PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Near miss with 5 airliners waiting for T/O on taxiway "C" in SFO!
Old 14th Jul 2017, 20:28
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Kal Niranjan
 
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Originally Posted by Ian W
jack11111




It would really do everyone a lot of good to read about visual perception and visual cognition. Our brains invent a huge amount of what we think we are 'seeing' much of the time our eyes are scanning around but the brain uses the informaiton from the balance system to edit out the movements of the eyes (see http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/caps...e_movement.pdf )



(See http://www.drjoebio.com/uploads/1/8/..._our_midst.pdf )

The above paper includes the well known cognition experiment where a basket ball game is played back on video and observers asked to count the number of passes as the game goes on a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the players across the screen - the gorilla is almost never noticed.

I remember from a long time ago an incident where an aircraft taxiing taxied into a large red British post office truck lost on the taxiway - the pilot 'didn't see it'

There are two effects here - something that is unexpected may be edited out by the cognition process in the brain that includes extra things happening or seeing things happen because they are expected to happen. So I expect to see 2 runways so I see 2 runways, I do not expect to see a large red cross - so I see no large red cross.

Add to this the effect of workload on a challenging approach that tends to lead to 'cognitive tunneling' or fixation on particular tasks and it is unsurprising that what should be obvious is not. All of these effects are exacerbated by fatigue and circadian stress making them far more likely.

It is really worth reading the two references and other similar references to understand what can _and_will_ happen to you.

It is important that ANSPs also realize that reliance on 'large red flashing crosses' will not work. Indeed the more attention getting it is the more likely the brain is to edit it out like the gorilla in a basket ball game. Therefore, the ANSPs that insist that the tower verbally reinforce the warning that the runway configuration is different have got it right - all of a sudden the red-cross is expected and it will be seen.

Don't fly into any gorillas
Wow you are all so knowledgeable and so very kind.

Had this incident happened to a non western carrier, the amount of scorn and racial insinuations would have been thunderously deafening! ' nuff said.
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