How to Deal with Complexity Like a Pilot (Part 1)
franklinfaraday.com
franklinfaraday.com
I find it interesting that drivers could stand some more of this prioritization. (Texting is communicating; it can wait until the driving is done.)
If drivers had to go through 1/10th of the training/certification a private pilot does, our society would look very different.
Here in the UK, we have the Light Aircraft Pilot's Licence, with lower requirements than the ordinary PPL.
While the 40 hours is a minimum, most people require more to complete their PPL training and pass their exam.
Some aircraft do not require a pilot license but I’m hard pressed for good reasons to fly without prior training.
This had me wondering several things (as a layman), notably: did the use of autopilot make for certain doom in these cases, as possibly an aircraft without might have entered a state of descent allowing its occupants to regain consciousness; and, what avionic solutions could aid in this type of accident, which seems inevitable given the rapid cognitive toll of hypoxia? A vigilance switch for the autopilot to remain engaged (on some aircraft currently but uncommon)? Controlled descent by the autopilot when fuel is depleted? And especially, remote piloting by instruments, which seems invaluable in a variety of related emergencies?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 and the two linked in '#See also'
Absent such a system, the autopilot probably didn't doom the occupants any more than no autopilot would have. It's extraordinarily unlikely that an uncommanded and uncontrolled descent from FL280 or higher (28K feet) would level off at an altitude above the ground but below around 15K feet to allow the crew to recover the airplane. (For one, a wing would probably roll off at some point in the process, leading to a spiral, but even with a wing-leveler, it's not likely the plane would be trimmed to descend and if it did, it would be unlikely to level off above terrain for long enough.)
>> Pilots know that no one else can help them fly their aircraft in an emergency.
My first solo was... interesting. Takeoff was fine. Climbed to about 400ft and then a full on panic attack (2nd time in my life) as I realized the implications of the empty seat next to me. Thought process was something like this:
What if I need that guy? Well you can call him on the radio, but there's nothing he's gonna say that you dont already know.
What if I can't do this? What if I have to wash out? Well that's OK, but first I gotta get back on the ground before deciding that.
Then I leaned on the window, looked at the plane ahead of me, made my turns, and by the time I was on downwind it was starting to pass.
After landing I taxied back to where I had dropped off my instructor, but he was nowhere to be seen. He'd said to do 3, so I went back out for 2 more takeoffs and landings without incident.
What a way to face your fucking demons.
Then there was some major stress in my personal life, and after that I lost a bit of nerve. Was working back up to solo flight again and then had to hang it up for a while. Hoping to get back to it one day. There's something about it that's different than any other thing in life.
That is the western pilot culture. Russian pilots have a different approach. Rather than a lone pilot in control of "their" airplane, a Russian air force pilot is flying the people's airplane. In some situations nearly every action, every turn or switch, can be commanded by a ground controller. A western pilot will trust his over instruments over ground control. A Russian pilot will likely obey ground control over his own instruments. Neither culture is better or worse than the other, only different.
Go back to the 1950s and 60s and military aircraft, even in the west, were literally controlled by ground control. Autopilots were cued by ground control computers, thereby freeing pilots to manage other systems such as early radars. An aircraft, particularly an interceptor like the FOXBAT, was seen less as an aircraft under control of a pilot than a missile platform, an airborne SAM site. Ground controllers could manage the radars and even fire missiles.
Interestingly enough, just last week saw the first flight of a completely autonomous manned US spacecraft: The Inspiration-4 flight in a SpaceX Dragon. There was no professional astronaut pilot onboard, and the four tourist crewmembers had less than a year of training, I think closer to six months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...
"The manual described TCAS as "a backup to the ATC system", which could be wrongly interpreted to mean that ATC instructions have higher priority.[5]: 80 [BFU 13] This ambiguity was replicated in the Tu-154 Flight Operations Manual, which contained contradictory sections. On the one hand, chapter 8.18.3.4 emphasised the role of ATC and describes TCAS as an "additional aid",[5]: 53 [BFU 14] while chapter 8.18.3.2 forbade manoeuvers contrary to TCAS.[5]: 103 The BFU recommended that this ambiguity should be resolved in favor of obeying TCAS advisories even when these were in conflict with ATC instructions."
