Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 39

Airplane pilots have to manage more complex variables with less margin for error than their maritime counterparts, but long trips can still be fatiguing. The earliest mechanical autopilots worked like the simple autohelm, but with rudder control being augmented by an attitude sensor adjusting the plane’s horizontal tail flaps, or elevators. Nowadays, autopilots are required for most long-range passenger planes over a certain size, and they consist of many subsystem controls for altitude, speed, throttle, heading, and course. While airplane pilots are always busy and can’t just zone out, they do rely on the autoflight systems to manage some of the tedious aspects of flying and to warn them when there is a problem.

Don Norman has studied the interaction of pilots with autopilot. Norman estimates that a pilot flying at 25,000 feet up has about five minutes to figure out that there’s something wrong, then decide what’s going wrong, and finally to recover in order to save the plane and the people aboard.