The Naked Pilot E-Book

David Beaty

• Herausgeber: Airlife
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Investigations into the causes of aircraft accidents have for decades focused on what happened and who did it - very rarely Why? It is the question Why? that David Beaty has addressed here, fighting the misnomer of 'pilot error' and propounding that the cause should be sought deeper inside human beings who make apparently simple human errors.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

List of Illustrations

Foreword to Paperback Edition

Acknowledgements

Preface

One The Man in the Left-Hand Seat

Two Those Daring Young Men in their Flying Machines

Three The Last Great Frontier in Aviation

Four Communication

Five To See and Not to See

Six Deadly ‘Set’

Seven On Being Deceived

Eight The Male Ego

Nine Decision-Making

Ten Learning and Regression

Eleven The Clockwork Captain, or Deus in Machina

Twelve Boredom and Absence of Mind

Plates

Thirteen Conformity: the Three-Headed Hydra

Fourteen Laterality: Green for Danger

Fifteen Fatigue and Stress

Sixteen Human Factor Education

Seventeen Human Factors in Management

Eighteen In the Echelons of Power

Nineteen The Knock-On Effect

Twenty Forward to the Last Great Frontier

Appendix

Glossary

Select Bibliography

By the Same Author

Copyright

List ofIllustrations

1a Balloonists’ portable altimeter, c.1912 (Science Museum)

1b Airspeed indicator, 1910 (Science Museum)

2a The instrument panel of the Vimy, 1919 (Science Museum)

2b The cockpit of the Vimy (Science Museum)

3a Members of the ill-fated R101 project, 1930 (Daily Mail)

3b The control cabin of the R101 (Daily Mail)

4a A typical blind-flying panel, mid 1950s (Quadrant)

4b Comet I instrument panel, 1951 (Rediffusion Simulation)

5a Comet IV instrument panel, 1959 (Rediffusion Simulation)

5b Boeing 707 instrument panel, 1960 (Rediffusion Simulation)

6a Concorde panel, 1976 (Rediffusion Simulation)

6b Boeing 747–200, late 1970s (Rediffusion Simulation)

7a Boeing 737–300, mid 1980s (Quadrant)

7b Boeing 747–400, 1988 (Rediffusion Simulation)

8 The A-320 Airbus, 1990 (Daily Mail)

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

When the HumanFactorinAircraftAccidents first appeared in 1969, it was recognised in the Press worldwide as ‘The first major attempt to pin down the human failings that caused planes to crash.’

However such human factor causes were resisted by aircraft manufacturers, airlines and the pilots themselves till the major disaster of Tenerife in 1977 when two 747s collided and 583 people perished. That caused elements of the aviation industry to begin to make tentative moves towards understanding the problem. By the time the hardback of TheNakedPilotwas published in 1991, human factors were being researched and taught in psychology departments and airlines in Europe and America. Indeed the study and practice of aviation human factors was beginning to blossom into an industry.

Even so, there had been and still is understandable resistance to that study in that we all tend to deny making mistakes in a society that blames and demands heavy penalties from those of us who do make them, especially ones with huge financial implications such as those resulting in an aircraft accident.

Denial is a defence mechanism that is used by our society and frequently by ourselves as individuals to ensure its and our survival. It is dangerous to go against the grain of public opinion and the opinion of our masters. We might lose our jobs. We would certainly lower the esteem in which we are held. Even Darwin hesitated for years before publishing TheOriginoftheSpecies because of public opinion at that time, and kept a low profile on whether our similarity to the bodily characteristics of animals might in some way and to some degree be matched by a similarity to the ways animals think and feel and react.

Happily, in the last four years since TheNakedPilot was published, there has been significant progress. The age-old witch hunt to identify a scapegoat – usually the pilot – has begun to give way to the concept of the collective mistake. The practice of Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) has been twinned with Line Oriented Flight Training (LOFT), though even as late as 1992, only four airlines in America had integrated CRM/LOFT programmes.

Then human factor education courses have been started in some enlightened airlines. There is a human factor examination requirement in the pilot licence. Joint training of flight deck and cabin crews has started, to which one or two enterprising airlines have added despatchers, ATC and maintenance staff. In other words, the concept of all being in this together and all being responsible for the outcome has at last caught on. Hopefully management personnel will also be incorporated. ICAO has initiated a sustained campaign to increase awareness of the pervasiveness of human error in aviation amongst the middle and senior managers of the international aviation community, particularly in some regions where there is an even lower understanding of human factors than elsewhere in the world. A bomb resistant container has been designed. An explosive detector is being installed at Heathrow and Gatwick and will eventually be in place on all BAA airports. More and more glass cockpits are appearing in airliners.

What is still to be accepted is the commonality of the causes of mistakes that lead to accidents in all areas of human behaviour. Forgetting to switch the lights off before leaving a car may result in a flat battery. Forgetting a switch on an aircraft may cost dozens of lives. Airliners continue to collide both into each other and into the ground for similarly universal human factor reasons. There have been at least twelve Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) accidents with horrific loss of life since the beginning of 1992.

There is need to look at mistakes in a much wider context instead of in constrained and separated specialised enclaves with little communication between them. Too many separate individuals and organisations appear to be pursuing the same rabbit from different directions without realising it. Individual expertise in the different environments of air, sea, road, rail and ground are of course essential, but a connection between them and a cross-fertilisation of information on the pivot of a corporate understanding of human factors needs to be established and maintained if we are to progress deeper into the many different areas of human understanding. One such, which so far has been avoided, is how far personality is a factor in the making of mistakes – but this minefield eventually will have to be addressed.

