By John Wyman, EAA 462533, Chapter 266 Montreal

“Just what part of ‘Easier and More Convenient’ do you not understand?”

That was the comic strip’s punchline that inspired me to write this. It captured my frustration these days with technology that is supposed to simplify our lives yet increasingly seems to complicate it.

The strip itself showed an older woman with a cane standing in front of a train ticket counter with a person behind the desk, and a large X taped to the automatic ticket machine’s dispenser window next to the counter. It implies she’s wanting to buy a ticket, and the attendant replies, “All you have to do is go home Ma’am, login, pay with your credit card, get your QR code, come back and scan your code here and proceed to the on ramp” …then the punchline, “Just what part of easier and more convenient do you not understand?”

Oddly enough, because I couldn’t find that comic strip, Google found it with just a few keywords in its search! How’s that for a double-edged sword? You swear at how convoluted the technology is, then you see how there’s a benefit to it… go figure.

But how about when it doesn’t help?

Right about now you’re probably saying, “John, you’re starting to sound mighty old, get with the times…” My answer is, “Maybe, but I know it’s not just the old people that feel this way.”

Case in point is a conversation I had with my 28-year-young first officer the other day. When I complained we’d recently had a 20-minute delay due to the automated weight and balance calculations not coming through, like they’re supposed to, about 15 minutes prior to push, he replied that just recently the same happened to him, except it was two hours! He explained in detail why, and then it clicked where the problem was. I’ll explain. Prior to adopting this software, we used to do the weight and balance ourselves and still technically can (because we have other software on our own iPads to do it). However, now it is sourced out to a third party who receives the loading and calculates its balance. That sounds easy enough, except for the people doing the loading weren’t able in either case to summarize the transmitted info to us, as they used to. Fact was that the numbers were no longer reprinted on paper to give to us, and, as such, no one was in a position now to translate what was entered in the “system.”

To me, this sounds all overly complicated, but some magicians somewhere have determined that this is the better way and we’d all better just fall in line… their reasoning being, how about we just take all the thinking out of the process and streamline it. In the end, it doesn’t make much of a difference to departing earlier, but when it does go amok, your flight is certainly going to leave late because there isn’t anyone willing to defog their brains to see how else the airplane can safely push back? E.g. “Comme autrefois, or back in the day.”

 

This leads me to talk next about thinking and memorizing, or lack thereof, these days. That’s the end-all culprit of technology doing everything for you. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? When did you realize that there was a benefit to memorizing your times tables, especially that 2+2 or 2X2 were one and the same? No thought required, right? No one told you so; you just noticed on your own that it is easier to just memorize it and be done with it. Except now we are conditioned to thinking that it’s now safer to enter the data and get an answer. The other day, that happened to me in Rome, where the coffee barista entered 3.30 Euros in his regular battery-powered calculator to determine the change for 5 Euros! I stood there with my jaw to the ground, ultimately deciding to give him some credit for his data entering skills after, “potentially,” a previous hard night out. But yeah, I was being generous.

So…is it me, or are we beset with a new generation that thinks that they can take the thinking out of everyday life? I know our governments want to do that, but when did this train of thought really start to take hold in our society? Has it exclusively been with the introduction of the “smartphone”? Maybe not, but the idea of a phone being smart is just the opposite to the user using it. I think, overall, it dumbs us down. Are we at the point of being so reliant on technology that, if it isn’t there, then everything grinds to a halt? I hate to sound like a broken record again (that’s more for my kids than you), but it seems that the more we try to streamline things that remove people from interacting with one another, the more we hold everyone back. How can we adapt to the change and still retain the common sense to find logical solutions to problems without losing the ability to think?

I’d say that the best way to do this is to do what we can, ourselves. Self-reliance is the key to a strong mind. Sure, we can try to benefit from the use of technology, but it isn’t 100% necessary to use it all the time. Take this article for example. Yes, it may sound like a rant, but guess what? I wrote it, and ChatGPT didn’t have an ounce of input. There is something to be said of our creativity at just doing the basics and using our own resilience to get things done.

I led to it in my last article about accidents, that technology does work, and it is reliable enough if the personnel using it understand “what the heck is going on?” That phrase makes me think of the Airbus A310. It had a particularly nasty habit of activating its approach mode (automatically, no pilot input) and reducing its speed to below green dot configuration, especially when departing and flying too close to the airport, as when leaving the circuit on a downwind leg. If you weren’t on top of your game that day, you could be caught with your pants down, at a high weight without flaps. This means that you are either experienced enough using technology with hiccups like that, or you’ve had a large share of input to its development. The latter shouldn’t be expected. There are only so many test pilots to go around. The fact is that it wasn’t developed overnight. Just like cars, it took engineers a long time to figure out that push button reversers (on airplanes) or transmissions (on cars) were not user-friendly, and testing said that this wasn’t going to work. So, changes were brought about to remedy that…i.e., “Out with the tried and in with the tested!”

 

The other day I was challenged by a retired United Airlines captain coming out of a washroom in Dorval (Montreal, Trudeau for you newbies) who, seeing me in uniform and after a brief introduction, suddenly blurted out “Tell me something, Captain. What is it with pilots now using spoilers at high altitudes on literally every descent that I’m on when travelling on passes with the airline?” I said that, for the most part, it isn’t required, that the next generation isn’t really being taught how to fly efficiently, and most of them are just jumping to their use because it’s the easy way out to accommodate what the controllers want. Few of them take the time and thought to discern what the controller really wants. Controllers, in general, just issue orders as if they were behind the counter at a drive-in restaurant, never fully realizing how those orders are mentally interpreted by the crews. That’s kind of a blanket statement on my part (and I am not inclined to say all controllers are like this, just the opposite, they are essential!), but it sometimes feels that way when you’re on the other end of the microphone, and they are asking you to slow down and descend at the same time! Kinda hard to do without those panels on the wing! Otherwise, for the most part, the clearances are given to pass published restrictions at waypoints with the other sector in mind because that’s what their procedures are, or if in a real jam, when traffic dictates otherwise. In the end, what’s really diminished is our liberty to think for ourselves and, when necessary, ask the controllers, what speed and altitude do you really need or are all restrictions cancelled? Most of the time, they are, and you’re left on your own, but only if you ask or think for yourself!

I hope I’ve made some kind of a point here, but let’s end on a joke…

Q: When NASA developed the pressurized ink pen that apparently cost a million dollars and could work at any angle in space (i.e., no gravity to push the ink out), what did the Russians do?

A: They used a pencil.

Disclaimer: It’s true that a million dollars were spent by someone! Fact is, it wasn’t NASA. I Googled it. The story is published by Scientific American. Read more about it here. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/

Ok. I surrender. Tech wins…

John Wyman, EAA 462533, Chapter 266 Montreal, is a passionate aviator. When he isn’t in the saddle at the airline, he can be found out at the airfield doing any number of things. He likes to fly gliders, practice aerobatics, write, work on airplanes, and fix stuff.