Part 3 of 4
A sometimes difficult premise to understand is that a very skilled pilot is not necessarily a safe or efficient pilot. Piloting an airplane requires more than skills, regardless of how finely honed those skills may be. A skill is simply a learned and practiced level of proficiency at performing a given task. A new or unfamiliar environment can sufficiently distract a pilot from applying the correct, necessary skill for a particular situation. If the pilot is suffering from stress or fatigue, certainly the performance of that pilot is going to suffer, and it may suffer to the extent that the pilot’s skill simply cannot overcome the inaccuracies in, or the absence of, appropriate decisions that govern the skill applied under the circumstances. A habitual missed approach procedure calling for application of power, rotation to a defined pitch attitude, achieving a specified airspeed, and putting the airplane into a one-half standard rate left-hand turn at a specified altitude to reverse course, for example, may be the usual procedure when visual contact with the runway is lost when flying at the pilot’s home airport. However, when approaching an airport with a large hill or mountain immediately to the left of the arrival course, because of stress, fatigue, or confusion, applying that same learned procedure is not going to be a satisfactory decision, even if the pilot conducts the procedure in an excellent, error free manner. The hill or mountain is still on the left – and the pilot will fly, very precisely, at the proper configuration and airspeed, directly into that hill or mountain ... a well-performed but inappropriate procedure.
A decision must be made when and where to apply a particular skill. The fact that skill-based behaviors do tend to become habituated and automatic may lead us into precisely applying the wrong skill for current conditions. Have any of you ever driven to work in the morning and, after arriving, realized that you have no recollection of the drive? You were operating on “automatic;” you were applying habituated skills with little or no conscious thought. What would have happened had the lady in one of the numerous cars adjacent to you during that trip been too absorbed in talking on her cell phone and allowed her car to drift into your lane? You probably don’t know; and neither do I. The point is – something would have happened – and the potential for that “something” having been less than optimum is pretty sizeable. All of us are creatures of habit. Habits inhabit all of us.
All of us have heard about pilots landing a retractable gear airplane with the gear retracted. Of course, that is not a skill for which that pilot was trained – and one can presume that each of those pilots, at one time, had demonstrated their proficiency and skill at landing their airplanes – safely and correctly. So, what happened in these cases? In 2006, the pilots of a Canadair Regional Jet began what many would argue was the beginning of a skillful takeoff procedure from Lexington, Kentucky. Unfortunately, it was the wrong runway – a runway that was much too short for a safe takeoff. Why? In 2009, the passengers on board an Atlanta-bound B-767 narrowly averted tragedy when the pilot making the landing mistakenly landed on the parallel taxiway instead of the runway. What was the reason?
Developing a list of skill-based behavior errors is not the goal here. Pointing out the negative potentials of applying skill-based behaviors outside of an appropriate framework for judgments to guide those behaviors, however, IS the goal. Pilots who rely on skills alone, where those skills provide the sole basis for how the airplane is to be flown, taking little or no consideration of the fact of the framework in which such judgments and decisions are made must be recognized as setting the stage for less than optimum outcomes.