How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower Enthusiasts Redefined Flight with Timothy Schultz

The Problem with Pilots: How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower Enthusiasts Redefined Flight

By Timothy P. Schultz

As a pilot I was surprised to learn that pilots are the biggest problem in aviation.  As a historian I wanted to learn why.  The result was this book and a new perspective on technological change and human adaptation.

The first place to start was the early decades of flight.  As aircraft flew higher, faster, and farther, airmen were exposed as feeble, vulnerable, and dangerous. They asphyxiated or got the bends at high altitudes; they fainted during high-G maneuvers; they spiraled into the ground in poor weather.  Pilots also found remarkably inventive ways to imperil their lives due to inattention, incaution, or ineptitude.  Many of these problems resulted from humans being inserted into complex technological systems where errors in cognition and errors in design clashed and multiplied.  The evolution of aviation described here is in large part the story of how a variety of professionals identified and corrected these errors.

I was surprised to learn how pervasive a role medical experts played in redefining flight.  Flight surgeons, or physicians specializing in the clinical pathology of flight, developed sophisticated methods to investigate and mitigate the limits of human function.  Things like instrument-based flight and pressurized cabins trace directly to their insights, and their collaboration with innovative engineers transformed the human-machine relationship in flight.  This merging of aeromedical and aeronautical expertise was also spurred by influential military leaders seeking to advance the potential of aviation. 

It became clear in my research that the powerful combination of physicians, engineers, and airpower enthusiasts catalyzed a fundamental change:  pilots became servants to technology rather than masters of it.  Surprisingly, this was evident after only a few decades of flight.  Galloping strides in technology pushed pilots to extremes beyond their physical and cognitive capacities, and they ceded their traditional hands-on, seat-of-the-pants control to superior forms of instrument-based and automatic control in order to exploit the domain of the air.  Driven by military necessity, they became human servomechanisms in an increasingly complex cybernetic system (even before “cybernetics” was coined shortly after WWII).  In this sense I claim pilots were reduced to “meat sprockets”—organic cogs in a machine—despite their iconic, leather-jacketed image. 

So what does the historic transformation of the pilot’s role mean for today?  The modern pilot is like the corpse at a funeral: his presence is traditionally expected but he doesn’t do much.  At least this is true in terms of hands-on control.  Despite their commanding position behind a locked cockpit door or strapped in an ejection seat, most of the time today’s pilots serve as observers and managers of complex cybernetic systems that do the actual flying, and do it much better than any human possibly can.  In the US military’s newest jet fighter, the F-35, the pilot wears a special helmet that interprets the environment for her.  In one test pilot’s words, you “look through the jet’s eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world.”  And evicting pilots altogether, a process that started even before the Second World War, has further expanded the potential of airpower—a phenomenon at full throttle in today’s world of drone strikes.

Overall, this book demonstrates how flight has become the province of automation technology that is in many ways superior to pilots and exceeds the inherent limitations of a human master.  Sometimes this leads to disaster.  I present a case study, for example, of a fellow U-2 pilot who narrowly survived the extremes of flight during a high-altitude reconnaissance mission to highlight the traditional and modern challenges of flight.  I also examine why the tragedy of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 resulted from its pilots’ “total loss of cognitive control” that permitted their Airbus A330, a marvel of engineering sophistication, to plummet into the Atlantic Ocean.

As it turns out, modern aviation is not a reflection of pilot skill but a result of pilot failings.  Physicians, engineers, and airpower enthusiasts understood this and redefined flight in order to advance the true potential of aircraft.  If and when necessary, they would use pilots.  Although humans are still essentially in control—they engineer technology, conduct research, write algorithms, fund systems, set goals, make rules, manage systems, and adopt innovations—pilots have increasingly relinquished their customary role.  I hope readers find this historical analysis yields new insights into today’s high-tech (and often unmanned) aircraft and our relationship with progressively intelligent machines in general.  Yet it also shows that our evolving symbiosis with technology remains, in the end, a human story. 

Timothy P. Schultz is the Naval War College's associate dean for electives and research. He is the author of The Problem with Pilots: How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower ENthusiasts Redefined Flight