I have had it up to the eyeballs with this psycho-babble called CRM and TEM, and I strongly suspect the silenty majority of aviators feel the same way.
The latest edition of "Australian Aviation" magazine Jan/Feb issue No. 257, at pages 66 and 67 reveal a perfect example of the gobbly-dook that is forced upon pilots under the guise of important principles of flight safety. The writer of the article is a highly qualified airline captain with a Masters Degree in Risk Management and no doubt an earnest well meaning individual.
But asking pilots to swallow the following extracts and in an earnest attempt to "educating" them in the theory of human factors psychology, is surely in direct contradiction of the eminently sensible adage, "KISS" which is short for for "Keep it simple, stupid".
The article is titled "Dynamic Decisions - Threat and Error (Mis) management"
"We usually have multiple goals which are often competing, hence needing to be prioritised - what we see is dependant on our plans and risk appetite and dynamically changes...the options to manage it appropriately are also dynamic simply by nature of the dynamic environment.........Appropriate Goals + Adequate Situational awareness + appropriate Level of Risk= Quality of Decision....our aymmetric risk appetite - because we feel losses twice as much as gains we have a tendency to be risk averse in terms of gains but risk seeking in terms of losses....this gives rise to what is termed "loss aversion, the status quo bias and the endowment effect which apply to ideas as well as goods....we don't see the world as it is but rather as we are"..
An astonished pilot reading this would no doubt exclaim "Huh?" And he would be right.
The other day I enjoyed a coffee with a former RAAF pilot with whom I flew fifty years ago. He is a retired Air Vice Marshal and a person of great intellect. The discussion turned from the good old days to the subject of CRM and TEM. He had fought in Vietnam so he knew a lot about threat and error management. Fly too low and slow and you get a missile up your clacker. Yet, this didn't have to be explained in words of psycho-babble - because the dangers of flying slow and low were painfully self evident.
The AVM said he could not remember ever flying with a arrogant Alpha-male type captain for whom he thought the original concept of CRM was coined. I must add that I also, had never met one of these mythical characters either in military or civil flying who was alleged to terrify subordinate first officers and thus cause accidents. Did these people really exist or did a sharp aviation psychologist seize upon one or two accidents that involved renegade captains and thought he could do a thesis and maybe make a dollar or two by publishing it.
One thing is for sure - and that is the money spent on buying books on the subject of CRM and shelled out by compliant operators and seized upon by regulatory authorities around the globe, is in the multi-millions of dollars. It is a huge con job and yet because the regulatory authorities have been conned by snake oil salesmen into swearing that CRM and TEM is the answer to fixing the accident rate, pilots have no option except to roll over and accept their medicine. No medicine- no licence to fly.
A few days ago in Melbourne, a couple of footballers had a scrap in front of the media. Very unwise move. One footballer got decked with a left and right combination and then to add insult to injury was kicked squarely in the goolies when he was on the ground. Now that must have really hurt. The description above illustrates the "KISS' principle.
However an aficionado of TEM would describe the incident differently - and certainly in a way that footballers reading his explanation would say "Huh?"
Converted the footballer story into TEM pilot-talk, one could say the victim was operating in an environment that was dynamic and constantly changing. His ability to adequately assess and manage the risk of getting kicked in the balls is termed "frequency gambling." Essentially, this implies that rather than properly assessing the operational risks on their own merit, we use a mental short-cut that since we've been in a similar situation before (for example the victim had insulted the attacker on previous occasions) and "gotten away with it", this time the same outcome could have been expected this time around. Over time this can produce an inappropriate insensitivity to certain risks - familiarity breeds contempt.
Obviously the footballer that got kicked in the balls was deficient in TEM training.
