In a 1950s magazine ad for Pan American Airlines, a Norman Rockwell portrait shows a crisply uniformed pilot gazing ahead with deep self-assurance. He's sporting "the look of experience," the ad copy explains, the look you get from being able to "see around the world." The poster man is Captain John Mattis, an actual Pan Am pilot who expertly guided more than 500 transatlantic Pan Am Clippers to safety, in the process becoming the airline's public face. "Pan American: The World's Most Experienced Airline" reads the slogan below Mattis's portrait.
Today the idea of Captain John at the controls, actively weaving an airliner between fluffy clouds, is about as folksy a notion as a Rockwell painting (or, for that matter, a spread for Pan Am—the airline was permanently shuttered in 1991). What we may have casually, selectively disregarded, with Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s help, is as of Oct. 21 pretty hard to ignore: commercial aviation is so thoroughly systematized, so profoundly automated, that two experienced Northwest Airlines pilots could fiddle with their computers for 150 miles and still touch down safely in Minneapolis. No harm, not a whole lot of foul—two revoked licenses, a Federal Aviation Administration investigation, and the deepening irony of any airline slogan involving the words "team" or "people."
It's hard to know whether all of this is comforting or instead likely to boost air-travel stress levels in consumers. "I worry [about public perception], given the events that occurred in Buffalo that didn't inspire confidence, and now this unfortunate incident," says Bill Voss, CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent, international organization dedicated to aviation safety. "[American aviation] is still at a spectacularly safe level, but this gives the public a sense of how…people are inherently lousy monitors of systems. It's very difficult for two well-trained, intelligent, well-rested people to sit and stare out the window for hours and hours at a time."
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