Increasingly automated cockpits have eroded pilots flying skills to the extent that many of them don't know how to recover from midflight problems. In fact, situations where pilots have been unable to manually recover from such problems are fast becoming extremely common.

According to the International Air Transport Association, there have been at least 51 loss of control accidents recently, in which planes were found to be in challenging situations from which pilots simply could not recover. As some pilots have put it, pilots are “forgetting how to fly.”

The Federal Aviation Administration and California plane crash lawyers have been warning about something like this for a while now. Recently, the FAA's advisory committee warned that the opportunities available for airline pilots to practice manual flying skills have been dramatically reduced. In fact, many airlines and even federal safety regulators prohibit pilots from taking the plane off auto pilot and flying manually.

Even though international plane crash rates have dropped over the past decade, many in the industry believe that an entire generation of pilots, who depend too heavily on automation and cannot rely on their own skills, is the number one aviation safety problem of the future. There have been far too many incidents involving pilots who found themselves in challenging situations, and had no knowledge about how to extricate themselves and the plane from the situation. Even when pilots try to respond to situations, many of them make serious errors.

There is a serious danger from becoming too dependent on aviation technology. Automated systems are heavily integrated in modern cockpits. As a result, a malfunction in a small piece of equipment somewhere can trigger a series of mishaps that can lead to an airplane crash. The only way that many of these glitches can be overcome is if the pilot has been trained to use manual techniques recover from the problem.