That further progress is needed is self evident. The safety standards of a number of airlines, particularly in China and Russia, have sunk to unacceptable levels. Economic crises throughout the world have given rise to calls for cutting down on safety resources at a time when civil aviation is still expanding at around four per cent a year. The world’s scheduled airlines lost nearly 16 billion dollars between 1990 and 1993. Aircraft manufacturers have had to cut back sharply on production. At the same time, a 1000-seater airliner (2000 seats in the military version) has begun to be planned, as has a larger replacement of the Concorde. The present high level of public confidence in air travel could suffer a severe set-back should a human factor disaster occur on a potentially greater scale than the Tenerife collision.

On the positive side, the aviation industry has now begun to realise the fundamental importance of human factor understanding. Boeing has just published AccidentPreventionStrategies which advances the collective mistake theory. It reasseses 232 major accidents over the ten years to 1991 and identifies 37 individual links which could contribute to an accident.

Because of its intensive supervision and testing, its vast network of information exchange, its introspection and present excellent safety record, other industries such as the medical and nuclear are coming to aviation to learn about human factors.

What is needed is the establishment and maintenance of awareness in people of the potential of human factors for both triumph and disaster. Unless there is receptiveness, all instruction will fail to penetrate deaf ears.

Acknowledgements

In the writing of this book, I owe a debt to more people than there is space to name and thank – those who have talked to me, those who have helped me in other ways, and those whose books I have read.

But I would particularly wish to thank Captain Ken Beere, ex-British Airways, whose knowledge and insights have been vital for the book, and also to thank him and his wife, Bonny, for their time, skill and effort given unstintingly throughout, and finally to thank their daughter Jo for diagrams.

I would also like to thank Captain John Faulkner and Qantas for their generous help and co-operation. I am also grateful to Ronald Ashford, Group Director Safety Regulations, and Dr R. M. Barnes, Senior Medical Officer, Safety and Research, both of the CAA; Ken Smart, Deputy Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, AAIB; Captain Laurie Taylor, ex-Principal Vice-President and Executive Secretary of IFALPA; Captain Jack Nicholl, former General Manager British Airways Flight Training and ex-Principal of Oxford Flying Training School; Dr Roger Green of the Institute of Aviation Medicine; Captain Michael Stonehewer of Dan Air; Captain Alex de Silva of Singapore Airlines; Captain Heino Caesar, Lufthansa Flight Operations and Safety Pilot; Captain Edgar Klöppinger, ex-Lufthansa; Swissair; Pan American and United Airlines; the Commonwealth of Australia’s Bureau of Air Safety Investigation, Captain Alan Gibson; and Bob Dignam and the DailyMail who have again been generous with illustrations, as have Rediffusion Simulation.

Professor Norman Dixon, who first taught me psychology at University College, London, has continued to encourage and stimulate my interest in human factors. Professor Jim Reason of Manchester University, whose research into human error is known world-wide, has been most helpful. And I would also like to thank Professor Earl Wiener of the University of Miami, co-editor of the comprehensive HumanFactorsinAviation, and of course my editors at Methuen, Ann Mansbridge and Alex Bennion.

I have learned a great deal from all my contacts, but I would emphasise that in this attempt to research and interpret human factors, the views, opinions, and human errors are mine alone.

Preface

On 29 September 1941, I flew one of three radar-equipped Wellingtons down the Portuguese coast to Gibraltar on the way to Malta for a tour of operations to make night interceptions of Rommel’s convoys to North Africa.

On arrival at Gibraltar, we were told that a Wellington bomber ahead of us had turned right instead of left at the southern tip of Portugal and was now presumed lost over the Atlantic – apparently a by no means unique occurrence.

Why?

That was the start to my interest in human factors in aircraft accidents.

Throughout my time in Malta, aircraft coming from Gibraltar often landed in enemy Sicily. Aircraft returning from operations ran out of fuel and flopped into the sea. Extraordinary human errors were made in the planning and carrying out of war operations.

Back in England, I studied RAF intelligence reports full of little crosses where aircraft had crashed into mountains. I watched young inexperienced pilots take off 90 degrees to the runway or undershoot coming in to land. Pilots beat up the homes of their girl friends – and crashed. Pilots were continually forgetting to put down the undercarriage, ignoring the blare of the warning horn. At the height of the Battle of Britain, the head of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Dowding, goaded by the number of damaged Spitfires and Hurricanes, issued a signal to all stations that pilots who behaved in this way should be punished ‘with the utmost severity’.

More aircraft were lost through accidents than by enemy action.

In BOAC after the war, I flew at first as a first officer with ex-Imperial Airways captains – many of them pleasant, some living up to their nickname of ‘Barons’. Communication on the flight deck could be very strained. First officers did not contradict the captain or correct his mistakes. I had my hand smartly smacked when I leaned over the throttle box to put a captain’s VHF on the correct switch after he had complained of not being able to hear anything. He would give the order, he said, when he wanted me to do anything. Otherwise I was to shut up and do nothing.

Although BOAC’s safety record was good for the time, there were numerous incidents with icing and the piston engines had a tendency to fail over the Atlantic. The worldwide accident rate was ten times what it is now. Flights were long and laboured and fatigue began to be identified as a major problem. But there were other factors which I wanted to identify and study such as conformity, perception, decision-making – all factors that involved human error rather than pilot error; in other words, mistakes that are the result of our human condition rather than mistakes in piloting skill.

When I left BOAC to take up full-time writing, this then became my field of study and interest. It was about the human factors in aircraft accidents that I wrote, and the multiple causes – not just the simple ‘pilot error’ that was then being almost universally promulgated. Human factors cannot be proved as causes of accidents – but areas of possible error can be looked for, patterns perceived and action taken to prevent occurrences and recurrences.

A serious accident occurred in Prestwick when an aircraft was trying to land in bad weather. A verdict of pilot error was brought in by the Inquiry. The KLM captain wrote to me in great distress. There followed a number of letters from pilots who had been similarly blamed, including Captain Harry Foote, whose story is described in this book.

