Human lives are priceless

[Clinton McKenzie]

Cognitive Bias

“Cognitive Bias” is a completely uncontroversial and well-known human attribute. The human mind naturally overestimates the probabilities of events that have awful consequences: Events like shark attacks and aircraft crashes. (The ‘mystique of aviation’ has been coined previously to describe the effects of that bias in aviation regulation.)

In sensible societies, finite risk mitigation resources are allocated on the basis of objective risk and cost benefit analyses, rather than perception affected by cognitive bias. When that doesn’t happen, the outcome is unnecessary cost and damage through disproportionate resources being allocated to mitigating the perceived, overestimated risks rather than the actual risks that would more effectively be mitigated.

Cognitive bias and the yawning gap between the talk and the walk about aviation safety risk and regulation are the main (but not only) reasons for the parlous state of general aviation in Australia (in whatever way “general aviation” might be defined).

In Australia, lives, livelihoods and life’s passions are sacrificed in the name of ‘aviation safety’ on a regular basis, when the cost of that sacrifice is either not justified by the cost or - worse and tragically - paid in return for no causal mitigation of any safety risk. It makes me sick to the stomach to reflect on - for example - the people who’ve committed suicide because of the enforcement of colour vision ‘standards’ that existed only in the minds of zealots. And that’s just the tip (albeit the most ghastly part) of the iceberg.