Dr Manderson nails it without naming it – cognitive bias
Dr Manderson nailed the issue at the heart of what is wrong with CASA's mindset and decision-making. Here it is, writ large, after Dr Manderson was asked about why it’s ‘OK’ for someone to with a ‘condition’ to drive a B-Double truck but ‘not OK’ for the same person to fly a light aircraft. Dr Manderson used the analogy of regulatory approval of covid vaccinations for very young children:
There's something about the way we're put together that we just don't want to take that risk with the little kiddies. We want to be extra safe. And extra careful. And extradifferent. ...
Why is it that we'll allow someone behind the wheel of a truck and not the controls of an aircraft? What drives that?
The answer is simple, Doc: Cognitive bias. It is, as you say: “the way we are put together”.
Cognitive biases are cod-ordinary, well-known and uncontroversial human propensities.
For example, humans ‘naturally’ over-estimate the probabilities of events with consequences that are ghastly to contemplate: Being attacked by a shark; Dying in the cliche '30,000 foot death plunge' in an aircraft. However, the result of that propensity can be harmful overreactions to the objective risks. I highly commend Cass Sunstein's paper
Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law on this subject.
There are many other examples of cognitive bias that we need to understand if we are to avoid their harmful consequences. For us aviators, in particular, there's a very good article in the January 2015 edition of
Flight Safety Australia called: “The fatal five”. The fifth is a form of cognitive bias called 'confirmation bias' of which aviators will be – or least should be – aware. It will get you into trouble in the real aviation world.
As another example, there is a way to avoid losing money due to the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ – another form of cognitive bias that results in people erroneously believing that a certain random event is less likely or more likely to happen based on the outcome of a previous event or series of events. Casinos and other gambling businesses are, of course, acutely aware of this form of cognitive bias. It’s why the Lotto people publish “Hot Numbers” and “Cold Numbers”. You avoid the financially disastrous consequences of this kind of cognitive bias by learning and making decisions based on matriculation-level probabilities.
The Perth city authority’s response to the Mallard tragedy is an example of both of these kinds of cognitive bias in action. The Australia Day flyover in Perth has simply been cancelled. CASA’s ‘Community Service Flight’ instrument is, in my view, another example, though there was at least an attempt to justify it on the basis of (highly contested) statistics.
An ASIC lasts only 2 years but an MSIC can last up to 4. I suppose that’s because a terrorist ‘inside the wire’ at Birdsville aerodrome poses a greater risk than a terrorist in charge of a ship full of ammonium nitrate in a city’s port.
The FAA does a pretty good job of avoiding harmful overreactions in aviation safety regulation. CASA? Not so much.
There is a way to avoid harmful overreactions caused by cognitive bias: You get disinterested people to assess the objective evidence and the objective risks then make decisions on that basis alone. And guess what? The law requires administrative decisions - like the decision by CASA to issue a medical certificate or not, or to impose a condition or to require some medical test - to be made that way.
The USA is pretty good at disinterested, objective evidence and risk-based decision-making in aviation regulation. That’s one of the reasons the USA has Basic Med and flight instruction without AOCs. It also helps that aviation is part of the USA’s ‘cultural DNA’ because aerospace capability is a fundamental input to its economic and military superpower status. The USA ‘gets’ that in order to enjoy the rewards, you have to take the risks and pay the costs.
Imagine where aerospace would be today if each tragedy resulted in a cancellation of any further similar activity. Analyse and learn - Yes. But keep the emotion out of it.
One of my favourite decision-makers in aviation is a (now deceased) British scientist named Conrad Hal Waddington, eponymous of the ‘Waddington Effect’. His analysis of the reliability of bombers in WWII showed that the mandatory preventive maintenance schedule was causing more problems than it was preventing. The ‘conventional wisdom’ at the time – ‘conventional wisdom’ being a euphemism for the intuition of experts with strongly held opinions - was that more preventive maintenance would catch and fix incipient problems before they became unserviceabilities. Waddington’s analysis led to recommendations to
increase the interval between scheduled maintenance and to
reduce the number of tasks carried out. That resulted in a 60% increase in effective flying hours of the RAF Coastal Command bomber fleet.
Waddington wasn’t an aeronautical engineer or an aircraft mechanic or even a pilot. He was a gifted developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist, philosopher, poet and painter who wasn’t particularly interested in aviation. But that’s why he was able to conduct proper analysis which showed that the
worst thing you can do to a complicated piece of machinery is pull it apart to find out why it is working well and try to ‘help’ it to keep working well. More mandatory meddling causes more problems than it prevents. The flight I fear most is the first one after my aircraft has been the subject of mandatory meddling. Most of the damage done to my aircraft over the years has been done during mandatory meddling.
What have we got out of CASA for so long? To use Dr Manderson’s term: 'Extra' careful. One of her predecessors called it: “The conservative approach”. Another CASA Avmed doctor said: “It is what the public would expect us to do.” That’s not objective evidence-based and objective risk-based decision-making.