At this point, I felt the subject needed greater psychological insight, so I returned to university and took a Master of Philosophy degree at University College, London. Afterwards, I joined a joint Ministry of Aviation and RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine (IAM) team as the psychologist investigating aircrew workload. I incorporated the results of my researches in a book called TheHumanFactorinAircraftAccidents, which was received in 1969 with great interest and, because it broke new ground, a good deal of incredulity. Never is tunnel vision seen more clearly than when you tell people they make mistakes – this, of course includes oneself.

One day, my daughter laid the table for breakfast. I noticed she had put the forks on the right and knives on the left. I expostulated to my wife. Next day, in a hurry, I set the breakfast table myself. This time it was I who put the forks on the right and the knives on the left.

I used this laterality confusion in TheWindofftheSea in 1962. Giles Gordon, the well known agent who was then judging for the Book Society, chose it rather than John Wain’s StriketheFatherDead. Giles, I discovered later, had a similar laterality problem to my main character. So, I found later, had many other people. I found this laterality confusion in myself on numerous occasions. I remembered I had once put on right rudder when an instructor ‘failed’ the starboard engine on an asymmetric training exercise.

Now the problem of human factors in aircraft accidents – unfortunately after disasters – has begun to be addressed by airlines. The BBC became interested and in 1970 featured a programme on air safety on which I was invited to appear. In the usual cock-fight type of programme, opposing me was an airline captain and a BOAC doctor who had written a book on aviation medicine.

The first thing I saw when I walked into the studio was a black decapitated aircraft nose. To this monstrosity, David Dimbleby proudly introduced me with the words, ‘At enormous expense, the BBC have hired this Trident cockpit, so you can sit in it and point out how easy it is to misread instruments and turn on wrong switches.’

I climbed inside. I had only been in a Trident once, but in those days aircraft instruments were pretty standard, and I wasn’t particularly worried.

Then I started to look around – and was immediately horrified. I couldn’t recognise a single dial, switch, lever or gauge. It was as though I was in some Wizard of Oz aeroplane with wonky numbers and crooked needles.

The cameras moved nearer. The programme was about to go on the air. I was wondering what on earth I was going to say to the watching millions, when suddenly I saw a knob on the instrument panel. Looking over my shoulder, the airline captain saw it too.

On the knob were the words ‘Bomb Release’.

At once what I was looking at made sense. This was no Trident cockpit! This was a theatrical prop for some film!

Indignantly I climbed out, and the airline captain and I refused to have anything more to do with the thing.

The programme never recovered. I said pilots made various mistakes. The airline captain said they didn’t. Every now and then the BOAC doctor chimed in to keep the peace.

Considerably shaken, I arrived at the hotel where I was staying the night. Room 53, the clerk said as he gave me the key. Up I went to the third floor, put the key into the door of room 35 – and couldn’t turn it.

Indignant again, I went back to the clerk, who accompanied me – this time to the fifth floor, where he opened the door of room 53 without difficulty.

This confirmed what I had written about laterality in TheHumanFactorinAircraftAccidents. But it was not just laterality errors that I found myself liable to make. I could make just about all the mistakes in the circumstances described in this book. And I am sure that many of us – if not most – are in much the same sort of boat.

Yet pilots in particular have to hide their mistakes. They think ‘It’s just me. I had better not let on. What would the management say?’ So, not unnaturally, they deny their error liability lest the management think less of them or they lose their image of themselves.

There is no intention here of blaming individuals who make the mistakes described in this book, only of identifying areas of possible error. What I am trying to indicate is that it should be recognised that it is our human condition to make such mistakes, and that this state of affairs should be acknowledged. Some valuable way forward has certainly been made in ‘owning up’ to errors which are then publicised. But the pilots in these incidents still remain anonymous for fear of disciplinary action.

Until the normal human-factor aviation errors can publicly be admitted without fear of reprisals, recognised as a human condition and adequately researched, the causes cannot properly be diagnosed, nor the remedies discovered. The same sort of human-factor accidents will continue to happen, and what has been called ‘the last great frontier in aviation’ will remain unconquered.

One

The Man in the Left-Hand Seat

The twentieth century is the age of the machine – the most complex and ingenious of which are designed to take us off our planet earth. But at the heart of these almost unbelievably sophisticated creations is the thin-skinned perishable bag of carbon, calcium and phosphorus combined with oxygen and nitrogen, a few ounces of sulphur and chlorine, traces of iron, iodine, cobalt and molybdenum added to fat and forty litres of water – Man.

There he sits at the centre of this Aladdin’s cave of scientific genius, the finger on the button, the tiny battery which will operate all this complexity. A complexity which has evolved with breathtaking swiftness in the last fifty years, into the study of which has been poured trillions of dollars, while Man has evolved with plodding slowness, and on the study of whom we grudgingly spend little, perhaps because we really don’t want to know.

Whether we take the theological or the Darwinian origin of Man, or any other theory, he has come from the mists of time – the mists which one version of Genesis declares Yahweh (afterwards to be the God of Israel) used to moisten the clay to make the figure of a man, and into whose nostrils he then breathed life. Even before this Old Testament account, a Mesopotamian legend described a man formed of clay, wet with the blood of Bel.

The Darwinian theory denies Man’s divine origin. Many scientists believe that we have evolved from a speck of life in the primeval swamps, though they argue about which came first; nucleic acids or proteins. And even before Darwin published his OriginofSpecies in 1859, researchers in Denmark had obtained proof that a cave-man, the contemporary of the cave-bear, had existed millennia before Bel was supposed to have mixed his blood with clay to produce that version of Man’s origin.

