet. As the four aircraft merged, the two F/A-18s turned toward Fitzgerald.
While his wingman engaged the two F/A-18s, Young began a climbing right turn that peaked at an altitude of 18,800 feet, then began descending back in the direction of his wingman and the other two aircraft at an average rate of 16,600 feet per minute.
At 10,000 feet, Young radioed his wingman, telling him, “I’m gonna go low.”
As he did so, one of the F/A-18s, “Cowboy Two”, having maneuvered into position behind Grumpy Two, then radioed over a common frequency monitored by all the pilots that he had “killed” one of the two F-15s.
Misunderstanding the radio call, Fitzgerald, radioed to Young, “I think he made a call on you.”
In the 15 seconds that transpired since he first told his wingman of his plans to “go low,” Young’s descent rate had nearly doubled to 30,000 feet per minute. At just below 5,000 feet – a “floor” for the exercise set to allow for a margin of safety at which Young should have broken off the engagement – Young radioed back to his wingman, correcting him, “Sounds like you’re dead.”
The attacking F/A-18 radioed again, “Grumpy you copy kill F-15 at 15,000 – 12,000 now?” in order to get the F-15s to acknowledge his previous kill call and to get the “killed” plane removed from the fight.
Six seconds later, still descending in a more-or-less straight line, Young radioed back in acknowledgement, “Aux, Grumpy copy” (“Aux” being the common frequency used by the planes).
Two seconds after this, Young’s plane hit the water.
Young’s wingman told investigators all he saw was “a big white splash that reminded me of Niagara Falls.”
Following an extensive search-and-rescue operation, the remains of Maj. Young were recovered along with some of the wreckage, the pieces of which were no larger than “a small trash can.” Young was given a hero’s farewell in his hometown of St. Helens with a service attended by family and friends, members of his squadron, the Governor of Oregon, and the Oregon National Guard Adjutant General. He was given a 21-gun salute and a “missing man” flyover by four F-15s.
Meanwhile, a team dispatched to investigate the crash began its work out of hangar at Portland International Airport. With the plane nearly completely destroyed, an analysis of the aircraft and airframe was limited to a review of the plane’s maintenance records and interviews with ground personnel. These, along with the fact that Young never indicated any problem and the plane performed as expected, showed nothing to suggest there was anything mechanically wrong.
With plane’s flight data recorder also destroyed, investigators were limited to reconstructing the plane’s flight path using radar tracking data, videotapes of the other planes’ head-up displays and data from their flight recorders, in addition to testimony of the other pilots. From this, investigators determined that Young’s plane hit the water at an angle of 24 degrees and a speed of greater than 550 knots.
Young was a highly experienced and capable pilot. He had no outstanding medical conditions nor was he taking any kind of medication that might have posed a problem. According to interviews, he had plenty of rest and was in good spirits. Young’s flight suit and life support equipment showed it to be in working order. His radio calls were appropriate for the flight, and indicated no problem.
Young’s helmet showed he had a head-up posture, indicating he was conscious at the time of impact. An analysis further suggested Young was looking up and slightly to the right, not at the ocean in front of him, not at his head-up display nor at his instruments. An examination of his anti-G suit indicated it was not fully inflated, so Young was not pulling significant Gs to arrest his descent.
Increasingly, the evidence pointed to spatial disorientation.
Military aviators use the term situational awareness to describe a pilot’s ability to accurately comprehend and react to the environment around them. That is, to know what’s going on. In general, those with superior situational awareness will fight more successfully. Young, in addition to maintaining control of the plane, had to interpret information from his radar warning receiver to prioritize threats, visually search for “hostile” aircraft, determine who was “killed” by adversary aircraft, and maneuver his plane to a position of tactical advantage.
