We're living in an era of unprecedented airplane safety, as no American airline has had a mainline crash since 2001. I'm speaking largely as an outsider, but it

We're living in an era of unprecedented airplane safety, as no American airline has had a mainline crash since 2001. I'm speaking largely as an outsider, but it seems probable that the increased automation has helped facilitate that trend. We all have a desire to romanticize and glamorize the jobs we do and resist the belief we can be augmented by automation and process. Some of the pull quotes from this article seem to indicate that mentality. To wit, "Now that is being in command of a system, of wonderful computers that do a great job — but that isn’t flying." Just like a good programmer should understand manual memory management even if he or she always will be writing in Python, I sympathize with the need to understand the underlying principles. But can we really say safety is at risk?