Managing Automation: A Pilot's Guide to Automation, Glass Cockpit Operations, and Human Factors

Modern avionics can reduce workload, improve precision, and expand situational awareness—but only when pilots understand what the system is doing, why it is doing it, and what it is likely to do next.

Managing Automation brings automation theory into the cockpit. Drawing on human-factors research, official accident and incident investigations, and practical operating principles, Matthew James McDermott examines how highly capable systems can produce mode confusion, automation surprise, weakened monitoring, and difficult transfers of control.

Readers will learn how to build accurate mental models, recognize divergence between aircraft behavior and pilot intent, manage workload, preserve manual-flying proficiency, and choose an appropriate level of automation. The book’s Automation Management Cycle—predict, verify, observe, compare, simplify, communicate, and intervene—turns those lessons into a practical discipline.

Written for developing and experienced aviators, instructors, and safety-minded readers, this is a measured guide to using sophisticated tools without surrendering judgment, discipline, or command.

Matthew James McDermott is an instrument-rated pilot, FAA-certificated Advanced Ground Instructor and Instrument Ground Instructor, and aviation writer based in Rochester, New York. His work focuses on aircraft automation, human factors, operational decision-making, and the professional disciplines that support safe flight.His interest in aviation was inspired in part by his late father, Lester McDermott, an airline pilot who accumulated more than 20,000 flight hours. Through Managing Automation, McDermott brings together official accident investigations, established human-factors research, and practical aviation examples to examine how pilots can use advanced systems while maintaining awareness, judgment, and the ability to intervene.He publishes aviation nonfiction through Contact Departure Press and continues to study, fly, and write about the evolving relationship between pilots and aircraft technology.