The Dangers of Automation in Airliners
If you are in search of riveting, edge-of-your-seat, real-life stories about people in grave distress looking for a way out, consider the work of Jack Hersch.
In his debut Death March Escape, Hersch told the remarkable story of how his father twice escaped the Nazi Holocaust — through every harrowing step. Now Hersch turns his attention to aviation, delving into the confluence of modern airplane technology and pilot behavior to probe how and why flight disasters happen.
In The Dangers of Automation in Airliners: Accidents Waiting to Happen, Hersch, an instrument-rated commercial pilot, focuses on nine flight incidents and seven crashes over 10 years, intricately dissecting what went wrong and even factoring in the competence and frame of mind of the pilots. To say Hersch makes readers feel like they are in the cockpit is not cliché.
REAL PEOPLE LIVING REAL LIVES
Hersch understands how to write of human drama, as from his opening sentence: “On the last night of her life, 24-year-old First Officer Rebecca Shaw was fighting a head cold … but it wasn’t bad enough to keep her from her job as a copilot for Colgan Air.”
When two Boeing 737 MAX airlines crashed four months apart, that was the impetus Hersch needed to write the book. Those tragedies for him were “the tip of the automation iceberg. Automation in aviation, I learned, was a story with many sides, and it needed to be told.”
People get frustrated with computers every day. When they don’t do what they are supposed to — or when humans don’t provide concise directions — the devices sit like innocent pets without the slightest notion or remorse of what they did wrong, awaiting further command.
When an airplane malfunctions, the stakes are on a completely different scale. Will backup technology kick in? Will the coolness and capability of the flight team have what it takes to steer them out of harm’s way?
Read about one man’s passion with the complicated relationship between man and those ever-so-advanced flying machines.
Watch our interview with Jack J. Hersch here.