I manage a large team of people. It takes 70 odd people to fly the company I work in. It is the immense privilege of the pilot to be able to have to prioritise their own work, and to have absolutes like fuel load and altitude. I have to negotiate priorities with the company. People constantly come to me for advice. Communication is key to an organisation.
The other disadvantage us ground dwellers have is that everything is changing. A pilot knows the key performance metrics of their plane, and has a planned destination. Mine get modified during flite. My destinations get changed. Very little is set in stone. We attempt tasks that nobody in the world knows how to do. It is not much like flying a plane at all
Communication is key is what is said by every manager with that as his primary skill. It's not that it isn't important, but if a doctor said that breathing is his skill you'd probably go to someone else but it is totally accepted by managers to not have any domain knowledge.
I've seen examples of economists ruling over doctors & bartenders ruling over programmers but the people on the floor are never happy about that.
What is worse, they seem to arrange companies to make communication more important. This includes having a matrix structure in the company, putting responsibility on everyone (which in practice means managers with good communication skills get away from responsibility, which wouldn't be the case with a clear responsibility chain) and making daily meetings even though they don't have anything to say (I've made a bingo card with the buzzwords).
What can also happen is that because management knows they have zero domain expertise they make themselves more important by holding on to information that should really be passed on.
Most communication is the empty calories of business management.
Sorry for the rant, I don't believe you are that kind of manager because you are on this forum, just needed to get this off my chest.
"Aviate, navigate, communicate" is meant as a simple guide for pilots in distress. Distress on a plane can be extremely busy and demanding time and it may not be possible to think rationally - the situation may require the pilot to revert to rely on instincts and habit like the above rule. That is why training is so important for pilots.
Our normal lives are rarely as busy. I don't think it is wise to rely on very basic instincts to drive what could more efficiently solved with high level reasoning.
I would even go as far as to say that if you catch yourself to go a long time on what I call "autopilot" (doing things instinctively without stopping to think) you should stop and evaluate your situation.
This sometimes happens to me, especially on a busy project towards the end. Not a good idea
Which is exactly the reason to stop and think. Even during most damaging outages I took part in there was never a situation where I couldn't stop and reassess what is going on.
> I think that applies as a pilot too.
Most pilots will never meet a situation like that. But the training is aimed to prepare pilots to handle even worst possible situation where there isn't time to think and it is not just the choice of the pilot -- the the conscious part of human brain isn't able to process stuff that fast.
I personally do not fly but I sail. To become a skipper you must learn to handle your boat and manage your crew. Full HALF of the training is devoted to just one maneuver, which is man over board situation.
Yes, I repeat, half of the training is so that you can make a simple loop with your yacht and come back to rest just by the person that fell into water.
There is lots of stuff to be done during that maneuver. On the type of yacht that I sail you will have to throw the person something floating, put MoB marker on your navigation, keep an eye on the person in water, manage the crew, prepare the deck for recovery, keep an eye on your boat so that you don't screw the maneuver, recognize the exact direction from which the wind blows so you know where you want to end up in relation to the person and execute complicated maneuver that will include at least one tack. Then you drop your sails at just the right moment so that the wind will slow down your boat as it comes to rest. During that time somebody would also be starting the engine to complete the maneuver.
On a good day it takes about 10-20s for me with a crew that has at least been trained a little bit, over 20s on a worse day.
There is absolutely no time to think then, you just go off "autopilot".
But this is extremely rare, in most situations in life even in distress it is good to stop and think.
I made it a point with my teams, whenever we have particularly stressful situation (like overruning an important project or an outage) to have a regular meeting devoted solely to stopping and thinking. Just to counteract the natural tendency of people to run on autopilot.
Decision fatigue is a real thing. Some people live in a different reality of resource scarcity, kids, far-less-than-ideal partners, multiple jobs etc. When your brain is fatigued, it’s almost impossible to think or absorb new information. When you are constantly fatigued, you get into chronic stress and start making more bad decisions which, (when unchecked) leads to a really negative cycle. It doesn’t take an emergency to create a situation where your brain can’t process information fast enough to respond to a dynamic environment.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s crucial to stop and think in these scenarios to figure out what direction to go in order to fix the situation. It’s just really difficult because of the tendency towards perceived urgent (important/not) action.
