Category Archives: TV

I’ve been getting some (understandable) ribbing at home about my recent fascination with aviation disaster documentaries – in particular National Geographic’s Air Crash Investigation.

Even with air security firmly in the news, it’s easy to dismiss programmes like these as sensationalist or morbid.

But what they’ve taught me over the last few months is how rich and multi-faceted aviation safety is – and how intellectually stimulating the subject can be.

Allow me to ruin your festive period by expanding a little on what I mean.

Sometimes, it turns out, the factors which jeopardise air safety are huge – like the failure in corporate ethics which allowed one near-catastrophic DC10 accident in 1972 to be followed two years later by another fully-catastrophic one which happened for the exactly the same (by then, avoidable) reasons.

But sometimes they’re about tiny details of plane design and ergonomics - like the decision to put a vitally important control next to a pilot’s footrest (one slip of the foot, in this example, and the craft becomes invisible to air-traffic control or other aircraft).

Sometimes they’re audio-related. When two cockpit warnings share the same sound, and one of the two warnings is much more prevalent, who can blame pilots for confusion when one day the second meaning is what’s being indicated?

(The Helios disaster I’ve just linked to was also compounded by linguistic issues – a Cypriot co-pilot and a German captain who had difficulty even understanding each other.)

Or the contributing factors can be physiological - like the pilot who, without visual cues to correct him, erroneously disregards what his instruments are telling him because he’s suffering from vertigo. (His inner ear, in other words, is playing tricks on him.)

Sometimes they’re managerial. If a pilot fails to properly delegate tasks to his team, and as a result everyone becomes fixated on a single part of the cockpit, vitally important signs elsewhere can be missed.

And sometimes they’re cultural. It was Malcolm Gladwell’s examination of why hierarchical, deferential societies traditionally crashed more planes (because co-pilots were less ready to challenge their superiors when mistakes were made) which first piqued my interest in this whole subject.

Sometimes they can be contributed to by regulations designed to make flying safer. If a few more minutes’ delay taking off means a flight will have to be postponed due to limits on working hours, a pilot could be more inclined to push ahead and take off in haste.

Or they can be about processes, and the failure to adhere to them. The repair that’s done skimpily; the service that’s missed because one maintenance worker’s off sick; the check that’s falsely signed as having been completed when one vital step has been omitted.

But the factors I find most interesting – in my capacity as a geek – are those faced not just by the aviation industry, but by everyone involved in interaction design and/or usability.

As planes have become equipped with ever more complex automation systems, how do airlines ensure that pilots properly understand how to use them? Improved training? Clearer manuals? Better visual and audio cues?

I’ve been surprised to learn how many accidents have been caused over the decades by pilots simply not grokking their autopilot: failing to understand what it controls, what it doesn’t, how elements of it can be inadvertently switched off, and how to recognise if that’s happened.

Worse still, there’s the psychological effect of reliance on automation. If as a pilot there’s little to do once you’re up in the sky – for hour after hour – how do you maintain concentration? (This is not an academic question.)

And I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.

There must be other subjects as absorbing and multi-disciplinary as this. But right now I’m struggling to think of one.