Excellent article on checklist use – and when not to follow them. Quotes from Frog, Toad, and the black swan pilots of Qantas Flight 32. Written by a systems ergonomist/work psychologist with a real understanding of aviation issues.
http://humanisticsystems.com/2015/10/01/toads-checklist/
I fly an airbus – but the sentiment is the same:
One of the hardest things to do as a pilot is to not go flying. To tell your boss, your passengers, or your brother-in-law that no, I’m not flying today. Because I’m tired.
It’s macho to say “need a straw?” (So you can suck it up.) It pays more to fly more. And unless you are absolute worn-out, it’s a tricky second-guessing judgement call.
So good luck to the Cathay Pacific pilots who are taking a stand on tiring schedules. Are you mentally tough enough to say no?
Undertake something that is difficult; it will do you good. Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
~ Ronald E. Osborn, and not, as is often seen, Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think I’m a good pilot. Above average, anyway. For sure.
Over 17,000 hours, 5 type ratings, published scientific research into pilot behavior, on and on. I work at it, every flight. Well, most every flight.
But a paper recently published in Psychological Science: Journal of the Association for Psychological Science (I’m not a nerd, but I am a subscriber) has me worried. It’s titled When knowledge knows no bounds: Self-perceived expertise predicts claims of impossible knowledge. The authors found that “people overclaim [knowledge] to the extent that they perceive their personal expertise favorably.” People that think they are experts, “overestimate their knowledge, including overestimating on concepts, events and people that do not exist and cannot be known.”
Clearly this applies to a lot of talking heads on TV, and a lot of teenagers talking about cool music … and maybe just maybe, pilots.
The researchers note in their discussion of the research:
Our work suggests that the seemingly straightforward task of judging one’s knowledge may not be so simple, particularly for individuals who believe they have a relatively high level of knowledge to begin with.
We don’t know what we don’t know. This could be very bad in a airplane cockpit. This effect has actually been studied extensively. A great online article by one of the paper’s authors for non-psychologists – We Are All Confident Idiots – has links to fun examples, like TV clips of Jimmy Kimmel asking pedestrians about hot new bands (that don’t exist).
We don’t just pretend to others we know more than we do, we actually fool ourselves. We don’t know what we don’t know. But the more stuff on a subject we do know, the worse our estimation about what things we don’t know becomes. Yikes. Are you really ready for a system malfunction? Or engine failure? How do you know?
What’s the solution? I think it’s the classic mindset of Beginners Mind – the right attitude of a child learning. Absorbing, accepting, always in touch with the wondrous new. Keep studying. Keep an open mind. Listen to your co-pilot, your wife, the little voice that says ‘are you really sure?’.
This mindset will help you become a great pilot. Like me!
The menace to understanding [is] not so much ignorance as the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J Boorstin