To most people at that time, the idea of a very ancient man was absurd, and Darwin was appalled by the contumely with which his theories were greeted. Tempers ran high. In 1860 the famous duel between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce took place, and the wife of the Bishop of Worcester is reported to have said, ‘My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.’

But in spite of the protests, anthropologists now seem certain that we are cousins to the ape and the descendants of hominids who flourished over a million years ago: though from which of the several types of hominids we are sprung is open to question. Some American scientists once believed that modern Europeans were descendants of Neanderthals. Not so, say some British scientists: we came out of Africa, from a sub-Saharan Garden of Eden. Probably we are a mixture. Our genealogical tree has been described not as a straight palm bearing a proud crown which is Man, but as ‘a tangled thorny and bristling bush’.

And it is an unpalatable truth that the chemical composition of our blood is the same as that of the ape, that we suffer from the same sort of illness and that modern Man’s brain before birth is comparable to that of the ape, though Man’s continues to grow in childhood until it is three times that of the ape, yet its ground plan remains essentially the same. As for another not too distant cousin, the chimpanzee, his IQ is an impressive 85. He is the only non-hominid to make tools and it is said that our possession of buttocks rather than the brain distinguishes us.

As Man and his forebears, it would seem, lived for millions of years in tundra and jungle conditions, it is natural to suppose that Nature would have endowed him to survive and prosper in those environments, and that we have inherited most of these endowments, many of them unsuitable for the technological environment we have created.

As these hominids spread further afield, they supplemented their root, berry and seed diet with meat – some of it their fellow hominids. Many of the ancient skulls that have been discovered were remnants of meals, the skulls smashed and the brains picked out. The origin, perhaps, of picking other people’s brains, a practice which present-day man has enthusiastically embraced. A theory has been advanced that the swift growth of the brain in the Pleistocene era was a result of cannibalism – a selective cannibalism in which the brain was prized for its aphrodisiac qualities and which Oscar Mearth avers caused the brain to grow from a mere 400 cc to the 1,400 cc of Neanderthal man (the average modern man’s is 1,360 cc).

In fact, Man has been defined by an eminent anthropologist as ‘A primate who ate his own kind.’ So, when he ate meat, Man had to learn to hunt and kill, and for that he needed not just to feel hunger but to feel aggression, and, just as importantly, to learn to control and channel that aggression. When he wasn’t hunting his fellow hominids, he hunted bear, hyena, mammoth, elephant and sabre-toothed felines. Against these four-footed animals his upright carriage, an advantage in that it freed his hands, was a disadvantage in terms of speed. So he learned to sharpen flints, hurl them and make weapons, acquiring tactile skills and dexterity.

He used his voice to communicate with his fellow hunters. And although there is a theory that mankind could at one time communicate by thought transference, and that language is a retrogressive step, it is generally held that tool-making, language and our upright carriage are what distinguish us from animals. More importantly perhaps, he learned to take risks and to have swift, certain reactions when things went wrong. Nature supplied glands to secrete adrenalin and increase his heart beat and give power to his lungs and muscles instantly, and other glands to supply him with noradrenalin to help him escape or freeze into the camouflage of the landscape.

He learned to observe, to remember the habits of the game he hunted and, when he wasn’t hunting, the attributes, poisonous or otherwise, of the leaves he ate. Like other animals, he soon found out that the shortest route between two points is a straight line. ‘As the crow flies,’ we say, treading a bold path across a manicured rectangular lawn. And while Nature made Man curious and therefore exploratory of unknown territory and new phenomena, he had to be very suspicious of novelty, of anything that was different or new.

Hunting in packs was easier and much safer than hunting alone, so gradually he began to fit into some sort of social group, to learn to be accepted by them, to form a pecking order and to defer to an authority figure like the Silverback (the group leaders) of his gorilla cousins. He learned to keep warm in caves and, perhaps most easily of all, to find a mate and propagate his own kind.

So how far have we advanced from the cave-man? Not so far, many people would say. Man’s brain reached its present size more than 100,000 years ago. Strauss and Cave (the anatomists) have written of Neanderthal man: ‘If he could be re-incarnated and placed in a New York subway – provided he were bathed, shaved, and dressed in modern clothing – it is doubtful if he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.’ Similarly, could he slip on that four-gold-barred jacket without being recognised? What should be recognised is that characteristics inherited from him might well get inside that jacket and on to that aeroplane.

So how can modern Man deal with the aeroplane and other machine monsters he has created?

The machine, the technology, has advanced more in a hundred years than man’s brain has in a hundred thousand. There is a certain terrible similarity between God breathing life into the nostrils of man, and the machine into which the tip of Man’s finger breathes life. We all know what endless trouble God had with His creation. Is it not time we studied how Man is coping with his?

For unlike the machine which has developed an even larger and more complex ‘brain’, Man has not been quite so fortunate. Anthropologists have developed a means of measuring the ratio of brain weight to body weight (from portions of early skeletons) and this they term the ‘index of cephalisation’.

In normal healthy men, the ratio is approximately 1:50. This compares favourably with the male gorilla’s ratio of 1:200. The sobering discovery, however, is that the estimates of ratio taken from prehistoric human remains shows no startling contrasts with that for modern Man. And though we know that mental capacity depends more on cortical connections than mere size, it is an interesting fact that mankind, though much better cerebrally endowed than other creatures, does not head the cerebral list.

Nevertheless, over the years that separate us from our earliest ancestors, our brains and memory stores have become larger and we have acquired more connections between nerve cells. What no one seems to know is when and how brains began to provide the ability to make errors. An early description of human error is Adam’s eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden. And having committed the error, Adam, like his present-day descendants, knew he had to find a scapegoat – Eve.

