When he passes through town, a friend, a long-time CFI and designated pilot examiner, calls so we can catch up over coffee. Like many people today, pilots or not, an iPad seems permanently attached to my friend. Curious, I asked how many applicants flew with iPads. Many of them, and their number is growing, he said. His first checkride question to them was about their backup for the digital charts. If they don’t have one, the checkride is over. His backup? His iPhone, which runs the same software on the smaller screen.
Overwhelmed by his enthusiastic itemization of the iPad’s aeronautical benefits, an important question did not occur to me until I was halfway home. How has this technology affected the new pilot’s mastery of the art of flight? Certainly, all who pass stay within the parameters specified by the appropriate practical test standards. But I’m curious to know whether pilots are bouncing between these limits like a tumbling numbered globe in the Powerball barrel or fly a specified altitude, course, and speed with variations of plus-or-minus nothing?
Technology can be a wonderful tool, but seduced by its reliable perfections, too often people, not just pilots, surrender their responsibilities to it. And therein lies the problem. Mastery of the aviation arts relies more on how pilots think, how they combine information from every available information source and bodily sense, than it does the control inputs derived from this metaphysical process. Technology is only as “smart” as the people who programmed it. It tells us what to think, not how to think. Perhaps it’s time to resurrect, with a modification, an admonition from my youth: Question Technology!
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