Work overload, or “task saturation,” the investigation speculated, may have contributed to a situation in which Young was so focused on maintaining an awareness of what was going on outside the plane, that he “relegated the task of maintaining aircraft control to his subconscious, thereby relying on his internal sense of his position.” That is, he left it to instinct. The report noted that though Young was an experienced pilot who was undoubtedly proficient in managing these tasks, the report noted, “even the most skilled aviators are susceptible to task saturation.”
As evidence, the report pointed to the fact that Young blew through the 5,000-foot floor of the exercise. Fellow pilots interviewed told investigators that they would normally set the altitude warning to go off 4,500 feet above the floor, or 9,500 feet in this case. If Young did the same, he would have received an audible “warbling” alarm in his headset for several seconds after descending through 9,500 feet. However, Young may not have “mentally processed the information because” his attention on the other aircraft, the report noted.
Add to this the weather and visual conditions: no clouds and calm seas. There would be no visual cues with respect to Young’s altitude and, in fact, little to distinguish between sky and earth. As Young went from a climb to descent in his final maneuver, he would be susceptible to a somatogravic illusion that would lead him to believe his dive angle was much shallower than it actually was. He may, in fact, have thought he was inverted. The fact that his rate of descent increased significantly in the final seconds before impact indicates that Young “may have even believed he was climbing in the final moments, although he was actually still descending.”
The report is careful not to blame Young. His crash, it reminds us, is proof that “the most effective defense against [spatial disorientation]… is the pilot’s frequent instrument cross-check to insure actual flight path matches perceived flight path.” Of course, Young knew this. It is the same mantra given to pilots since the days of Doolittle. While it would be easy after the fact to accuse Young of having let complacency creep into his cockpit discipline, there’s no evidence to back it up. A far less satisfying conclusion, but one nonetheless borne out by the grim statistics of crashes similar to his, is that Young was simply confronted with a series of circumstances that he was neither psychologically nor physiologically able to deal with.
Or, to be more fatalistic, Young’s crash proves how limited our progress against spatial disorientation has come. If a pilot of Young’s caliber can’t be saved, who can?
Modern cockpits put a wealth of information at pilots’ fingertips. In addition to primary flight information (attitude, airspeed, altitude, heading), today’s electronic displays provide an abundance of information: weather, air traffic, terrain, their route, moving maps, fuel management and engine monitoring, airport information and, for military aircraft, airborne and ground-based threats, weapons systems, targeting information – all of it integrated into large, easy-to-read displays instead of multiple needle-and-dial gauges.
Combined with advances such as HUDs (head-up displays, in which critical flight information is centralized and projected through a transparent display mounted above the instrument panel, thus allowing the pilot a continuous view directly in front of the aircraft), forward-looking infrared (or FLIR, for vision at night), helmet-mounted displays that project flight information on the helmet visor so the pilot’s head is free to move, and three-dimensional “highway in the sky” displays (or HITS, in which the display provides a “pilots-eye view” of the earth and terrain, and projects a pathway for the pilot to follow), today’s pilots have the capability of maintaining a level of situational awareness that their predecessors never dreamed of having.
In general, says Bill Ercoline, a scientist for California-based Wyle Laboratories who provides human factors research for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks City-Base in Texas, this is a good thing. But when it comes to countering spatial disorientation, the new displays create their own problems. Studies of unusual attitude recovery using head-up displays found that HUDs actually could interfere with recovery times. In addition to issues of the displays’ narrow field of view, the non-universal symbology employed from manufacturer to manufacturer, and the non-intuitive nature of the displays, there’s simply too much information to process. “It’s like drinking through a fire hose—it’s just difficult to get the right gulp,” Ercoline says. With so many more systems to manage and monitor, pilots end up devoting less time to actually flying.
Among the new technologies developed or under study are helmet-mounted control systems, or “super cockpits” that allow systems to be controlled using a combination of eye movements, voice commands and tactile sensors operated by hand or finger movements. The advantage, from a spatial disorientation standpoint, is that the systems can be operated without the redirection of the pilot’s head, thus reducing pilot susceptibility to spatial disorientation in certain circumstances.
