Manual piloting almost extinct; Reliance on autopilot has led to accidents

By Joan Lowy

Associated Press WASHINGTON - Pilots' 'automation addiction' has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don't know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.

Some 51 'loss of control' accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association. 'We're seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes,' said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. 'We're forgetting how to fly.' Opportunities for airline pilots to maintain their flying proficiency by manually flying planes are increasingly limited, the FAA committee recently warned. Airlines and regulators discourage or even prohibit pilots from turning off the autopilot and flying planes themselves, the committee said. Fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the U.S. during the past decade. However, The Associated Press interviewed pilots, industry officials and aviation safety experts who expressed con cern about the implications of decreased opportunities for manual flight, and reviewed more than a dozen loss-of-control accidents around the world. Safety experts said they're seeing cases in which pilots who are suddenly confronted with a loss of computerized flight controls don't appear to know how to respond immediately, or they make errors - sometimes fatally so. A draft FAA study found pilots sometimes 'abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems.' Because these systems are so integrated in today's planes, one malfunctioning piece of equipment or a single bad computer instruction can suddenly cascade into a series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to rely on the equipment.