Automation – Friend or Foe?
This is the first in a series of articles on automation, the increased levels of automation and the potential risks associated with this. This first post will focus on what automation is and why it has become so prevalent in aviation. Automation in our lives Automation has become part of daily life for people across many industries. However, as indicated by the fact that scholars and developers alike often draw on experiences from aviation, only some have achieved the level of human-machine automation integration that aviation has. As technology becomes more and more capable and the perception that automation can perform various tasks more efficiently than humans remain, the level of automation will continue to increase. It may be argued, though, that while the original intent of automation was to assist and aid the human operators, there are indications that the situation may have started to move towards a level of automation where the human is being pushed further than what may be safe through other issues arising from these high levels of automation. When automation in aviation is discussed, manual handling is often the first topic that is put into question. Though this is of great importance, many other […]