Timelord and
Easy Street - would I be right in thinking that you were not present at the Old Bailey trial?
In the eight weeks that I was there, there were probably three occasions that really stuck in my mind as being pivotal.
The first was when a first responder talked about AH lying beside the wreckage of his aircraft, very near to death (his life was only saved shortly afterwards by the quick reactions of another first responder). AH was still conscious, and he said “I blacked out” (in flight).
The second occasion was the first time I saw the full video of the flight, alongside positional analysis. My reaction was ‘what on earth is he doing that for?’ His manoeuvres made no sense at all.
The third time was when a highly qualified aviation human factors expert identified at least eight, and possibly twelve, unconnected errors between ‘Point X’ at the start of the crash manoeuvre and the time, 23 seconds later, when it was too late to recover. Asked ‘How do you analyse the importance of those errors?’ he replied ‘One type of accident is an accumulation of errors, so they’re not independent.’ ‘Why do pilots do this?’ ‘There are many reasons. It could be a conscious decision, or it could be unconscious. But here I can’t find any relationships between the errors. They’re not related. It’s very difficult to explain. The chances of eight to twelve errors happening within the short time of 23 seconds are very remote. The probability [of this happening] is very low.
The point of that human factors evidence for me was that it wasn’t just a single blunder which you could put down to carelessness, or indiscipline, or whatever.
So
Timelord’s question
what is to stop any pilot (or surgeon or engineer) who makes a huge blunder just saying “well, I was cognitively impaired”
is a good one. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as cognitive impairment of the kind that is being discussed here. The point about all of this is that we just don’t know enough about it, and there is very little research to draw on. I understand (but I don’t know for sure) that the death of Flt Lt Jon Egging (Red 4), near Bournemouth in 2011, resulted in the RAF doing new research into the effects of G at levels lower than normally thought dangerous. But I definitely don’t know if there were any useful results from that research.
airsound