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Dear Prudence

By Dave English

The sun is up, the sky is blue,it’s beautiful and so are you.Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play? This song first appeared on The Beatles famous White Album, the lyrics by John Lennon are about actress Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence Farrow, who became obsessive about meditating while practising with Maharishi Mahesh in Rishikesh, India. She’d stay in her room meditating all the time. This all has little to nothing to do with a super cool airline pilot research paper I recently read, but it’ll sorta make sense in a couple of minutes. The paper is Character Strengths of Airline Pilots: Explaining Life … Continue reading Dear Prudence

Awake

By Dave English

The squeak of tires on landing, the view over a ridgeline, the red warning light. When I’m fully awake, I’m flying my best. Quote by Thich Nhat Hanh, online article The Three Gems in Tricycle magazine. Original photo of single-seat sailplane CC0 Public Domain from pxhere.

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think

By Dave English

Thirty-five years ago a paper was presented at a conference, titled Ironies of Automation, by Lisanne Bainbridge. It included many insightful ideas: The designer’s view of the human operator may be that the operator is unreliable and inefficient… so should be eliminated from the system. There are two ironies of this attitude. One is that designer errors can be a major source of operating problems… The second irony is that the designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator to do the tasks which the designer cannot think how to automate…it means that the operator can be … Continue reading Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think

No surprise— upset recovery worse when surprised.

By Dave English

New research in The International Journal of Aerospace Psychology on the influence of surprise on upset recovery performance in airline pilots is no surprise. Hint— unexpected unusual attitudes caused “significantly more difficulties”. Best be over-prepared. And remember, this was still in a sim. If it happens for real, in a plane, with weird g-forces and the ground in a strange place on the windshield, I’ll bet our performance will be worse than what the researchers saw! Full paper is free online: The Influence of Surprise on Upset Recovery Performance in Airline Pilots Annemarie Landman, Eric L. Groen, M. M. (René) … Continue reading No surprise— upset recovery worse when surprised.