OUTSOURCING THE MIND: The Digital Controller

摘要

ATC automation will provide powerful new computational machines that meet the conflicting demands for greater capacity, more fuel efficiency, greater flexibility of traffic, and improved safety. Yet what is often forgotten is that the capability to build more powerful machines does not guarantee success. Oftentimes, these systems do not perform as advertised, so the performance of people remains more important than the performance of equipment. Therefore, the safety critical questions for ATC automation is how to provide human controllers the capability to take adaptive action in the event of system failures or novel events and in the absence of detailed knowledge of the circumstances. Even routine activities can snowball quickly with little, if any, advanced warning. The difficulty with automation is that the facts or parameters required for all possible situations must be known or identified in advance. A controller can go back to first principles when faced with a difficult or novel situation and apply general rules of ATC or innovative solutions while automation is still limited in this respect. This means that the controller must remain in the control loop because without them, there is the danger of the controller becoming less than efficient when the need for intervention arises. That need will arise as long as there are software risks and imperfect fail-safe systems. Consider the number of system failures that were avoided because controllers reacted skillfully and rapidly to unexpected events.