Syntes: Ebbatson et al. (2010) — airline pilots who had hand-flown less recently controlled the aircraft differently, the first objective sign of automation-era skill decay

Källa: Ebbatson, M., Harris, D., Huddlestone, J. & Sears, R. (2010). The relationship between manual handling performance and recent flying experience in air transport pilots. Ergonomics 53(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903342349

Verified content

• [abstract] Starts from anecdotal evidence that pilots of highly automated aircraft lose manual flying skill because they rarely hand-fly on the line, and notes the lack of objective data.
• [abstract] Uses both traditional flight-path tracking measures and frequency-based control-strategy measures.
• [abstract] Finds significant relationships between pilots' very recent flying experience and their manual control strategy.

Limits

• [assessment] Abstract only; sample size and effect sizes are not in the abstract. Correlational, not before/after; flight automation, not AI. Bears on C18 only by analogy.

Why it is in the library

Human-factors evidence from the field that has studied skill loss under automation longest; with Casner et al. 2014 (already in the library) it gives C18 a before-AI baseline for what skill decay under assistance looks like.

Added 2026-10-25 by the project (weekly source sweep, kind: adjacent; read: abstract). [abstract] = from the published abstract; [full text] = read in the full text; [assessment] = the project's own assessment.