Overheard from my third-grader’s zoom classroom — “Put your eye’s here Alex”. Very clear directions from an experienced elementary school teacher. A teacher who knows if you’re not looking at the words, you’re not reading the assignment.
So simple. But very powerful for him, and me. Because last night I read in the excellent 2019 book Controlling Risk: Thirty Techniques for Operating Excellence, by five-time Shuttle commander Jim Wetherbee, of the same idea.
When he was a Navy A-7 pilot there were several crashes caused by computer limitations that forced pilots to manually enter navigation coordinates while flying close to the ground. The Navy made a flight rule requiring keyboard entries were not to be made while banking at low-level. However it wasn’t enough for this future chief astronaut:
“I wasn’t satisfied with the new rule. The conversations I had with pilots at the time indicated most pilots understood and accepted this new rule. I thought the rule missed the mark and provided insufficient protection to me at 450 knots, two hundred feet above the ground, a few heartbeats away from no more heartbeats. Distraction duration was much more important as a contributing factor than simply being in a turn. Surely, the turn exacerbated the tendency to become disoriented, but I could have flown into the ground just as quickly with my wings level if I were distracted for more than a few seconds … Mountains don’t care if we are turning or wings level. To kill us, the mountain only needs us to be distracted for a short period of time.
My solution was to self-impose an additional limitation when using the computer keyboard. I never looked down longer than the time it took to type three keystrokes before pausing to look up and verify my velocity vector.”
Three keystrokes. Then put your eyes outside.
In the ASK-21 sailplane last month, the instructor checking me out from the back seat said he knew when I was looking down at the speedbrakes, because we turned left. (The speed brake handle is indeed on the left.)
In the Airbus, our airline has a call-out for the First Officer when he or she is looking down programming the FMS or other computer work: “Heads Down”. It alerts the Captain to make sure their eyes are fully outside.
Our focus is limited. Years of meditation can teach us how to control attention. But for flying there is a quicker fix. The third-grade teacher reminded me — put your eyes here.