This month, watch cspans coverage of the 2016 republican and Democratic National conventions, and every saturday night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, we will look back at past conventions and the president ial candidates to won their partys nomination we will focus on nominees who ran for president only once during their political careers harry truman of the 1948 Democratic Convention in philadelphia. The 1960 Democratic Convention goldwater,n, barry in california, the 1976 Republican Convention with gerald ford in kansas city, missouri. Walter mondale at the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco. Michael dukakis in atlanta for the 1988 Democratic Convention. In the 2004 Democratic Convention in boston with john kerry. Past republican and Democratic Conventions tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. I never felt the urge, as i mentioned before, to make money what turned me on was to make policy. That always is what drove me. Sunday night on q a, a twopart interview with former Public Interest lawyer and politician mark green, offer of bright, infinite future, a memoir on progressive life coming which he talks about his life in public office. Green you have to have a drive that mr. Green you have to have a drive that might be enviable in a spouse you have to go to sleep saying i wanted so much. If you do everything, you went. Part one and sunday night on q a, and part two will air on cspan2. National Transportation Safety board chair Christopher Hart discusses safety technology. He says while there are methods, there are parts that have to be researched. He spoke thursday. The national highway Traffic Association announced it is investigating the performance of autopilotmodel 3 system. The system was engaged at the time of the crash. This is an hour. National safety transportation chairman Christopher Hart has been in this role for over a year. Nd has made his mark the ntsb, with a staff of 400 is an independent federal agency that investigated significant accidents involving railroads, highways, u. S. Waters, pipelines, and airplanes. Just this week, the board was called into action to probe a fiery, headon crash between two freight trains in texas. The agency determines the probable cause of the incidents and issues safety recommendations aimed at preventing future accidents. In addition, the ntsb studies Transportation Safety and coordinates the resources of the federal government and other organizations to provide assistance to the victims and their families affected by major transportation disasters. Hart is the greatnephew of james herman banning, who is the first African American to receive a u. S. Pilots license, which he got in 1926. Banning was killed in a crash during an air show before hart was born, but aviation must have been passed through down the family genes. Hart is a licensed commercial pilot. Harts career has taken him to the federal Aviation Administration and to an earlier term on the ntsb. He also worked for the national highway Traffic Safety administration, which may have sparked interest in what hes here today to talk about. Autonomous vehicles. Its a wild, wild west of a field that holds potential for improving highway safety, but also poses a lot of questions. Who is liable if a crash occurs . What happens if a technology thats supposed to help people drive more safely ends up having the opposite effect . Hart will tell us more about Autonomous Vehicles can benefit from Lessons Learned from other modes of transportation. Aviation is the most automated mode, but most other modes use some form of automation. Please help me give a warm, National Press club welcome to National TransportationBoard ChairmanChristopher Hart. [applause] chairman hart thank you, tom, for that very kind introduction. Thanks to all of you for coming, and certainly thank you to the National Press club for inviting me to speak on behalf of the ntsb. Its a privilege and an honor to be here. When they invited me, i warned them that they were going to have trouble shutting me up because i love talking about this stuff. But they did it anyway, and if that werent enough, im an attorney so that means my credo is never use one word when two will suffice. [laughter] so today, i would like to speak about Driverless Cars. Theyve been called all kinds of names. Im going to call them Driverless Cars. I want to talk about how the ntsb can help the process of bringing them onto our streets and highways. By doing this, i dont mean to suggest that were looking for work because our plate is already very full, but i am suggesting that we could be a very valuable resource. So to put my remarks in context, ill follow up with what tom said in terms of what the ntsb does. He described it pretty completely, but that wont stop me from using two words when one will suffice. The ntsb is an independent federal agency and we oversee accidents in all modes of transportation. Lot of people see us, think of us, as aviation accident investigators only. But we do all modes of transportation and we do that to determine what caused the accidents and then make recommendations to try to prevent them from happening our primary product is recommendations. Our world class investigators and analysts dont like to give up until they have the answer, until they found out what caused the accident. And the recommendations that they create are so compelling that the recipients respond favorably to our recommendations more than 80 of the time, even though they dont have to. Theyre not required to do that. We are not a regulator, we are a recommender, so they do that more than 80 of the time. And we like to think