cts | Volt a Day | Protecting the Distracted Pilot November 19, 2010

I am a bit of an airhead. I always feel a little better admitting that, although now I can't remember why I was mentioning it.

Oh, I know. I have been flying little airplanes for about five years now. Once, back when it was only two years in the cockpit and probably fewer than two hundred hours in the sky, I was returning from getting the plane serviced in Long Beach, flying back north to Santa Monica. A minor hop.

I was at 4,500 feet over LAX's double set of runways, preparing to descend. In the plane there are three controls: a throttle which lets more or less air into the manifold (black lever), a propeller control which adjusts the RPMs of the propeller (blue lever), and a mixture control which changes the air-to-fuel ratio by limiting the amount of fuel into the engine (red lever). Really, there is little to do with the mixture lever on a normal, short flight. It comes into play when you climb high enough to adjust for thinner air. But normally I'd take off from Long Beach, fiddle with throttle and RPMs, and then descend for Santa Monica. On that sort of flight you only touch the mixture control at the end of the flight, pulling it back to starve the engine of fuel to shut it down.

If all of this sound medieval, that's par for the course. There's a lot of aviation that has not changed since Lindbergh flew.

As I prepared for descent I needed to pull back the propeller control. That way when I came out of my dive the propeller would return to a slower speed, really controlled by the throttle setting. I was planning my entry to the traffic pattern, and doing my radio call to any other traffic, wondering about the huge jets landing on the field directly below me, and... well, that was too many things. I reached over and pulled the red lever instead of the blue lever.

It got VERY quiet in the cockpit. Without fuel the engine just spun under the force of the air windmilling the propeller. It took about four seconds for me to realize what had happened, to advance the mixture control and hear the engine roar back to life. Of course, I was directly over one huge airport and within easy gliding distance of my destination. And a beach. And, probably from that altitude, a third airport to the south. So there was never any real danger, but technology could have saved me.

Tonight Chevy's engineers saved me a little embarrassment. I was tooling along Montana in the Volt. I was talking to my wife on the bluetooth handsfree, thinking about collecting the boys from their field trip, how the dinner plans were going to work out, what might be up for tomorrow, whether there was someone behind me I was irking by trying to eek a few more miles out of the charge, and... too many things. My wife said "Goodbye" and I pressed the "Off" button to hang up.

Yes, the big blue button that turns the car off.

Really, what is the point of intelligent machines if they cannot save airheads like me from ourselves?

The Volt rolled a little dialog up on the primary driving screen and said, "To turn off the car, press the power key a second time." Exactly. I wasn't going to do THAT. And I was rolling along at 30mph down a residential street, I didn't WANT to turn off the car. The clever car knew that.

Tells me where to go, keeps me from disabling the car along the way, politely chimes when I am getting a little close to my neighbors when parking... this car is very helpful. I hope by the time I am eighty it is driving itself. And, obviously, that it is electric with a thousand mile range.