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: HF
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 …
A Very Bad CRM Book
I was so looking forward to The Pilot Factor: A fresh look into Crew Resource Management (2014) by Jean Denis Marcellin. Had heard about it online. Cool cover picture has airline pilot ripping off uniform shirt to show Superman costume underneath. Some glowing reviews on Amazon. Then I got the book and started reading. Oh dear. It’s a self-published stretched padded 100 …
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 …