It is astonishing to me - but really not, because I experience it a lot - that we come directly from talking about the causes of the Cali accident to relating the individual experiences and resumes of the discussants.
So let me briefly discuss here the tropes that have been raised, and then let's please get back to talking about the important point: automation and human interaction with it.
First, academics is my day job. I also do a bunch of other things. I run a small engineering company. I also have experience with aviation accident analysis that few if any other people on this WWW site have (no, not walking around wreckage fields, although I have handled this and that broken part sitting in a state transport accident investigation facility from time to time). Let's not put people into shoeboxes and assume we know everything about what they do and what they can do from their day job.
Let's get on to the tropes. Easy ones first.
Originally Posted by RAT 5
There's a lot of over complicating a simple case here. I am a simple guy and like to keep things easy. ..... Consider the facts from a simple airmanship point of view. ..... All the 'causal contributions' came afterwards. The root cause was not mismanagement of the FMS, and Jeppe mistakes and Boeing mistakes with no auto-stow speed brake etc.etc. .... That to my simple mind is an airmanship problem. That is the root cause of many prangs.
So, from a "simple" point of view (and I agree wholeheartedly with the adjective!): (a) there was a failure of airmanship; (b) other stuff is secondary; (c) failure of airmanship is thus "root cause".
That is the classic trope "blame the pilot if we can".
(Just to be clear here, I am rephrasing "came afterwards" as "secondary", because of course these other things did not literally come afterwards, they were installed in the airplane before the flight and executed their function during the incident, not "afterwards".)
No one working in aviation human factors accepts such a line of argument. The reason is part (b). Why is other stuff "secondary"? What criteria are being applied to conclude that other stuff is "secondary"? That these phenomena do not contribute to "root causes" (plural please, not singular)? Because they are, demonstrably, causal factors.
It's easy to write a note on a WWW forum and say "I don't agree; I am a simple man, and I say the pilots screwed up and you can ignore everything else." One can just as easily write a note on a WWW forum and say "I don't agree; I am a simple man and I say 2+2=5 and you can ignore everything else." And the two statements are about equivalent in worth, whatever that is.
To terpster I would say: sorry that you don't think you can understand the Cali analysis. The problem lies certainly in our presentation, because I can assure you from experience that people with widely differing backgrounds understand very quickly how to perform rigorous causal analyses. A 6-hour day can suffice, although two is more usual.
But I would equally point out that it is naive to dismiss technical results because one cannot understand them. Aerodynamics is complicated engineering and math, which you cannot learn in a couple of days of practice, as you can causal analysis. But you believe the figures in your FCOM. So what's different there?
What is different is that everyone and her dog thinks they can perform causal analysis, and thinks their preferred opinion is immune to criticism. The first is wrong for most people (they don't have the necessary discipline and training, just like with aerodynamics); the second is wrong for everybody, always. No analysis is immune to criticism. Even though the analysis is rigorous, and only open to observation that one has made a mistake, which may then be corrected ("look, you have here 2+2=5; but 2+2=4!" "You're right! Here, we changed it"), the two following questions of a causal analysis are always valid: (i) why did you stop there?, and (ii) why did you summarise these facts like that / why did you formulate this phenomenon/these phenomena in that way? One can only answer "because X" and then X is -always- open to discussion.
There is a similar phenomenon with the puzzle known nowadays as the "Monty Hall Problem" (look it up in Wikipedia). It has to do with estimating probabilities during a guessing game (one guesses to win - or lose - some prize). The probabilities may be derived, by either frequentist methods or Bayesian reasoning, and you can even establish them by playing the game over and over again and looking at the results (Bayesians can even guess random probabilities at first and then use Bayesian updating on the results of these game plays to reach the conclusion that others reach by ab initio reasoning).
However, the probabilities are, mostly, incorrectly estimated by most people at first. The odd phenomenon is that people stick with that incorrect estimate, even in the face of both proof and experiment that it is wrong. And not inexperienced people, either, but sometimes even people with PhDs in math.
Because of this phenomenon, the problem has also been well studied by cognitive psychologists. It is an amazing phenomenon. There is a very good book about it, The Monty Hall Problem, by Jason Rosenhouse, Oxford University Press 2009, which I read last week.
Unlike the Monty Hall game, causal reasoning occurs at some level in everyone's life all the time. This probably explains why more people are able to give their causal judgements as "simple" people, and stick with them, ignoring argument which demonstrates that their view is unsubstantiated.
Causal analysis ain't like voting. It isn't a matter of opinion. "Simple" means "naive", and naivety is about as welcome in causal analysis as it is in aerodynamics.
Back to the trope (a); (b); (c) above. In my experience, the only expert people who seriously propose it are very senior lawyers in compensation disputes. No scientific expert on automation and human factors whom I know (and I really do know most of them professionally on some level) supports such a view.
PBL