But although mankind has acquired consciousness, more connections and a vast memory store, transmissions of information in and out of the brain, perhaps because of the divided lobes, remain comparatively slow – slower than is the case with some birds, who are in fact ahead of us in the cerebral league, where finches occupy first place. Perhaps Man’s urge to fly is his reaching for the next step in the evolutionary process. There is an interesting diagram from Professor Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1897, of the skeleton of a man and the stretched-out vertical skeleton of a bird. The similarity is remarkable

But whatever the basis of Man’s urge to fly, it is Man who is the centre of the endeavour to be airborne and, like train drivers, sailors and all operators of transport, the pilot is a well-trained but ordinary human being. A human being with all the psychological endowments of his ancestry and his upbringing, with the added hazard of his need to adapt to this fast-moving up-to-date world.

Man and Bird from professor Langley’s article(1897)

Like the rest of creation, mankind has slowly evolved biologically through changes in our genes over thousands of generations. Far faster has been mankind’s cultural evolution. But now, particularly with the development of high technology like aviation, even our cultural evolution has become too slow. In our cultural evolution we have gained the ability to cause change at a hitherto undreamed-of speed, and both biological and cultural evolution are inadequate to adapt us to the environment we are creating.

Few environments can be as different from the natural world as the flight deck of an aircraft. Cut off from the earth and an earth-dweller’s horizon, hurtling through another dimension, across time-zones, surrounded by machinery, monitoring dials and head-up displays, glued to his environment, moving with it (the world beyond probably muffled in cloud), the human being at the centre can alternate between long periods of boredom interspersed with the need for concentration, rapid decision-making and action.

So what is this particular human being like?

The airline advertisers, who have learned a little applied psychology, wisely portray him as a kindly, competent, grizzle-haired man (something of the Silverback of our cousins, the gorillas) and his calm friendly voice over the address system is in tune with this reassuring image. As Tom Wolfe puts it, ‘the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the Right Stuff’. Certainly the pilot is no longer seen as the daring young man on the flying trapeze or the dashing youngster driving his sports car to collect his latest conquest among the stewardesses. After all, he doesn’t need to drive fast cars to project his macho image. For where is the car that can compete with the power of a big jet? The pilot would say that on the ground he is more likely to be found in the family Volvo on his way to the supermarket for the week’s shopping. Today’s Jumbo captain would see himself more as a James Herriot than a James Bond.

Psychologists tell us that there is an identifiable pilot personality, that he is most likely an intuitive extrovert, and that he is an active-masculine personality. Eysenck has presented pilots as above-average in stability in comparison with the rest of the population. Yet among commercial aircrew, psychiatric disorders are second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of loss of licence.

Other writers have found pilots to be matter-of-fact, with strong needs for personal achievement and high regard for the responsibilities of family life, yet subject to excessive unconscious aggressive hostility related to frustrated achievement and the difficulty of reconciling their sense of responsibility with their need for novelty. Perhaps, in other words, coming to terms with both the family Volvo and their life on the big jets.

Aviation is still very much male-dominated, and for the purposes of this book it is the male pilot who is described, but there is no reason why women should not be just as good pilots as men. Yet men have resisted their move to the flight deck, as they have resisted every advance in women’s equality.

When Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic with Wilmer Stultz in 1928, men made snide remarks that she had simply been a piece of freight and that the Atlantic would certainly eat any woman who fought it on her own. She vowed to show them and in 1932, in a solo flight from Newfoundland to Londonderry, she did, going on to become one of the most illustrious aviators, along with Amy Johnson, Jean Batten, Beryl Markham and many other women. When the Second World War came, women did tremendous service with Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), ferrying every sort of aircraft from Spitfires to four-engined Stirlings – only to be shut out of civil-aviation pilots’ jobs when the war ended. (See Chapter 8.)

Although there is still a steady intake from the RAF, many pilots will have come in straight from school or university. They will have been educated to at least A-level standard and may well hold a degree. Few pilots will mention their desire to fly as a reason for their calculated decision. Being masculine and matter-of-fact, they would prefer to say that it was based on firm commercial calculations. Certainly, if a pilot had any illusions about the glamour of flying, these would probably be discarded within the first few weeks of flying training.

The granting of a licence is merely the first check upon his ability. Throughout his career he will be called upon to demonstrate to hard-bitten examiners his awareness of the latest regulations and his continuing ability to do his job to the highest standard. His performance during the twice-yearly simulator checks will by analysed no less critically than that of an actor playing his first Hamlet. If he survives, he prays that the doctors will pass him fit on his regular medical check. In return he will get a smart uniform, a great fillip to his self-esteem, an image in society, a good salary and the opportunity to sit up all night hunched over the aircraft controls in a cramped flight deck.

Few people meet the criteria demanded. Pilots are required to be averagely good at all things. Eliminate from the population at large all those who require spectacles, those suffering from minor medical conditions like colour blindness, young men who never went on to further education, those who couldn’t steer a tram down a Roman road without hitting a tree, and the people who quite sensibly insist upon sleeping in their own bed at night, and there are precious few left to choose from.

From this group, there are few proven criteria of how to choose men and women who will remain cool and capable of making balanced judgments under trying circumstances, knowing that an instant decision taken at one hundred feet above a dark runway may well be analysed later at a four-hour meeting of desk-bound critics and found wanting. Personnel selection techniques have emphasised skills and basic intelligence. Such measures do fairly well at predicting early success in flying training, but most do no more than predict 25 per cent of variance in pilot performance at advanced stages of civil aviation training.

On the surface, the pilot is no different from most professional men and women, or from his fellow pilots. The variability of their control of any standard aircraft performance is slight. Yet, as Professor Roscoe points out, ‘Giant differences among pilots are revealed as tension and confusion mount under operational stress.’

Understandably, most airline pilots want a quiet life. On the surface, a pilot might well, like Tolkien’s hobbit Bilbo Baggins, say that he doesn’t much care for adventures and that his ideal day is one in which he departs on time, arrives on time, and has a thoroughly routine and boring flight between the two events. After all, disruption can alter his work pattern for up to a month, causing him to miss his son’s sports day or his daughter’s eighteenth birthday.

