Does the human mind have limitations when confronted with multiple variables presented during short time windows requiring a life and death decision? I took a course in third year university called “Human Performance” and in the course we pondered the question of “reaction time”. It was postulated by our professor that when a football team was confronted with a “third and one” (American rules) scenario that the offensive team should be guaranteed a first down because of their advantage of snap count cognition. However; any fan of the game has witnessed the defence putting on the stop. After all, a quarter back sneak requires execution after the snap.
Airplanes now have all this automation which is predicated on electronic data flow. In fact, some of the data flow is initiated from conditions exterior to the fuselage. Ice pellets, rain, snow, wind, lightning and thunder are all conditions which airplanes may encounter and hence require the pilot whether automated or not to interpolate. But wait…shouldn’t these automated systems adjust for the conditions? Hasn’t every imaginable metric been created to account for weather events which have now been deployed within electrical circuit boards and decision switches? Has it not been established that auto pilots can now drive the plane from just after take-off to just before landing? Does a pilot dare interfere with the scientific deployment of automation when his / her instinct has been aroused? Has the human mind been compromised through excessive deployment of automation in an environment which carries living souls through the air in a cargo machine?