Missed the Freq Change
By lex, on December 26th, 2009
Salon is carrying a kind of apologia for the Northwest flight that missed Minneapolis by half an hour, claiming a kind of inside knowledge of 11 more or less trivial errors:
This scenario is based on a secondhand account written by a pilot who happens to be a friend of Flight 188′s captain. The pilot’s letter has been cited in news articles and blogs. I’ve paraphrased here and there, and rounded things out for clarity. I cannot know for certain if the details are accurate, but certainly they take what was, on the surface, a startling and borderline implausible story, and make it plausible.
In other words, laptops were only part of what went wrong. This was more than a pair of pilots zoning out under the glow of their computers. It was something less overt: a combination of small errors and oversights, not all of them of the crew’s doing, creating a loss of what a pilot calls “situational awareness.”
Patrick Smith, Salon’s aviation correspondent, says that the incident was blown out of proportion by the media and in the public mind. And it’s true that technology can make a crew complacent – a pilot with no autopilot navigating via dual VORs has no choice but to fly the machine and maintain continuous situational awareness (SA), because SA is otherwise too painful to rebuild once lost. Even the best of us can become enervated by long hours of cruise flight, especially if that’s the daily work.
But for my own part, I’m a little less inclined than Mr. Smith to let the crew off quite so easily. Most major mishaps involve sadly uninterrupted links in a chain of events, many of them trivial right up until we have dirt intrusion into the cockpit. But the priorities don’t change: Aviate, navigate, communicate. If George is doing the aviating, it’s the least someone could do in a two man crew to wonder where the aircraft is every few minutes or so, and maybe pimp the controller for let-down instructions if there hasn’t been any radio chatter for half an hour or so.
The hammer fell pretty hard on these two fellows, who after all were career professionals with many hours in their log books. But while it’s unfortunate for them and their families, it’s a useful lesson to the rest of us.
We don’t hang men for stealing horses, we hang them that horses might not be stolen.