A person with a ‘condition’ might be 'OK' to drive a B-double truck, but an aeroplane? Cognitive bias says: No!
Contemplating a B-Double crashing into a school yard doesn't scare people as much as contemplating a Cessna 172 colliding with a Jumbo Jet. And that's what could happen if Joe or Josephine the Cessna 172 pilot has a 'condition'. The B-Double jack-knifing into the playground won’t put the kiddies through the horror of the 30,000 foot death plunge and, in any event, that’s ‘someone else’s’ risk to manage.
Assuming the driver of the B-Double and the pilot at the controls of the Cessna 172 each suffer sudden incapacitation, the probabilities of the B-Double causing death or destruction are many orders of magnitude higher than the Cessna 172 causing death or destruction.
This pilot was rendered unconscious by a carbon monoxide leak and walked away from a ‘landing’ while unconscious. There was no mid-air collision with a Jumbo Jet while the aircraft continued on its way with an unconscious pilot.
It might be ‘OK’ for you to drive a car that is three times the weight and carries double the number of passengers compared with your aircraft, and it might be ‘OK’ for you to do that in densely populated areas and on the highway in close proximity to busloads of school children, without having a battery of costly six-monthly medical tests. But as soon as you want to get into that Cessna 172 to fly to Birdsville with your partner and child it’s ‘not OK’ because you become a potential aviation catastrophe that’s too ghastly to contemplate. Cognitive bias says: No! Think about the kiddy in the Cessna death plunge.
The ever-expanding “large number of potential aero-medically significant conditions” – that’s a quote from the CASA DAME Handbook – create ‘risks’ that justify – nay, demand! - intrusive, restrictive, costly and – in some cases – risky and destructive impositions on pilots. That’s being extra careful. It’s the conservative approach. It is what the public would expect us to do. (Oh, and by the way, it keeps us in a job with endless busy-work that makes us feel important.)
CASA had a bit of amnesia for a while and overlooked the Waddington Effect during its ‘Community Service Flight’ changes. CASA was proposing to ‘increase’ the maintenance ‘standard’ of the private aircraft involved by requiring them to undergo more scheduled maintenance. Fortunately a reminder of the Waddington Effect made it to someone capable of listening and deciding on the basis of data rather than intuition. (Unfortunately, the same did not happen with the control cable AD. I paid $10,000 to have my Bonanza turned in to a death trap. Thanks CASA! And many maintenance organisations have incurred regulatory wrath on the basis of non-compliance with a light aircraft manufacturer’s maintenance schedule based on numbers plucked out of the air in the mid 50s and 60s but treated as ‘holy writ’.)
Imagine being a judge, faced with a safety authority conjuring up the risk of the 30,000 foot death plunge as a consequence of a ‘risk’ that the ‘authority’ is not ‘satisfied’ has been ‘appropriately’ mitigated. Judges are humans, too.
When the day comes that Australia has to stand up, alone, and defeat an armed attack by a serious force, Australia will again learn the real value of aviation infrastructure and expertise and the real cost of selling it off and regulating general aviation into the ground. DFOs don’t deter or defeat armed attacks. You can’t maintain and operate a defence force for very long unless you have a surge capacity in the form of civilian bodies and brains and facilities that do not rely on immigration and external supply chains. That’s why the USA encourages as many of its citizens and businesses it can to design, build and fly whatever flying machines they can possibly imagine.
Here are the words of a
judge in the USA expressed in a 2015 case:
Not only is general aviation important to the national infrastructure, but it serves a critical role as the cradle of aviation. The security and economic vitality of the United States depends on this laboratory of flight where future civilian and military pilots are born. Airports such as Solberg blossomed in an era when local young men turned their dreams of barnstorming into air dominance in World War II and led this country into its golden age. These dreams still live in our youth, and general aviation endures as the proving ground for future pilots from all walks of life.
Finally, there is a certain freedom that defines general aviation. Men and women throughout history gazed longingly at the soaring effortless freedom of birds, pondering release from the symbolic bondage of gravity. Only here can a man or woman walk onto some old farmer’s field and turn dreams into reality. As Charles Lindbergh once said: “What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men . . . I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.”
Thus, general aviation airports serve a myriad of public purposes. The record substantiates the importance of general aviation and Solberg Airport’s role in particular. The Defendant offered documentary and testimonial evidence, which this Court found persuasive in its determination of public purpose. The objective evidence demonstrated that general aviation generates over a billion dollars in revenue and creates thousands of jobs across the state [of New Jersey]. It has a substantial economic impact on communities and contributes directly to local business transportation capability. The evidence also demonstrated that New Jersey’s general aviation infrastructure provides many health, welfare, and social benefits: emergency medical services, schools, fire and emergency services, law enforcement, tour operators, and traffic surveillance directly benefit from general aviation airports.
If only we had the same ‘cultural DNA’ in Australia. And we need more Waddingtons.