I saw a TV ad the other day; a father driving his teenage daughter to school, talking to her in the mirror. Suddenly a car bolts around him on the left side; it veers in front, cutting him off with barely a car-length to spare before stopping short. The father’s car automatically slams on the brakes. He looks in wonder, saying, “Wow (referring to the computer’s brake application), it really can do that.” The car saved the day. Look how it recognized the threat. It understood Daddy was too preoccupied to identify the danger and acted in their best interests – stopping the vehicle.

It was the scariest commercial I ever saw.

We’ve done it; we’ve glorified incompetence. Automobile manufacturers are selling cars that allow us to ignore the most mundane driving skill – knowing your surroundings. This Dad of the future wasn’t texting or talking on his cell – dangerous habits, to be sure – but casually driving, obviously unaware, no … oblivious, to the fact that Biff Tanner was driving nearby and was late for his date with a manure truck.

What is truly frightening about this ad? We’re quick to condone complacency, deciding the problem isn’t with the driver, but the vehicle; it hasn’t assumed as much authority over us as we need it to. What if he was texting or tuning in a satellite station? Then the viewer would have had no compassion for his stupidity. Throw in daughter, Tiffany and Dad has become overwhelmed with distracting input; a loving father who is bonding with his daughter is now sympathetic. His inferior driving skills are overlooked.

Complacency in the pre-digital days at times ended in tragedy. Three-man cockpit airliners had episodes where job familiarity and routine worked against the crews, breeding a false sense of security. To combat this, changes, e.g. more checklists and cockpit resource management, were devised to keep crews on their toes and question decisions. But rarely did another airliner sneak up, accomplishing an end run on unsuspecting pilots with three sets of eyes scanning the skies and instruments; the pilots were aware of their surroundings.

How Are Technicians Dealing with the Digital Age?

What about us? How are technicians dealing with the Digital Age? I haven’t pushed a roll-along toolbox in two decades, surrendering them to drive an investigator’s desk. When I left, the digital aircraft were beginning to make the decisions, telling the mechanic where it hurt or what didn’t feel right.

I recall one of my instructors at A&P U, Mister Little, first name: Chic, middle name: Ken. He graduated the semester before I started. Every other day Mister Little would come to class with an ‘I-know-something-you-don’t-know’ look on his face. He’d purse his lips, pausing for effect, before regurgitating something another instructor just told him.

I don’t object to instructors borrowing stories from others who have better contacts or history. But I’ve seen design engineers who’ve never dealt in maintenance, presume to know more about fixing airplanes and designing maintenance-friendly aircraft.

The trials of troubleshooting teach us that some solutions don’t come like the prize from a Cracker Jack box. Squawks sometimes make no sense and therefore the solutions are hard learned. In accident investigation, I never sought out the designer. I always went to the mechanic first; they knew the squeaks and groans of an aircraft that has seen some age, punched holes in the sky. The technician was experienced with the noises never heard on the assembly line.

The B777 was the first aircraft designed with a virtual mechanic crawling through the bowels of the jet or trying to remove a slat actuator. This recognition of technicians and their ergonomic trials was a great breakthrough in design. And with these developments, timeframes were conceived.

Any maintenance program that uses controls, e.g. task cards, has developed timeframes. Hours and minutes collected over numerous inspections across the years have been crunched, averaged, and scientifically broken down until the exact amount of time required to, e.g. replace an actuator or nose tire is calculated and tracked for planning purposes. A Part 121 or 135 operator’s mechanics are expected to spit out a phase check in a predetermined amount of time. If you’re a Part 145, the contract you make with a carrier to work on their aircraft hinges on if you can match their times; it establishes whether your repair station loses money or makes money.

And just like Mister Little’s class, it doesn’t require a mechanic’s experience to give a technician their job structure; one just needs to know how to design the original aircraft. There’s no requirement for airframe and/or powerplant certificates, just how to design while removing the thought process from the entire job. For example, if it takes 2.0 hours to replace an actuator, no troubleshooting is required, the R&R has been planned out for you. If it doesn’t fix the problem, ask the aircraft’s computer what’s next, either the aircraft or the manufacturer’s engineers will tell you what to replace next. It’s eerily reminiscent of the Zager and Evan’s song, In the Year 2525, where, “you have nothing to do, because some machine is doing that for you.” One can almost feel the nanites beginning to dull the logic centers, dissolving any conscious mechanic thought.

What makes us irreplaceable as technicians is our experience. We can feel the heat from a bypassing actuator; hear metal against metal in a jackscrew assembly; or sense low frequency vibrations alerting us to a main rotor’s imbalance. Computers and designers can’t recognize the unplannable nor predict the unexpected; these skills are instilled in us through practice. No matter how advanced the technology, we must never let this ability to troubleshoot – this talent born of experience – to atrophy.

The days of driverless cars, pilotless airliners, robot technicians and sky routing made out of digital breadcrumbs are close at hand; indeed they're on the horizon or already being used. But I prefer to learn all there is about my vehicles, processing that information for future tasks. I’m not ready to surrender experience to complacency.