airline ops

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

What not who

By Dave English

Hats, braid, big pilot bags. Age, experience, ego. Someone’s the captain, but the what is right always trumps the who is right when it comes to matters like gravity, aerodynamics, weather. “It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.” Thomas Huxley Picture is a cool looking Pan Am 707 flying to Moscow.

Academic Airmanship Paper

By Dave English

This week I read an interesting research article on airmanship in standardized airline cockpits. The lead author is Torgeir Haavik, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with an engineering background in oil drilling, who more recently earned a PhD in the sociology of risk and safety. The paper is wildly — for an academic journal — titled: ‘Johnny was here: From airmanship to airlineship’. It was published by Applied Ergonomics journal in 2016. So: Who’s Johnny? What’s airlineship? And can pilots learn anything useful from the journal Applied Ergonomics? Read on, all will be revealed! “Airmanship belongs to a … Continue reading Academic Airmanship Paper

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.