Posts by user "Subsy" [Posts: 5 Total up-votes: 12 Pages: 1]

That's a lovely bit of analysis. Is it possible to work out at precisely which point the RAT deployed?

Also, while I'm barely a pilot, I am a qualified cognitive scientist with an interest in memory. Without going into any detail, even assuming no concussion or other insults, given what the single witness has gone, and is going through, I wouldn't trust a word he says about his experiences, especially about timings and orders of things happening. I'm not implying any dishonesty, just a very high risk of entirely innocent confabulation about such a short and intense experience that nothing could prepare him for. Flight crew, with vast amounts of training and years of trying to imagine their way through the impossible, would probably do better, but even then post hoc confabulation would be hard to avoid.

It would be a lot more conceivable if the pilot had been practicing this action in a simulator recently.

It's ironic that cognitive science arguably started with 'The Cambridge Cockpit'; an attempt to make sense of, and mitigate, pilots doing this sort of thing when tired, stressed and so on. This kick started an ergonomics revolution which appears to have come full circle. Now we have cognitive science offering Bayesian accounts of neural function that might explain how innocent but unfortunate priming of 'muscle memory' when practicing for emergencies could, almost predictably, lead to this sort of complex, protection overriding, error.

As non consciously executing a complex, well practiced, but unintended, action is a fairly common experience in less critical situations, I'm surprised that there isn't already a more effective ergonomic fix than the safety switches fitted.

As things stand, our best understanding of how the brain does what it does can often be described rather nicely by Bayesian statistics. For long boring reasons, this means that things we have experienced or done recently can have a disproportionate effect on how we act and how we perceive the world. Everyone is familiar with visual illusions but there are a few cheap tricks in which priming can be used to reasonably reliably adjust someone's prior expectations so they say something that they don't intend. Here are a few examples. All of them will feel like cheap tricks, because they are, but they all also reveal just how easy most of us are to spoof.

Most of these work best when spoken out loud, so it's probably better to try them on someone else if reading them out load doesn't work as well. However, it can sometimes be hard to realize that you've got it wrong and it may need to be pointed out, so double check because you might think you didn't, until you check...

All but one have the same format - undertake a priming exercise and then answer a question.

Ring rang rung, ring rang rung, sing sang sung, sing sang sung. What is the past tense of brought?

How do you spell most? What does that spell? How do you spell most? What does that spell? How do you spell most? What does that spell? What do you put in a toaster?

Whether you've heard it before or not, that gives you a clear sense of how you are being tricked and should make it easy to avoid next time. However, it's missing the point to stop and think about it, you need to answer straight away.

How do you spell silk? What does that spell? How do you spell silk? What does that spell? How do you spell silk? What does that spell? What do cows drink?

How do you spell folk? What does that spell? How do you spell folk? What does that spell? How do you spell folk? What does that spell? What do you call the white of an egg?

Finally, one for the mathematicians: what is the sum of 1000 + 40 + 1000 + 30 + 1000 + 20 + 1000 + 10?

I don't deny that all of these feel a bit silly, but the fact is that saying a word is an intentional ballistic action that involves a wide range of complex actions, such as moving and shaping the tongue, breathing in just the right way and so on. We are all both 'designed' and highly trained to do so and so it's all second nature. Just like cycling a switch. The mental processes underpinning the physical actions are tolerably well understood these days, but the intentional processes underpinning them are only marginally better understood than when Aristotle was first talking about them.

So if you, or anyone you try them out on, is caught out by any of these, especially once they know what is coming and are actively trying not to mess up, it might be worth giving the 'brain fart' theory a little more credence. I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that there's a long history in aviation of people setting out to do one action and doing another, especially in designs in which the ergonomics wasn't quite right, like the B17 and the Harvard. Sometimes the local ergonomics can be spot on while the whole system, including training, can introduce priming that can have unintended consequences.

I've not posted enough to post a link yet, but anyone who fancies googling this:

airbus cockpit control confusion

Will find an Airbus bulletin on action slips.

Obviously, they are not that common, but suicide attempts with another person on the flight deck and during take off seem so uncommon that I can't find a single example on a passenger aircraft.

"...and here is my concern with our assumption of intent from evidence of action."

It is worth pointing out that action slips are actually incredibly common but rarely critical - or reported - events. Suicide attempts, by their very nature, are always critical events. Looking at the literature, action slips on the flight deck are actually pretty common but usually trivial - and that's the ones that get reported. Dangerous action slips are common enough that Airbus have openly available training material on them. Action slips that lead to situations that can't be recovered from are always going to be remarkably rare in an industry that goes out of its way to get the ergonomics right to avoid action slips as a result of designer error. A good example would be the similarity of location, action and shape of the flaps and undercarriage of the B17. The flight deck is one of the few places deliberately designed to make action slips harder to be dangerous and this shows how common they have been.

Action slips occur all the time - most of us have had a few - and used to be far more common in fight before aircraft were designed to avoid them. Suicide attempts remain remarkably rare, attempts with no clear buildup (that can at least be unearthed later) are rarer still and suicide attempts on takeoff are not something I can find online.

So if the investigation is left unable to infer intent from action, it's clear which intention is more likely and also which is more visible.