Monday, July 8, 2013

Failed heuristics due to pilot's lack of Boeing 777 experience in Asiana crash landing?

Aircraft accidents make for useful case studies in researching heuristics (rules of thumb) based decision making. This is because multiple high-stakes decisions are made, compressed in time, space and complexity. According to Scott Shappell and Douglas Wiegman between 70 and 80% of air crashes are commonly ascribed, at least partly, to human error. They distinguish between errors of decision making, skill and perception.

Consider the recent crash landing of the Boeing 777 of Asiana Airlines at the San Francisco airport. The air crash investigation is obviously ongoing and the causes will eventually be established. It is, however, even at this stage clear that pilot error may have played a role.

In this post I would like to focus on the relative inexperience of the pilot on the specific aircraft and its possible role in poor heuristics based decision making. Expert heuristics based decision making typically occurs in what Kahneman refers to as intuitive (System 1) thinking and depends heavily on associative memory that comes from experience, lots of it (10 000 hours, if you accept Gladwell's popular account). Gary Klein is considered one of the experts in experts' intuitive decision making (pun unintended).

It was reported that the pilot in the Asiana incident had only 43 hours experience on the Boeing 777 and was making his first landing at the San Francisco airport. While he did have almost 10 000 hours total flying experience, consider the complexity of an airliner cockpit relative to a motor vehicle's controls. Then consider the difficulty the typical driver experiences when driving an unfamiliar vehicle. That should demonstrate the importance of expert experience based intuitive decision making when landing a relatively unfamiliar aircraft at a relatively unfamiliar airport. For another opinion on this issue, see this by Scully Levin (former SAA training captain) in Beeld, only in Afrikaans.

No comments:

Post a Comment