We’re just done teaching an MIT Aero/Astro course that covers the FAA ground school material and also a lot of the engineering that goes into the systems.
In re-architecting the course for this year I decided to heed some advice from the book iGen regarding today’s young people:
Overall, iGen is good news for managers: iGen’ers are more focused on work and more realistic about what that entails than the Millennials just before them. iGen’ers want good, stable jobs and are eager to prove themselves. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t want to be entrepreneurs—in fact, they are less likely than previous generations to want to own their own business or be self-employed. That means iGen talent is ripe for the picking for the right businesses.
Whereas Millennials needed praise, iGen’ers need reassurance. Given their slow upbringing, many are also less independent. Give them careful instructions for tasks, and expect that they will need more guidance. Managers who learned to be cheerleaders for Millennials will find they are more like therapists, life coaches, or parents for iGen’ers.
Use the word safety or refer to your “safe environment.” iGen’ers have been taught to value safety more than any generation before them, and these words are not just comforting but expected. They want to know that they will feel safe and protected—not just physically but socially and emotionally.
It is this last part that I considered relevant. Flying light aircraft has an ugly reputation and that is backed up by some ugly statistics. So I added slides that explained how to come closer to airline-style safety by flying in pairs and using checklists, by doing recurrent training at frequent intervals, and by developing and maintaining instrument proficiency. Where a slide from an earlier semester had said “If you do X then you will crash” I would change it to “You can keep safe by doing Y”.
All of my co-teachers were experts and, except for the military pilots, I was surprised at how they would naturally gravitate to the dark side when it was time to explain something. Sometimes they wouldn’t even finishing explaining what something was before beginning to list the pitfalls. Oftentimes they would leave students hanging because they’d listed a bunch of hazards, but hadn’t described any simple ways to avoid them.
This was true even when it came to non-technical material. For example, in a 10-minute presentations about aircraft rental versus ownership, the expert pilot and happy co-owner of a plane in partnership said that aircraft partnerships were like “a marriage” and fraught with perils (not really explained to the students). Afterwards I said “Is that fair? Half of American marriages end with one partner suing the other. Do you know any aircraft partnerships that ended with one partner suing the other?” (answer: no) It was working great for him. These were young people whom we’re trying to inspire to pursue their existing dreams of becoming pilots. Why mention the possibility of a failed partnership that, in any case, is easy to get out of? (you can sell your half of an aircraft without going to family court and without paying a lawyer most of the rest of your assets!) [See this Plane & Pilot article for a complete description of aircraft co-ownership.]
I’m wondering if talking about the hazards of an activity requiring expertise is a way to highlight one’s own superior skills. If I make something sound easy and then say that I’ve done it, people will hear “Philip did something easy”. If I make something sound challenging and risky, people will hear “Whoa. Philip is courageous and super capable.”
Readers: Have you had this experience too? When you ask experts to explain how to do something do they tend to overemphasize the negatives and pitfalls?
Safety professionals often use the scary story approach when training; I’m not sure the “highlight one’s own superior skills” motivation fits here. I’ve always thought that focussing on culture and systems is more effective than trying to scare people about hazards which are pretty obvious. For example, rather than (or at least in addition to) stories about people going blind, provide designer safety glasses and make a big deal about letting each person choose their style. However, I”m not aware of any data answering the question one way or the other.
Also, wouldn’t the concept of target fixation tie in to this? (i.e. when action is required, you don’t necessarily want people thinking about all of the things they shouldn’t do)
I like to stress to my students that they need to be constantly outside their comfort zones if they want to learn anything, and I yell at them, because it is fun. They say that, by definition, a ‘safe space’ is a space that does not contain me. I always took it as a great compliment, but I am now wondering whether it is their way to express fear. Oh well.
Are you describing an urge to give a philosophical education on the values of lessening risk, while learning to be comfortable with what remains, to your students of aviation?
Do you also wish them to develop an elementary notion of how to calculate risk rigourously (i.e. reducing rates of failure)? By being able to handle it intelligently, they might fear it less.
Have a class on reducing insurance costs or better yet, how they are calculated– that could easily introduce the concepts you are concerned about.
> When you ask experts to explain how to do something do
> they tend to overemphasize the negatives and pitfalls?
Someone who would have said “yes” was a British prime minister in the late 19th century, Lord Salisbury. In June 1877, as Secretary of State for India, he wrote
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”
Clearly Lord Salisbury would not have understood engineering, transportation, healthcare systems and the sciences that are “in the backroom” of these endeavours which are both public, and which carry varying degrees of risk for users. The comprehension and responsiveness to inherent risks require the intelligent attention and listening by those who both use and those who are in positions of control and responsibility within these endeavours.
The point in the above short essay that focuses on the emphasis on negatives assumes some measure of the old-fashioned term, “maturity” and “character” where an adult, free of artifices such as “millenial” or “iGen’er”, is capable of comprehending the difference between material, effective safety processes built by those who really do know their stuff, and the amorphous, somewhat naive expectation that one “must be safe/expects to be safe”.