The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, developed a multi-sensory system to enhance a pilot’s spatial awareness. Called the Spatial Orientation Retention Device (or SORD), the system incorporates a helmet-mounted flight display with a headset with thee-dimensional audio sound and a special suit that has miniature vibrating devices embedded in the fabric. In addition to giving the pilot a constant visual display of critical flight information, the system uses combination of Doppler-like varying pitched sounds and a series of bodily taps to alert the pilot to the direction of the immediate threat – whether it is air traffic or the ground. The Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Florida, has used similar technology to develop the Tactile Situation Awareness System.
These systems are, Ercoline admits, just alternative ways of conveying the same information portrayed in other visual cockpit displays. They are based on the premise that by using the underutilized sense of touch it will command a pilot’s attention more effectively than traditional cockpit displays or warnings. How effective they are remains to be seen. Due to budget constraints and a noticeable drop in the rate of major aircraft accidents, the Air Force decided to close the program in 2004. “We did most of the research, integrated the technology, and even developed a prototype system, but unfortunately we never got to test it on actual pilots,” Ercoline says.
The drop in accident rates, some say, may say less about the success of current Air Force training and countermeasures for spatial disorientation than it might appear. Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a high “ops tempo,” or increase in the number of missions and hours flown in support of those operations, has meant comparatively fewer hours flown in air combat training or missions that pose higher risks for spatial disorientation-related accidents.
A number of foreign air forces – among them Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, India, Greece and Turkey (to name a few) – have purchased high-end simulators capable of inducing vestibular and visual illusions and incorporating the machines as part of their standard pilot training. The simulators, which go far beyond the Barany chair, cost as much as $40 million and require large, dedicated buildings capable of withstanding the high torque loads generated by the centrifuges that can rotate along all three axes. The hope is that by exposing pilots to various situations, it will not only reinforce what they already know but instill better cockpit discipline.
The U.S. Air Force also has taken a different tack. Led by NASA and a team at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, it has developed an autopilot that engages when the pilot is unconscious or unaware that he or she is about to hit the ground. The Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (or Auto-GCAS) evaluates a variety of factors (aircraft weight and performance, navigational information, terrain and elevation data) to constantly calculate the aircraft’s position, the time before impact and the maneuver required to prevent a collision with the ground. Whenever the system determines a collision is imminent, meaning that the plane is within 1.5 seconds of the “point of no return” and no action has been taken yet by the pilot, it will take control of the plane and perform an automatic rescue maneuver. The system, developed and tested over the past two decades, is now ready for use with F-16 and F-22 fighter jets. The Department of Defense says it hopes the system will virtually eliminate “controlled flight into terrain” crashes from spatial disorientation or G-induced loss of consciousness.
Had Maj. Young’s plane been equipped with such a device, says William Albery, a senior research scientist at Wright-Patterson, “he would be alive today.”
While GCAS will certainly help, says Albery, it won’t completely eliminate the problem of spatial disorientation. As long as there are human pilots on airplanes, he says, and even pilots not on airplanes, as there have been several incidents in which pilots who remotely fly aircraft have lost control due to spatial disorientation, there exists the susceptibility to spatial disorientation. The only way to completely eliminate the problem, he says, is to develop fully automated aircraft.
While GCAS will certainly help, says Albery, it won’t completely eliminate the problem of spatial disorientation. As long as there are human pilots on airplanes, he says, and even pilots not on airplanes, as there have been several incidents in which pilots who remotely fly aircraft have lost control due to spatial disorientation, there exists the susceptibility to spatial disorientation. The only way to completely eliminate the problem, he says, is to develop fully automated aircraft.
Yet, whether the world is ready for that is another question. There’s an old joke among those in aircraft automation: Because people will never be completely comfortable with the idea of a pilotless plane, the cockpit of the future will have a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog; the dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.
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