This is a link to an excellent article, Illusions of Safety, published yesterday by the Royal Aeronautical Society. It’s written by Dr Rob Hunter, Head of Flight Safety, British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA). While it is most directly aimed at the safety professionals that regulate and manage airline safety departments, it has interesting reverberations into any personal risk management discussion. Is …
Category: Link to Article
Red Bull Air Racers Inner Game
“The clearest mind has the advantage.” “Red Bull Air Race pilots spend hours visualising their course. Some sit staring into space, simply picturing the air gates; others physically construct a scale model of the course in their hangars, walking through it over and over again.” “You should be listening to your plane.” ~ Paul Bonhomme. “You need to …
Planes Without Pilots?
If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail. ~ Amy Pritchett, Professor of Cognitive Engineering at Georgia Tech. Quoted in the New York Times article Planes Without Pilots. The same piece also quotes the normally enthusiastic Professor Mary Cummings, a former fighter pilot and currently director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, …
Ageless Aviator Wisdom
AOPA Pilot magazine magazine has a great article by Dave Hirschman in the April edition about the Mavericks, four Florida pilots who fly formation aerobatics together. They are mostly in their mid-70’s. With long backgrounds in all kinds of flying. Ageless aviators with wisdom to spare: Just like artists or musicians, we’re constantly striving to master our craft, to try …
Japanese Running Monks
“Enlightenment, the monk says, isn’t a point where everything stops and you’ve made it, forever surrounded by a halo of bliss. It is something alive, something that pushes you on every day, whether you are a Daigyoman Ajari on Mount Hiei or a data-management assistant in an office in Hounslow.” Article in The Guardian on Japanese monks who run long-distance …
New Research on Meditating F-16 Fighter Pilots
New peer-reviewed scientific research suggests mindfulness mental training helps F-16 fighter pilots. It’s in the latest edition of the International Journal of Aviation Psychology, and describes a long-term (2-year) study using Norwegian F-16 pilots. These high-performance combat-rated pilots show a increase in self-perceived skills associated with mindfulness, attention regulation and arousal regulation following a regime of mindfulness training. Alone it’s not …
Matt Hall on Not Judging an Accident from the Outcome
Matt Hall is a former fighter combat instructor and international unlimited aerobatic competitor who now competes in the Red Bull air races. His latest airmanship blog post takes a look at the recent Harrison Ford and SpaceShipTwo crashes. It’s worth reading. Don’t judge an incident or accident based on the outcome. We always need to look deeper…the preparation, the planning, …
There’s No Skill for Prospective Remembering.
“We really have to have habits—unconscious expert execution of tasks—otherwise we are just novices at everything, forever. It works very nicely most of the time, but there are some situations where we can get into trouble.”Great article by Flightsafety Australia about the aviation work of Dr Key Dismukes, glider instructor and former chief human factors scientist at NASA’s Ames Research …
Can You Use the Force on Others?
Interesting article on advanced crew resource management by Erika Armstrong. Can you use The Force on others? Pilot Persuasion: Effective Crew Resource Management