Paris, June 18, 1914: Crowds gathered at the “Concours de la Sécurité en
Aéroplane” to witness 21-year-old Lawrence Sperry demonstrate his newly invented
gyroscopic stabilizer. With his hands in the air, the device flew his Curtiss
C-2 flying boat. Only a decade after the Wright brothers’ initial flight, the
first n “autopilot” made its public debut. As impressive as this public
demonstration was, it was merely a humble, although spectacular moment of
foreshadowing. Even today—110 years later—the process of automating aspects of
flight has not yet fully concluded, leading to deteriorating insight into the
automatic behavior of aircraft systems, and even the waning of human instincts
and intuition.
Controlling Aircraft—From Humans to Autonomous Systems: Rise of the
Machines covers the distancing of humans from their flying machines
through more than a century-long process of “assisting” systems introduction,
the positive and negative consequences of this process, and mitigation solutions
for the negative consequences.