I’ve flown large transports all my life and believe me, I both listened to experts in my field and remain still, an expert in both aviation and aviation flight safety work. A bit of darkness in the form of, “This airplane will kill you at the first opportunity you give it” isn’t dark, it’s just the truth. If that’s dark or perceived as blunt or cranky then a reassessment of one’s experience in the face of real expertise where it counts, is required.
Now if your talking pollsters, politicians, internet experts with online degrees, financial advisors, sales people, though many are honorable, still, the world is full of shysters, pretenders and charlatans. Staying away from them and their products is part of growing up tough.
I think Mememe captures it quite nicely.
Don: The students’ next step is to be part of a two-pilot crew (student+instructor) in a Cessna 172 or Piper Warrior operated from a runway that regularly handles B767s. Would you say that falls into the category of ““This airplane will kill you at the first opportunity you give it”?
We can present the same information in a positive way. Instead of saying “Don’t take off after dark because it is more dangerous than taking off right around sunset” we say “Take off before civil twilight because it is safer than trying to adapt to the dark immediately.” Instead of saying “Don’t fly single-pilot if you’ve had a long day of meetings because you will likely die” we say “Take a co-pilot along if you’re not going to be at your best because it is safer and that’s what the airlines do.”
Hi Phil;
Thank you for your response.
Re your example, and “falling into the category of”, …etc. No, I wouldn’t say that it does, 😉
The pithiness of the statement IS the essence of aviation and of course, always and already applies to anything that leaves the ground.
It’s not something instructors say to students all the time! In fact I like the approach being taken, as far as it goes – positive reinforcement – the indication that “this is what I want” from the instructor which directs the student positively, is strongly emphasized when becoming a flight instructor. Same approach when transitioning in larger, multi-crew aircraft.
The negative approach has been set aside because it doesn’t work.
This is part of a larger approach to aviation safety known as CRM – Cockpit (or Crew) Resource Management, and SMS, Safety Management Systems. In CRM, the emphasis is on good communication skills, recursive actions, (confirmation of understanding, confirmation of expectations & expected conclusions), when handling an abnormal occurrence or emergency.
SMS is a safety reporting and action process whereby an open, reporting culture is in place which sets aside the very negative aspects of enforcement/punishment for “doing something wrong”, instead encouraging the admission of mistakes so that they may be corrected, be they organizational, systemic or possibly individual.
This is known as a “Just Culture” and is formally recognized by most carriers, large & small. In this context, your approach is the correct one, which encourages enquiry, (the act of questioning), the adoption of a professional approach which, learned early and reinforced, gradually builds an “aviator’s context” in which the blunt phrase I used regarding what the airplane is wanting to do to one, is uttered.
These approaches can be scaled and productively applied to general aviation as human factors and systemic issues exist within all aviation endeavours. In fact, your examples in your second paragraph are excellent ones which illustrate this exact process.
The reason the essay was of interest must be obvious…the notion that today real experts in real professions and industries are summarily dismissed wholesale by young and old who don’t know what they don’t know who also have a platform, requires a response from a member of a profession that does indeed know what its doing. I can tell you’re serious about this stuff. That’s why I thought I would comment.
Don
Professional aviation is probably the most well documented and transparent endeavor in the world. There is no Fake Altimeter or obfuscated Aircraft(Engine) Maintenance Manual.
That is how we went from controlled powered flight to a round trip to the Moon in 66 years after 450,000 years of cognitive groundpounding.
Don: I feel that the biggest safety issue with conventional FAA Private Pilot training, including ground school, is the emphasis on single-pilot operations as the standard. This is odd, if you think about it, because most of the FAA works to prohibit single-pilot operations, e.g., for FAR 121 and 135 (airline and charter). If it is a bad idea for safety to have the most experienced pilots flying single-pilot, why is it a good idea to have a 40-hour Private pilot flying single-pilot?
One of the “scary” examples that we gave was in the seaplane section. We showed part of an AOPA video by an experienced and serious-minded amphib pilot who landed gear-down in the water. The plane flipped over and his son was killed. We suggested to the students that this was a situation where two pilots working from checklists in a crew would have been much less likely to make the mistake.
>I’m wondering if talking about the hazards of an activity requiring expertise is a way to highlight one’s own superior skills. If I make something sound easy and then say that I’ve done it, people will hear “Philip did something easy”. If I make something sound challenging and risky, people will hear “Whoa. Philip is courageous and super capable.”
I think that your observation of experts’ focus on the dark side is a very incisive one. I’ve seen it occur in many situations where there is no signalling of the kind you mention — this leads me to think there’s a more fundamental, and less socially-influenced mechanism to explain it.
Most people talk most about what’s salient in their minds, and it appears that the dark side sticks out for expert teachers of all kinds. They would know the full picture, and indeed spent a lot of time learning different elements of that full picture to become an expert teacher in the first place; and yet, the parts they find most compelling are the dark ones.
Why are the dark parts so compelling? Perhaps because they make for good stories and the kind of experts that volunteer to be teachers are natural storytellers. It isn’t to do with ego of the teacher, but rather the thrill of creating wide-eyed drama in the room. (i.e. not “Phil is super capable” but “Holy shit that happened? Whoa! [non-directed awe]”)