One of the best books written by a test pilot/astronaut is Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys by Mike Collins. He was a USAF test pilot, spacewalked on Gemini 10 and went to the Moon on the historic Apollo 11 mission. Here he talks about an interesting airmanship trap — Death by Embarrassment: It’s hard to admit a slip or …
Tag: error
Airmanship at a Distance
This is a sad story. But important to think about. For we are all our brother’s keeper. The news headline this weekend was ‘Flight school sued over death of student‘. Fox5 reported: A 21-year-old’s dream of becoming a pilot was cut short when during flight school his plane came crashing down, killing him, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in …
Procedural Drift and the Sandbar
On 3 January 2015, the large ship MV Hoegh Osaka left the British port of Southhampton. An hour later she made a turn to port, then began listing markedly to one side. Soon enough the rudder and propellor were out the water. In flying terms, ‘departure from controlled float’ we could say. Fifteen minutes after the turn she was grounded on the …
The Secrets of the Wave Pilots
There is a wonderful long-read article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine titled The Secrets of the Wave Pilots. It never mentions flying or airmanship, but it’s thought-provoking contemplative stuff for any aviator concerned about visual flying skills. And it’s an in-depth romp through animal navigation, GPS, modern brain science and almost lost ancient knowledge. The glue of the story …
How the Swiss Air Force Learns
A great Swiss Air Force video shows us all how an enlightened high risk organization should use mistakes to get better, by moving away from a blame game and towards a learning culture. If people get blamed for their mistakes, the only thing one achieves is that people will keep their knowledge about mistakes, safety gaps or dangerous situations for themselves. …
We Will Not Accept Any Kind of Lapses
It became public this month that Qatar Airways has fired all four pilots in the cockpit when their Boeing 777 tail broke a set of runway lights during takeoff from Miami International last September. They mistakenly left from an intersection thousands of feet short of the planned full runway length. It was a serious accident, no doubt. There was a visible …
The Most Dangerous Phrase …
Change is hard. But the alternative is worse.
Perfection, Zero Error, Flawless Performance
Zero errors is an impossible goal. What we should work on is catching our errors early. This is from a book on High Reliability Organizations (HROs): It’s an excellent book, a classic. The latest (2015) edition is on Amazon
