Cyber Resource Management

The paper decorates clickable hyperlinks with colored boxes (hidden in the alternate version).

Cyber Resource Management (CybRM) is the extension of Crew Resource Management (CRM) to any automation responsible for critical control loops (airplanes, self-driving cars, etc). While Wall Street is eager to bring “autopilot” to our daily lives (e.g., in the form of self-driving cars), the history of airplane autopilot demonstrates that something is still missing when humans and automation team up. CybRM proposes that the missing piece is communication — automation still speaks like R2-D2, so the crew is never quite sure “What’s it doing now?” The CybRM solution is straightforward; define how automation can talk to the crew in their native language without being over-chatty (e.g., when Google maps gives you three instructions to turn onto your own street).

CybRM is explained in the paper “How do we fly and why do we fall?”, which was written to serve multiple purposes:

• To understand the basic aerodynamics of flight. Why is the standard explanation for lift fallacious? Why is indicated airspeed more relevant than true airspeed? Why are wings swept?

• To understand the trades governing up-scaling. Bugs flew before birds, and birds before humans, but the physics of flight doesn’t change very much across scales. However, the square-cube law heavily constrains up-scaling; heavier things fly faster with stronger wings. Even the most unscrupulous human cannot escape natural law, and so the evolution of airplanes is visibly constrained by limitations in material science and human factors.

• To study a remarkable inversion; in a very brief period (12 decades), flight went from one of the most dangerous forms of transport to one of the safest. When human beings built wings, we skipped evolution, and thus did not learn an instinct to “not stall”. With the addition of many redundant safety systems to backstop the pilot, almost like a synethic instict, fight became the safest form of travel. Can self-driving cars match this level of safety?

• To crystallize CybRM for debate, since the ideas were previously too half-baked. The author’s deep dive into the engineering and evolution of flight was necessary to chunk and organize the evolution of flight-safety technology, since not all patterns were obvious (e.g., the 200 KIAS speed-limit on max wing-loading). Only with cybernetic confusion defined and many incidents catalogued could a reasonable remedy be proposed and justified.

Given that “How do we fly and why do we fall?” serves multiple purposes, the paper is lamentably long. Cyber Resource Management is introduced in Section 6, and those not familiar with aviation may need to read Sections 1 and then Section 5 to get caught up with the jargon. Sections 2-4 focus on the engineering trades of flight, and can likely be skipped by the less interested.