Originally Posted by
wonkazoo
If I have to read "Turn off the Magic, Set the Pitch, Set the Power, Trim the Aircraft, Monitor the Performance, and Move the Aircraft to a Safe Altitude" one more time my head is going to explode like a pimple on a teenage girls nose.
I have no idea why a few very well-invested individuals here are pounding this drum so loudly and consistently.....
You titled this post
"Fate May be the Hunter, but Fear is the Killer."
Exactly! I could not agree more, and therein lies the key to understand where all this has been going.
FEAR. Gut-wrenching, mind-numbing FEAR. FEAR is the killer. FEAR is the enemy. FEAR is the obstacle to successfully navigating so many aircraft emergencies. So how do we overcome this very predictable human reaction?!
Think for a moment what transpires in military training. Military commanders know that their soldiers will be engaging with FEAR on the front lines, but they also know that paralyzing FEAR is the one thing most likely to doom them. How do they overcome this obstacle? Through training and repetition. Training and repetition. Training and repetition. One of those famous cliches you hear in military-themed movies when the battle is about to be joined, "Remember your training!" And yes, some number of soldiers will still forget their training and freeze at a critical moment, but that doesn't mean the training was useless.
To the uninitiated pilot in training, I can think of a lot of simulator events that can stimulate the fear reflex - Engine Fire at V1, uncommanded engine failure at high altitude leading to decompression and an emergency descent, low altitude windshear recovery. That is exactly why we train for them. You need to train, and you need the repetition of training so that the correct responses are drilled deep down into your reptilian brain. The current training practices at most airlines do an okay job at training for the KNOWN.
What the current training regime is failing to train for is the UNKNOWN.
Yes, paralyzing fear is one possible outcome when faced with an unknown emergency, particularly at low altitude. Since we know this, we ought to train for it. How? As I have amply described, you train for it by intentional subjecting the flight crew to the unknown and novel situations where the only correct answer is: "
Turn off the Magic, Set the Pitch, Set the Power, Trim the Aircraft, Monitor the Performance, and Move the Aircraft to a Safe Altitude." You do this literally again and again until their heads want to explode. The inborn FEAR response is usually described as: Fight, Flee, or Freeze. As aviators, we need to add a fourth - FLY THE AIRCRAFT.
To those who may say this is idealistic or somehow not possible, this grey-haired pilot will tell you that this is what we used to do. Somewhere along the way, the training environment stopped emphasizing one of our most important tasks - when all else fails, when the world is going to **** around you, when you feel the fear rise in your throat, FLY THE AIRCRAFT, first, last, and always. Yes, the crew's ineffectual response is ultimately a human factors issue, but it is a human factors issue that has a very definite fix.
The Ethiopian crew failed in their response to this malfunction
because their training regime failed them first.