that the implementation of our recommendations has helped to make transportation safer for all of us. Speaking personally, its a privilege and an honor for me to be here, because we do have such world class investigators and analysts, and they do all the hard work, and i get all the credit, so whats not to like . So my remarks today come from the context of our experience as accident investigators. Driverless cars are coming, theres no doubt about it. And their potential for improvement is absolutely amazing. First and foremost, Driverless Cars could save many, if not most, of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways. 32,000. A very tragic and unacceptable number that has been decreasing for several years but has recently, as most of you know, taken a turn in the wrong direction. Driverless cars could also increase the amount of traffic that our roads can safely carry, because instead of maintaining a car length separation for every ten miles an hour, as im sure we all do, Driverless Cars could reduce that separation. Stay tuned for what other amazing changes might be possible. And how might that happen . Ideally with automation. Most crashes on our roads are due to driver error. The theory of Driverless Cars is that if theres no driver, there will be no driver error. Ideally, removing the driver would address at least four issues that are on the ntsbs most wanted list of Transportation Safety improvements. Namely, fatigue, distractions, impairment, and fitness for duty. The automation in Driverless Cars would presumably also address another item on our list, which is improved Collision Avoidance technologies. Decades of experience in a variety of contexts has demonstrated that automation can improve safety, reliability, productivity, and efficiency. But that experience has also demonstrated that there can be a downside. As noted by Professor James reason, who is a world renowned expert in complex humancentric systems, in their efforts to compensate for the unreliability of human performance, the designers of automated control systems have unwittingly created opportunities for new error types that can be even more serious than those they were seeking to avoid. Our investigation experience provides three Lessons Learned that support professor reasons statement. The first is that the theory of removing human error by removing the human assumes that the automation is working as designed. So the question is always what if the automation quits or fails . Will it fail in a way that it is safe . If it cannot be guaranteed to fail in a way thats safe, will the operator be aware of the failure in a timely manner, and will the operator then be able to take over to avoid a crash . An example of the automation failing without the operators knowledge occurred right here in washington, and you may remember the metro crash near the fort totten station in 2009 that tragically killed the train operator and eight passengers. In that accident, a train temporarily became electronically invisible. We found that there was a it was called a parasitic oscillation in the electronics. I minored in Electrical Engineering and never heard of parasitic oscillation. Thats what caused this train to become electronically invisible. When that happened, the symbol of the train disappeared from the display board in the central dispatch center. When a train becomes invisible on the board, an alarm sounds. The problem is that the alarm sounded several hundred times a day, so that meant it was largely ignored. Unfortunately, when the train became electronically invisible, there was no alarm, and the train behind it regarding the electronic disappearance of the preceding train. Thats why the operator of the train behind was unaware of this disappearance of this electronic disappearance. Instead, based on the electronically unoccupied track ahead, the automation in the train behind began accelerating to the maximum speed for that area. And by the time, the operator saw the stopped train and applied the emergency brake after coming around a curve, which is what limited her sight distance, it was too late. Another Lesson Learned in support of professor reasons statement is that even if the operators removed from the loop, humans are still involved in designing the vehicles, manufacturing the vehicles, maintaining the vehicles, and theyre involved in the same functions with respect to the streets and highways. Each of these points of human engagement presents yet another opportunity for human error. Moreover, human error in these steps is likely to be more systemic in its effect, which means it possibly involves several vehicles instead of just one, and more difficult to find and correct. An example of this Lesson Learned is the collision of an automated driverless people mover into a stopped people mover at the Miami International airport in 2008. That collision was caused largely by improper maintenance. So even though they had no operator, it still had a crash, caused by some other point of intervention of human error. The most fundamental lesson from learned from our accident investigation experience in support of professor reasons statement is that introducing automation into complex humancentric systems can be very, very challenging. Most of the systems we have investigated are becoming increasingly automated, but they are not yet fully automated. As a result, we have seen that the challenges can be even more difficult in a system that still has substantial human operator involvement and is not yet completely automated. Situations involving partial automation with substantial human operator involvement have demonstrated two extremes. On