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safety. However, there is often a tendency to use intensive training to make up for design and operating deficiencies. In regard to this McFarland(6) says:
"The most promising solution lies in the simplification of the tasks of the air crew rather than in an attempt to improve the quality of the personnel, which is already of a high order in the civil air lines. The relationship between the difficulty of tasks and human performance have been simply expressed by the analogy of a number of people given the assignment of walking a 2 foot wide plank on the ground without falling off. The percentage of human error would be negligible. If the plank were reduced to 2 inch width and raised a considerable distance off the ground, the number of failures would increase rapidly. Extending the analogy to the simplification of the cockpit, it would be easier to facilitate the task by increasing the width and lowering the height of the plank than to select a group with sufficient skill to be able to walk on the narrower plank higher above the ground."
An interesting training area that has been little explored to date is the use of electronic trainers to determine

whether present procedures are straining the flight crew's ability to the breaking point. PAA has made some use of its Dehmel trainer in this light, changing procedures that have resulted in "crashes" of the trainer, but to date no effort has been made to put a coordinated and well planned research program along this line into effect. The results could prove very useful.
The use of intensified training at this time in an attempt to improve the airline safety record should be, we think, only an interim measure until such time as planes and operations are simplified to the point where they are more compatible with human ability.
REGULATION
the final facet in the air safety picture is regulation, having implications in all the previous fields, design, operations, and training. Although there is often the cry of "overregulation", clear thinking people will, the author believes, admit that it is, at its worst, a necessary evil. The best example of the effects of underregulation is the state of safety among the non-scheduled airlines. Some of these operators have excellent records but there are many who cut the corners of sound practice and the overall record shows the results glaringly.
There is a basic conflict in air transportation between