Back in the days, cars all had manual transmissions. Fast forward through technology and voila, automated transmissions. Like Airbuses and Boeings, the degree of automation—the amount of kick in the stick—affects how one drives. The steering sensitivity of the Aston Martin DB9 varies from the Ford Focus which varies from the Maserati GranTurismo, and on and on.

Is the car operating with a manual transmission, souped up power steering or somewhere in between? If you drive a car, you know the answer by feel. It is through touch, experience and handling that car that you learn how it stops and starts, how it corners, how it takes a hill, or if it is sputtering under pressure and why. The vehicle is unique. Your hands on operation informs you, deliberates with you, engages your senses as part of a machine so you know its paces–the height and depth and breadth it will reach. But even in a car you know backwards and forwards, if you’re on the road with the autopilot on, distant, not communinicating, letting the machine turn over on its own, when you take control again, it can take a measurable length of time for your response to kick in from passive to active. And that’s just braking on a highway.

I believe that stands true for a lot of our daily gizmos.

I believe this autopilot/manual distance between car and driver stands true for plane and pilot.

Take the infamous Air France Flight 447, when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, lost in international waters, and eventually after Herculean effort, found. The ill-trained pilots lost track of what was going on, exacerbating what should have been a minor hiccup into disaster. We know there was an investigation, and hopefully it is still ongoing. I really hope it is ongoing because problems are ongoing. In July, an Air France Bordeaux to Paris flight in July nearly stalled. The near stall makes me wonder about Air France pilots, maybe all post eighties pilots. I’ll let pilots talk about the details of the stall, if they want to discuss it; but I am trying to focus on the bigger picture.

My pilots tell me that these days, their primary cockpit activity is monitoring instrumentation.

I would postulate that drivers drive hands-on, and so should pilots. Flying requires reflexes. Too much automation insulates the pilot from developing and practicing “pilotry”. We all know that sports stars become the best in their field because of the doctrine of practice practice practice makes perfect perfect perfect. But pilots do a lot of sitting back and monitoring when they could be practicing.

Are pilots losing touch? Is there a wholesale lack of connection between plane and pilot caused by automation?

I fear passive monitoring rather than active flying is guilty of dulling the reflexes which make a pilot a superstar. Are all pilots actually learning how to fly? or just how to monitor?

Is there a solution? You tell me.

In an aviation disaster, what happened is never a true mystery. A true mystery is something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained. We know there’s an explanation. We know something tangible happened. There is a tangible explanation. We just don’t know what it is. What happened. Or in what sequence. Or if one or two of the events in the sequence didn’t happen, could the disaster have been prevented.

Most aviation disasters live in a realm of tragic mystery. We are always walking around, picking up the pieces of the puzzle. In fact, there are usually few pieces of evidence to pick up–and the ones we do find crumble in our hands, or they’re inexplicable or perplexing. So when we put the puzzle pieces together, they may fit a multiplicity of ways. There may be huge gaps. Or there may be no way at all to fit together the disparate elements. Oh, sure, we come up with a thousand theories–perhaps a different theory for each time we consider, each time we try to take another perspective, each time we speak to another expert. These experts agree; those experts disagree. Perplexing, an enigma, a riddle the answer of which remains forever out of reach. The alleged mystery—the answered question— remains, all the more tantalizing because we know there is an answer.

As troubling as it is for those of us who look for the answer to “how” it happened, families struggle with fathomless questions a thousand times harder to deal with: why my loved one? Of all the thousands of trips, why this particular flight, why this particular plane, why this January, why this Monday?

Families play the questions back in their heads, rewind their lives and replay the events as if somehow in the thinking of it, they could reach back through time, stop their loved one from boarding that plane, or otherwise change a single factor–make the pilot leave his phone behind. Make the mechanic give that lug nut an extra turn. Bless that plane designer—or the parts designer—with something extra so that on that long ago day when he came up that design, it was flawless. The thing that if it had been done just a little differently, would have kept the tragedy from ever happening. That magic something that could undo what has been done with such conclusive finality. As if the moment could be rewound as in a movie, and come out differently. These are the questions which are beyond inscrutable, profound questions heavy with the weight of life, of love wrenched away before its time.

The answer may be elusive.

But there’s always rigid hard reality behind a crash. There’s always an actual sequence of events that instigated the tragic event.

So any time I see an airline being proactive, I think of lives that will be saved.

Alaska Airlines begun inspecting their 14 Boeing 737 jetliners because of the emergency airworthiness directive issued Friday. Severe vibration occurred in some European flights was due to “lug failure on an elevator control mechanism. The elevator controls the plane’s pitch.”

There are mysteries hanging about 737s such as ITEK & PERM and recently Ethiopia. In the first two it was determined that it was human error.

I have always believed that pilot error alone will not bring down a plane.

This vibration opens a whole new window of possibility of answers to our unanswerable questions. In some of these past crashes where we have not found the answers, is it possible these tragic flights encountered turbulence which was exacerbated by this vibration? Could this flaw have been instrumental in the Aeroflot-Nord B735 crash at Perm on Sep 14th 2008? or to Itek Air B732 at Bishkek on Aug 24th 2008? Or more recently, to Ethiopian Airlines B738 in the Mediterranean Sea on Jan 25th 2010?

So I am glad to hear that Alaska Airlines begun inspecting their 14 Boeing 737 jetliners. I am glad to hear that Alaska Airlines is committed to safety. They should be commended for wasting no time in ordering an inspection.

If only all carriers were so diligent, there might be fewer grieving families. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?