one hand, the human is the most unreliable part of the system, so thats the reason for trying to take the human out of the system. On the other hand, if the system encounters unanticipated circumstances, a highly trained and proficient human operator can save the day by being the most adaptive part of a system. An example of a human operator saving the day is captain sullenbergers amazing landing in the hudson river when his airplane suddenly became a glider, because both of his engines were taken out by birds. In stark contrast, a textbook example of the complexities of the Human Automation interface in which the human was the most vulnerable part of the system is air France Flight 447 from Rio De Janeiro to paris in 2009. After air france 447 reached its cruise altitude of 37,000 feet at night over the atlantic and began approaching distant thunderstorms, the captain left the cockpit for a scheduled rest break. In doing so, he gave control to two less experienced pilots. The airplane had pitot tubes that project from the fuselage to provide information about how fast its going. Air speed information is so important that there were three pitot tubes for redundancy, and the pitot tubes are heated in order to assure they were not disabled by ice. At the ambient temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees and with abundant supercooled water from the nearby thunderstorms, the pitot tube heaters were overwhelmed, and the pitot tubes became clogged with ice. So the airplane no longer knew how fast it was going. The loss of air speed information caused several systems to quit, as they were designed to do when they dont have reliable information. That included the automatic pilot that was flying the airplane and the automatic throttle that was maintaining the selected speed. As a result, the pilot suddenly had to fly the airplane manually. The loss of air speed information also rendered inoperative the automatic protections that prevented the airplane from entering an aerodynamic stall, in which the wings no longer produce lift. The pilots responded inappropriately to the loss of these systems, and the result was a crash that tragically killed all 228 on board. As with most accidents that we investigate, several factors played a role. To begin with, the redundancy of having three pitot tubes was not effective, because all three were taken out by a common cause. In addition, the pilots had not experienced this type of failure before, even in training, where the problem can be simulated in very realistic simulators. So as a result of never having seen it before, they were unable to figure out just what went wrong. Finally, use of the automatic pilot is mandatory at cruise altitudes, so the pilots had never flown manually at that altitude before, even in training in the simulator. This is important, because the airplane behaves very differently at cruise than it does at low altitudes, such as during takeoff and landing. Other operational and design issues compounded the problem and lead to the tragic outcome of the loss of 228 people. As an aside, the pitot tubes have frozen before in that type of airplane, but the pilots in those previous encounters responded successfully. Consequently, the entire fleet, including the accident airplane, was scheduled for the installation of more robust heaters. But given that the previous encounters were successful, an immediate emergency replacement was not considered to be necessary. With that background on how automation can be both the good news and the bad news, let me turn to how the ntsb can help inform the process of moving towards Driverless Cars. First, as i have just explained, we offer considerable experience regarding the introduction of automation into complex, humancentric systems. Most of our investigations involve relatively structured systems with highly trained professional operators who have various requirements regarding proficiency, fatigue, impairment, distraction, and fitness for duty. Given that human drivers will probably be in the loop for some time to come, i would suggest that, as difficult as that transition to more automation has been in the structured and regulated environment that we have investigated, it may be even more challenging in the public arena in which drivers are usually not highly trained and may be fatigued or impaired or distracted or not medically fit. Query whether some whether some human drivers may always be in the loop, because they would rather not use the automation for various reasons, for example. They just dont trust it, or they just like to drive. The second way that the ntsb can help relates to collaboration. The Auto Industry has already recognized the importance of collaboration as mostly recently shown by the collaborative approach regarding autonomous emergency braking. Our experience with collaboration, especially regarding commercial aviation, may help improve it further. So lets talk about where were seeing collaboration in aviation. The most recent fatal u. S. Commercial Airline Crash occurred in 2009, and more than once in recent years, the commercial Aviation Industry has gone years in a row without a single passenger fatality. Although automation has played an Important Role in the industrys continuing safety improvement, much of the industrys exemplary Safety Record is attributable to collaboration. In the early 1990s after the industry accident rate had been declining rapidly, the accident rate began to flatten on a plateau. Meanwhile, the federal Aviation Administration was predicting that the volume of flying would double in 15 to 20 years. The industry became very concerned that if the volume doubled while