More pilots now rely on automated flight planning tools  and electronic databases for flight planning rather than  planning the flight by the traditional methods of laying out  charts, drawing the course, identifying navigation points  (assuming a visual flight rules (VFR) flight), and using the  pilot’s operating handbook (POH) to figure out the weight  and balance and performance charts. Whichever method a  pilot chooses to plan a flight, it is important to remember to  check and confirm calculations. deteriorated due to an overreliance on computers. In fact,  BALPA voiced a fear that has dogged automation for years:  that pilots using automation have less “stick and rudder”  proficiency when those skills were needed to resume direct  manual control of the aircraft. Thus, the Veillette-Decker study sought to determine what,  if any, possible differences exist in manual flight skills  between aircrews assigned to conventional and automated  flight decks. Limited to normal and abnormal operations  in terminal airspace, it sought to determine the degree of  difference in manual flying and navigational tracking skills.  Commercial airline crew members flying the conventional  transport aircraft or the automated version were observed  during line-oriented flight training.  Most of the aviation community believes automation has  made flying safer, but there is a fear that pilots fail to see  that automation is a double-edged sword. Pilots need to  understand the advantages of automation while being aware  of its limitations. Experience has shown that automated  systems can make some errors more evident while sometimes  hiding other errors or making them less obvious. In 2005,  the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) raised  concerns about the way airline pilots are trained to depend  upon automation. BALPA felt the current training leads to  a lack of basic flying skills and inability to cope with an  inflight emergency, especially mechanical failures. The union  believes passenger safety could be at risk. The data set included various aircraft parameters such  as heading, altitude, airspeed, glideslope, and localizer  deviations, as well as pilot control inputs. These were  recorded during a variety of normal, abnormal, and  emergency maneuvers during 4-hour simulator sessions.  All experimental participants were commercial airline  pilots holding airline transport pilot certificates. The  control group was composed of pilots who flew an older  version of a common twin-jet airliner equipped with analog  instrumentation. The experimental group was composed of  pilots who flew newer models of that same aircraft equipped  with a first generation electronic flight instrument system  (EFIS) and flight management system (FMS). Concerns about the effect of automation on flight skills are  not new. In 1995, the erosion of manual flight skills due to  automation was examined in a study designed by Patrick R.  Veillette and R. Decker. Their conclusions are documented  in “Differences in Aircrew Manual Skills and Automated  and Conventional Flightdecks,” published in the April 1995  edition of the Transportation Research Record, an academic  journal of the National Research Council. In the February  2006 issue of Business and Commercial Aviation (BCA),  Dr. Patrick R. Veillette returned to this topic in his article  “Watching and Waning.”  When pilots who had flown EFIS for several years were  required to fly various maneuvers manually, the aircraft  parameters and flight control inputs clearly showed some  erosion of flying skills. During normal maneuvers, the  EFIS group exhibited somewhat greater deviations than  the conventional group. Most of the time, the deviations  were within the Practical Test Standards (PTS) or Airman  Certification Standards (ACS), but the pilots definitely did  not keep on the localizer and glideslope as smoothly as the  conventional group. The differences in hand-flying skills  between the two groups became more significant during  abnormal maneuvers such as steeper than normal visual  approaches (slam-dunks).  Analysis of the aircraft data consistently had pilots of  automated aircraft exhibit greater deviations from assigned  courses and aircraft state parameters, and greater deviations  from normal pitch and bank attitudes, than the pilots of  conventional flight deck aircraft.  [Figure 7-2]  The most  The Veillette-Decker seminal study on automation came at  a time when automated flight decks were entering everyday  line operations and concern was growing about some of  the unanticipated side effects. Deterioration of basic pilot  skills was one of these concerns. While automation made  the promise of reducing human mistakes, in some instances  it actually created larger errors. When this study was  undertaken, the workload in an automated flight deck in the  terminal environment actually seemed higher than in the  older conventional flight decks. At other times, automation  seemed to lull the flight crews into complacency. Fears arose  that the manual flying skills of flight crews using automation  Change 1 (January 2016) 7-3 Cockpit Automation Study