Originally Posted by
itsnotthatbloodyhard
Maybe rather than shutting down a really good process, he was facilitating a more practical and workable approach.
Of course there’s a place for the scientific process in aviation safety, but when my wingman loses contact, I don’t want a scientist-practitioner. I want a simple, practical solution. Right now.
In any case, we’re some way off topic (again).
Interesting.
A scientist-practitioner in an aviation context is someone who is an experienced aviator and can be a scientist on the ground. The scientific investigation is in slow time, such as enumerating the possibilities of a particular scenario. The key is to find ways to apply the findings of the science in the air as a practitioner which often operates in fast time.
Is a rule-based approach that requires 16 cases to be memorized practical? Perhaps, if the rules are simple and the scenario can be practiced in the air or simulator and become a natural response. But if not, it's important to enumerate scenarios anyway and then attempt to find ways to compress the rules into a manageable format for use in the air. Ruprecht suggested a principles based format. Then as an instructor, he could use an enumeration as a way of testing his principles. If that has never been done before then it becomes an important publishable article. A scientist-practitioner would know that.
As for "we're way off topic", there are a lot of aviators on this thread suggesting we shouldn't consider the scenario of this thread because it is a criticism of a perfect pilot. Humans are not perfect, so the system has to be error tolerant. So how do we achieve this error-tolerance? The frequent argument in this thread seems to be that flight scenarios are too complex to be analyzed. But isn't that what an accident investigation is? We learn incrementally by considering things that have gone wrong in the past and consider new ways of doing them better, on the ground, in slow time. What we learn even goes into the analyses that go into designing new aircraft types and the certification process that tests the new aircraft in lots of scenarios, including the potentially catastrophic ones. That's why type certification includes so many hours of test flying and requires many thick documents. Those aviators wanting to shut down the conversation in this thread seem to be advocating that none of this would be of any use. Yet the checklists and memorized items they use in the air have come from exactly the process they want to shut down in this thread.
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Or have I missed something and the new norm for aviators is they are perfect heroes and so any critique needs to be cancelled? Sounds like the opposite of CRM.