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Dead Reckoning
Vaughan's 2024 study of air traffic control — the product of years embedded with controllers at major facilities — that extends her framework into the cognitive work of maintaining situational awareness under conditions of increasing automation.
Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Organizational Change documents the way air traffic controllers construct and maintain a dynamic cognitive model of the airspace — a three-dimensional, temporally evolving representation of where every aircraft is and will be — that extends beyond what the instruments display. The book traces how increasing automation, while improving the informational basis of control work, simultaneously reduced the occasions on which controllers needed to build the cognitive model independently, producing a thinning of situational awareness that was invisible under normal conditions but critical when automated systems failed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The title invokes the navigational practice of estimating position from known starting point, heading, and speed — a form of cognitive reckoning that does not depend on external instruments. Vaughan extends the term to describe the independent cognitive model that experienced practitioners maintain as a check on automated systems, and that atrophies when the occasions for building