PAY ATTENTION! WHAT ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS REALLY REVEAL ABOUT DRIVER AND PILOT ALERTNESS

Asiana flight 214 • July 6, 2013 • San Francisco, California • 3 Fatalities From the NTSB Accident Report: • “Human factors research has demonstrated that system operators often become complacent about monitoring highly reliable automated systems when they develop a high degree of trust in those systems and when manual tasks compete with automated tasks for operator attention.” − (Parasuraman and. [...] May 7, 2016 “… the car driver’s inattention due to overreliance on vehicle automation.” “Monitoring steering wheel torque provides a poor surrogate means of determining the automated vehicle driver’s degree of engagement with the driving task.” − NTSB report of Williston, Florida crash Culver City, California. [...] January 22, 2018 Probable Cause • The Tesla driver’s lack of response to the stationary fire truck due to his inattention and overreliance on the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance system; • The Tesla Autopilot design, which permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task; • The driver’s use of the system in ways inconsistence with guidance and warnings from the manufacturer. [...] Automation Complacency • “Across domains, automation complacency has been identified as a critical consequence of automation -- a decrement in performance that results from less-than-adequate monitoring of an automated system by a human operator.” • “Detection of automation failure is poorer for systems that have a low failure rate. [...] • “In other words, the better the automation system, the more likely the operator is to become complacent and not detect its failure.” NTSB Finding “The vehicle operator’s prolonged visual distraction, a typical effect of automation complacency, led to her inability failure to detect the pedestrian in time to avoid the collision.” Change Blindness • “People are surprisingly poor at detecting even.