Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Cockpit Confusion

Now, you may be saying to yourself, information overload and messiness is annoying and sometimes overwhelming, but it’s not life-or-death. Actually it can be life-or-death. You may recall the tragic story of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 with a loss of all on board—228 passengers and crew who were traveling from Rio to Paris. Like many people, I was originally mystified by the news: Air France has a very good safety and maintenance record, the plane was a relatively new Airbus A330 (which is a superb piece of equipment), and the nasty equatorial storms of the flight path—with fast-moving 60,000-foot thunderheads—are navigated safely by flights every day. Even the freezing up of the pitot tubes, which measure airspeed, is something pilots are trained to handle.

What we now know, following the recovery of the black boxes from the ocean floor, is that the two first officers on the flight deck were simply overwhelmed by the non-stop cascade of faults, alarms, and warnings in really hairy nighttime flying conditions and the need to fly the plane manually—the autopilot had switched itself off with the loss of airspeed readings. In theory, these circumstances should have been survivable, with the pilots regaining control of the situation and continuing to fly on safely. The arguments over whether the crash was primarily due to pilot error are still going on, but it seems clear that cockpit confusion was a major factor in the disaster. ...