If all four engines on your B-747 stop, as happened to a pilot when the power units were clogged by volcanic dust, the internal alarm stimulus is to act immediately. But Lufthansa warns its pilots ‘the chance of saving the day by spontaneous reaction is extremely remote, the chance of catapulting yourself into deepest trouble is very high’. Yet immediate response to a dangerous stimulus has been inbuilt in Man through his ancestors for millions of years, and often the most difficult decision he has to make is to do nothing. As he sits at the airport, watching other aircraft depart in weather conditions he considers unsafe, he will be under enormous pressure to follow suit against his better judgment. Some of his own passengers, given the chance, would encourage him to take off. It has always been a source of wonderment to pilots that many travellers would much prefer to risk violent death than be half an hour late. The maxim ‘Better be half an hour late in this world than a quarter of a century early in the next’ falls on deaf ears. And yet, though the pilot wonders at it, under certain stresses he may well succumb to the very same innate, unreasonable time pressure. Accident records show all too often that under the pressure of the need to clear the runway, the need to get the aeroplane positioned somewhere else, the need to get away before the weather further closes or flight limitations ground him, the pilot takes off.

For though the routine and ordinary take place for so much of the time that few pilots now will ever see a crash, and some will complete a career without ever experiencing an engine failure, it is on the rare, stressful and dangerous occasions that the pilot reveals the presence or absence of those necessary qualities which as yet no test can predict. The important thing is what lies below the surface of the apparently good-humoured, matter-of-fact man with the four gold bars who, if you asked him what he thinks of his job, would probably answer ‘It’s better than working for a living.’

In other words, what does the man in the smart uniform who climbs aboard the aircraft carry in his ‘luggage’, as the counsellors call it – and by luggage they don’t mean his overnight bag or briefcase. They mean the weight of his problems past and present, his personality, his hopes and fears and aspirations. Most of all, his psychological hang-ups and how they all relate to his biological inheritance, as he travels across time zones with a group of people he may not have met before.

Man’s ancestors, the apes, are divided into chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas and Orangutans. Male chimpanzees are polygamous and opportunistic – they tend to mate with whichever female comes into season. Gibbons, however, establish a pair-bond relationship that often lasts for life; they are familial and mutually supportive, with brothers sometimes living together, or father and son. In a gorilla group, the Silverback, the dominant male, has his pick of the females, though he may show special favour and develop a more lasting relationship with one or maybe two. Orangutans are solitary, or at most a unit consisting of a female and maybe one or two children, to which group adult males pay occasional visits. Early Man formed a pair-bond relationship and, give or take periodic aberrations, mankind has followed in his footsteps. But the airline pilot leaves his wife at home and travels across the world accompanied by a bevy of pretty girls who are in a subservient role to him. In the implicit hierarchy, he is the big chief. If there is any trouble or danger big chief, or Silverback, is the one who should, and most probably will, get them out of it. This is a subtle relationship fraught with marital danger. And even if there isn’t actual danger, it is also fraught with imagined. For a number of airline wives were themselves stewardesses and, stuck at home with the children, it is easy for the imagination to paint lurid pictures. The old adage of what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose can be the justification for what follows.

Besides which, it is genuinely difficult to unwind and sleep after flying. Too much adrenalin is circulating. The pilot is experiencing too many of our ancestors’ fight or flight mechanisms. He has made the long journey but what is at the end of it? The brain and body don’t just quietly switch off. If he can’t knock someone down, or pursue a sabre-toothed tiger through the forest, sexual activity will reduce tension and therefore predispose towards sleep. It used to be said that after long flights the only way to get some rest was through drink, drugs or sleeping with the stewardess. Implicit in that advice is the chauvinistic attitude that the woman who travels in the male’s entourage is his special perk. If the cave man took a woman on his hunting trips, he would no doubt forget the pair-bond relationship even more easily.

But sleeping is not the end of the pilot’s problems or even the beginning of a marital one. Most pilots have a well-developed ego and a strong sex urge. Many pilots, especially military, subconsciously equate flying with sex. Nor is it always subconscious. The aircraft has a phallic shape. The bawdy songs of the RAF and the even bawdier ones of the USAF equate their aircraft with a woman, their bombs with sperm.

Flying is a sexual symbol; flying dreams are held to be about sex. Therefore it is understandable that a pilot’s professional and sexual worries intertwine. Ironically, many pilots find that flying has a deleterious effect upon their sexual performance. Lord Trenchard’s well-known dictum, ‘Remember, gentlemen, you cannot fuck and fly’, has a way of becoming too horribly true. And that is an added strain on a marriage, an additional piece of evidence to a suspicious wife and an added feeling of inadequacy and loss of personal image. What, asks the pilot, if I can’t land the aeroplane either?

And what of all his other worries: family illness and squabbles, bereavement, thwarted ambitions, jealousies, possible divorce proceedings, custody, ageing parents? All these clamber aboard with him, some ameliorated but most exacerbated by his absence. And all these add to his stress.

Because of higher than average physical requirements for entry and regular medical checks throughout his career, the pilot should enjoy a higher than average life expectancy. Yet the results of a survey by the International Federation of Airline Pilots Association (IFALPA) on the fate of 282 Argentinian, Canadian and British pilots who retired in the last decade shows otherwise. Nearly 60 per cent had died before reaching the age of 65, and 129 of these had died between the ages of 55 and 64. The main cause was heart disease.

Since the pilot is central to the safe operation of the flight, how much has he been studied?

The reply is, in my view, ‘Not enough’.

