Plane good sense
My friend Cam at Veritape forwarded me something interesting recently:
“Last night, I watched an episode of Air Crash Investigations – it’s a great programme which dramatises the unfolding events of classic air crashes. Not overly sensational, honest. Quite a bit of detective work involved, and they mostly concentrate on the investigation side of things.
Anyway, last night I watched about an American Airlines Boeing 757 jet that was flown into the side of a mountain in Columbia. Very _very_ experienced crew, no fault with the plane, good visibility (a clear moonlight night) and yet they just flew straight into a mountain.
One thing which puzzled the investigators: with nothing obviously wrong, how on earth did the accident happen? The determination was that the crew agreed to a change of runway fairly late in the descent, and as a result had too much work to do inside the cockpit (reading charts, punching routes into the autopilot, etc) that they didn’t FLY THE PLANE! The quickly-changing circumstances meant that they didn’t consider the mountains, the local area, the risks in last-minute changes, etc. In other words, they didn’t think ahead.
And here is the classic line, from a pilot being interviewed as an expert: “In aviation, you shouldn’t fly your plane somewhere that your brain hasn’t already traveled 5 minutes beforehand.”
Tags: good sense, Plane