As a pilot, training is paired with thought to encourage constant improvement while making most activities second nature so that a lot of complexity is managed sub-consciously. Asking “What happens if your engine fails right now” is a prime example of helping a new pilot think about how they can modify their procedure to better prepare for that outcome. That’s especially the case when paired with “so what do you think you could have done better” afterwards, usually on the ground. There is even an informal checklist to help a pilot not enter a scenario where they might not make reasonable decisions. (IMSAFE)
Thanks for your insight on sailing! It seems like a neat world from the outside. :)
Firstly, communication only comes last in a dire emergency, and otherwise, it is often key to avoiding dire emergencies, which is why communication is mandatory in class A, B and C airspace.
Secondly, everything that makes aviation safe is a result of extensive communication between engineers, pilots, instructors, and everyone who has an administrative or regulatory responsibility for facilitating safety.
The problem solving within a well defined game with fixed rules/moves etc is very different type of problem solving than when you play no rule games which is what software design is.
Ofcourse the chimp troupe tries to impose rules on such a complex game, but the rules will always break down, cause of how easy they are, for anyone who is unhappy with them, to rewrite.
What ever happened to sysadmins?
Some do.
> It is probably the opposite you should do,
Not really. "aviate" is the equivalent of keeping your servers up. Admittedly, a non-flying airplane will kill you, while server downtime only will loose you customers.
Aviation is a mature technology in which almost anything is already known and we could fly above the clouds where atmosphere is stable. Those conditions were not met for a long time in Aviation History.
In many environments the best thing you could do is communicate, like in a natural disaster like Tsunami, volcanic activity, Tornadoes. The sooner you can communicate and the better you can predict what will happen, the less damage.
One of the best things I learned from my mentor in company building is that the best working companies are boring, because they could plan ahead(navigate) and avoid (most)emergencies.
Some people just love emergencies because they make you feel alive, and if they don't have them on their lives they will just create them, because they need all the drama and rushing and adrenaline of being at the edge all the time.
I prefer jumping of bridges with parachutes or diving 100 meters and leaving my company boring.
A professional pilot has a low maximum cap on active hours. When limits are exceeded (or will be exceeded for a planned flight), the flight does not happen.
A pilot operates a system that's been carefully tuned and designed for maximum reliability and safety (within economic and performance constraints).
A pilot operates in a largely uncontended space, with little need for unanticipated close coordination with others. Where coordination with others is required, that is virtually always managed through a third-party resource, air traffic control. Where direct pilot coordination with other craft is required (outside of combat, competition, or demonstrations), things are already going poorly.
A pilot is specifically rated to the equipment they operate.
A pilot's equipment is highly standardised and regulated, with safety top of mind.
A pilot has a large team managing the logistics of fueling, prepping, staffing, maintaining, servicing, checking, and navigating their equipment, as well as managing cargo and/or passengers.
A pilot spends more time in training and practice, specifically for rare-but-criticial emergency scenarios, than they do in actual operation of their aircraft. The more complex the craft and mission, the greater the training overhead.
A pilot in professional capacity virtually always has fully-redundant staffing (a co-pilot), and often multiple fully-redundant staffing (relief and check pilots).
A pilot has final say over destination and deadlines. When an emergency situation develops, the pilot has final say over whether or not the emergency exists, its nature, and the resolution. Other parties may advise. The pilot decides.
A pilot does plan and communicate. Practices are governed by checklists, manuals, processes, procedures and training. Pre-flight and in-flight briefings are specifically indicated. It's possible for a previously unencountered circumstance to arise. It is very, very rare. When they do, in-cockpit communications ("cockpit resource management") is also actively trained and encouraged. Those conversations are recorded, on media which will survive all but the very most extreme adverse events, after which they will be studied exhaustively by multiple experts.
The fine article is ... distressingly misleading.