The emergence of psychology is like that ‘tangled, thorny and bristling’ bush used to describe the emergence of Man himself. Springing from the respected discipline of philosophy, and despite such giants as Freud and Jung and James, it has suffered a crisis of identity, a lack of self-image as disturbing as that which its proponents have discovered in the humanity it studies. Scientists of other disciplines have only reluctantly and lately acknowledged it as a science, and in an endeavour to be scientific some psychologists in the middle of this century retreated to the laboratory, confining themselves to experiments on long-suffering rats, ignoring the real world and the rich fields of study of humanity in the workplace and under the stress of the technological age.

This has changed and the change is accelerating. Throughout the world some exciting psychological studies are being carried out.

What isn’t changing so quickly is distrust of psychology. And although it is acknowledged that we cannot make sense of the world until we have made some sense of ourselves, much of what psychology uncovers, though in the long run vital, can in the short term be damaging to Man’s lofty image of himself – an image hedged around with defence mechanisms.

Yet never did Man so urgently need the help of psychology as in his dealings with the explosion of technology. And though warnings were given decades ago, only after a spate of disasters such as Three Mile Island, Zeebrugge, Tenerife, Chernobyl, Bhopal, King’s Cross, Lockerbie, Piper Alpha and Kegworth has the urgent need to study Man’s mistakes in his technical environment really been acknowledged.

Of course two world wars, like those disasters, helped to facilitate the entry of the psychologist into the workplace, and especially the aviation workplace. Both sides needed to know what made up a good pilot because they were expensive to train and aircraft were scarce. Many of the tests dreamed up were bizarre or inadequate. But beginnings were made; the problem was being addressed.

And what made psychology more popular was that money could be made out of it. Workers would produce more goods in certain environments, and advertising was more successful if it used an approach informed by psychology. It can be used to manipulate the public by touching on their insecurities – ‘have I bad breath, dandruff, sweaty feet?’ – to buy and buy. And it is assumed that what makes money can’t be wholly wrong.

Yet what saves lives is far more vital. Many airlines are at long last acknowledging that pilot error is a misnomer and that errors are due to human factors, and by no means always in the pilot. This last they acknowledge less readily, but acknowledgement of that will eventually come as it did with human factors. The fact that the pilot is sitting in the hot seat at the apex of the operation simply makes him more vulnerable to error, his own and other people’s. Airlines will also need to realise that his error, if he makes it, is probably the culminating one of a sequence, and that before airline flying is made even more safe, there is still a long way to go, much to be investigated and a number of defence mechanisms to be broken down.

For the environment in which civilized man lives has changed out of all recognition. Yet he knows very little about himself, and to the complexities of technology he still brings to bear many of the qualities better suited to his earlier environment – sometimes with disastrous results. In no other field of human endeavour can this be seen more clearly than in Man’s exploration of that totally new element – the sky.

Two

Those Daring Young Men in their Flying Machines

Man’s attempt to conquer the sky was greeted with the same disbelief and hostility encountered by Darwin’s theory of evolution – and it took aeons longer than is generally recognised. If Lucy (Australopithecusafarensis), the half-complete hominid skeleton fossil discovered by Donald Johanson and his colleagues in Ethiopia, had wanted to fly with Orville Wright in the first aeroplane near Kitty Hawk, she would have had to extend her life by about 3,700,000 years before becoming homosapiens and for a further 300,000 years after that. A very old lady by this time, she would have been relieved to find that she would have to wait only another eighty-five years before being able to take a flight in an Airbus A320.

Despite the fact that dreams of flying had occupied the consciousness of Man for thousands of years, despite attempts in almost every society in almost every century to become airborne, it was declared to be at best impossible, at worst a sin.

His fall when he did attempt to fly was equated with Man’s fallen nature, and it was therefore a blasphemy to try to become airborne. Flying was witchcraft, a work of the devil, on occasion punishable by death. But legends of flying persisted: Daedalus and Icarus, Capnobates who travelled by smoke, and Emperor Shun who five thousand years ago escaped his captors by flying away in the feathers of an obliging bird. While Church and public mocked or menaced, for thousands of years intrepid would-be aviators jumped off cliffs, spires and roofs from China and Japan to Constantinople and Egypt, while the legendary King Bladud, king of Britain in 863 BC, egged on by sycophantic courtiers, attempted to fly from the Temple of Apollo in what is now London with ‘wings that would not have held a cherub’.

But all the birdmen exhibited a quality that every early pilot needed – the ability to take risks and discount other people’s disbelief. Then came Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and the real birth of aeronautics. It has been said that Leonardo’s absorption with flying was ‘the most tremendous, most obsessing, most tyrannical of his dreams’.

It continued to obsess many other people. In the nineteenth century there were the Montgolfier brothers with their balloons, the glider Otto Lilienthal, and Sir George Cayley who designed an aircraft with forward thrust as well as lift.

Then the twentieth century – this age of aviation – dawned. But still the sceptics said, ‘Impossible’. TheTimes in a leading article in 1900 thundered that heavier-than-air flight was engineeringly impossible. The would-be airmen still continued.

And in 1903, success! The Wright brothers managed to become airborne and maintain height for a distance of 120 feet. Were the disbelievers confounded? Not at all. They didn’t believe it. The news of the Wright brothers’ achievement did not break on the world with the thunderclap you would now expect. Only two papers mentioned it. One was the DailyMail, and that in a two-inch report at the bottom of a column headed ‘Flight of a balloonless airship’. The other paper? The Beekeeper’sJournal.

The American government refused to buy the Wright brothers’ patent, so they offered it to the British government for £10,000. Our disbelieving government flatly turned the offer down.

Two years later, the French produced an aeroplane, flown sixty metres in 1906 by Santos-Dumont. They would not believe that the Wright brothers’ ‘real’ aeroplane existed until in 1908 Wilbur brought it over to a race-track at Le Mans. French and English newspapers declared him a fake, and said that his aircraft would not get off the ground. From 8 April 1908 to 2 January 1909, Wilbur flew a hundred flights in France, one of which lasted over two hours. Even so, the disbelief continued. TheTimes offered a prize of ten million pounds to the first man to fly an aeroplane over London, in the sure belief that it would never have to pay up.

Then the American Samuel Cody burst upon the British scene. Although he could neither read nor write, in 1908 he built and piloted the first aeroplane to leave British soil. Nobody gave him the money. He earned it by staging Wild West melodramas in local theatres. All his family were the cast, his sons rode horses down the aisles on to the stage, his wife hung from stage precipices and Cody himself alternated between the villain firing pistols and the hero doing the rescuing.

He too was laughed at by the press, derided as a charlatan. But the laughter died down when King George V gave him his friendship and approval and asked him for demonstrations. Even so, official disbelief continued. As war clouds developed over Europe, the Secretary of State for War declared that the government ‘do not consider that aeroplanes will be of any possible use for war purposes’.

It was individuals again who bought four aeroplanes and gave them to the Navy. They allowed officers to learn in them with the proviso: ‘No flying on Sundays’.

So the Royal Naval Air Service was begun.

The year 1914 came, and the Great War. Governments began to perceive that there might after all be a military advantage in aircraft. But they were seen rather as winged horses. Indeed the ability to ride a horse was considered the primary qualification for pilot selection. A good pair of hands is still reckoned the mark of a good pilot. And during the First World War, fighting in the air was conducted more along the lines of knights jousting. But the war gave a great fillip to the progress of flying (Britain finishing up with 22,647 aeroplanes) and the Royal Flying Corps became the Royal Air Force. Flying was an acknowledged reality. The air, it seemed, had begun to be conquered.

However, the pilots in their explorations were finding that the sky was even more dangerous than anybody had supposed. It was not just that aircraft broke up and engines failed – hazards that pioneers like Pilcher, Cody and Rolls had cheerfully accepted and died in their brave researches. The sky packed all sorts of unexpected punches to which pilots through the years would be exposed, and which would be fatal to many. Yet they went on. In the pioneer Pilcher’s dying words, ‘sacrifices must be made’.

Cold froze the fingers of the early pilots – the electric suits designed to keep them warm burned their hands. Though parachutes existed, no pilots were issued with them lest they abandoned their aircraft too soon. Altitude caused lowering of the atmospheric pressure and of oxygen levels, lack of which would eventually cause disorientation and death. The slipstream blinded pilots’ eyes, and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide from the exhausts. Unlike birds, which have the right internal instinct to stay on the ground at night or in fog, they were to find it almost impossible to judge attitude (position relative to the ground) without a horizon. Ice was an appalling danger, stopping engines, overloading fuselages, spoiling the aerodynamic qualities of wings. Certain clouds could break up aircraft. If turned or pulled up too quickly at too high a speed, the normal pull of gravity (G-force) is increased many times, resulting in injury or unconsciousness. Air sickness could be crippling. As the years went by, more and more unexpected hazards were to appear – among the latest being a microburst.

This is a very strong downdraught approaching the ground and producing an outflow of tremendous winds and downflow. Usually small in area, it lasts only a few minutes but is highly dangerous, particularly for an aircraft on take-off or landing. A large downburst lasting from five to twenty minutes is called a macroburst. Both were only identified around 1980. In 1982 153 passengers and crew were killed in a 727 taking off from New Orleans. Another fatal accident occurred to a Tristar at Dallas in 1985, when 133 people were killed or injured. Pilots are now trained in the simulator on how to deal with a microburst.

Casualties among the early pioneers had been large, but amongst the Great War pilots they were enormous. It would be nice to think that doctors and governments came forward to help pilots in their struggle to live in the sky, but the fact is that aviation medicine was born because the cost of replacing so many crashed machines was considered too expensive, and some form of selection of airmen had to be made.

The Germans were the first to establish a Medical Section to test their Air Force candidates – not only medically but (surprisingly) psychologically, giving them a test on ‘attentiveness, memory, quickness and sureness of movement, capacity to withstand fatigue, timidity, orientation and discrimination’.

The British continued to select on the ability to ride a horse, and in the event of an accident made the pilot, if he survived, take to the air again, resulting too often in the man losing not his nerve but his life. Only a Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) corporal was attached to a squadron, and the wounded from the trenches were recruited to augment the depleted ranks. When eventually examining stations were set up under Major Flack, the principle selection tool was the ‘Flack Bag’, purporting to discover the ceiling to which a candidate could ascend without oxygen. The figure sought was 20,000 feet – yet everyone requires oxygen at 12,000. This test continued for years, and was one I had to pass to be selected for the RAF at the beginning of the Second World War. Unfortunately, it gave pilots not only the belief that they could fly at such heights, but that men who could not were cissies.

The French system of testing would-be pilots was almost as lunatic. They tested for ‘nervous shock’, firing a revolver close to a candidate’s ear and examining his reactions.

American doctors concentrated on the function of the vestibular apparatus in the ear, under the belief that it orientated the flyer in the air as on the ground. One test was to place a candidate on a piano stool and spin him. If he vomited, he was rejected. It was not until after the war that they discovered that they were rejecting the normal. As with the Flack test, the myth caught on amongst airmen (and persisted for ten years after the Armistice) that a man who could not maintain attitude without a visible horizon in fog or at night was no good as a pilot – a belief that resulted in hundreds of deaths from spinning in.

The formula that guided the American aeronautical organisation was that of all flying casualties 2 per cent were caused by ‘the Hun’, 8 per cent by ‘failures of the engine or the plane’ and 90 per cent by the ‘failure of the flyer himself’!

And so was born the highly convenient catch-almost-all concept – pilot error.