The Wiki Man: Not-so-basic instinct

As someone who has a panic attack when the Sky box fails to work, I am fascinated by people who stay calm in a major crisis. Hence I love listening to cockpit voice recordings on YouTube. Among the best are Apollo XIII and ‘US Airways Flight 1549’ — the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’.

With both engines of an Airbus A320 knocked out by a birdstrike, captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III is offered an emergency landing at Teterboro. He pauses for a second. Then: ‘We can’t do it…. We’re going to be in the Hudson.’

At this point, it is worth noting a few facts about the pilot. He was 57 at the time, an age which would disqualify him from many airlines. He was a former military pilot with 40 years’ flying experience and 19,000 hours of flight time — about 18,930 more than John Kennedy Jnr. He also had experience flying zero-engined aircraft: he was a keen glider pilot.

How could he decide so quickly that landing at Teterboro was impossible? Instead of taking out a scientific calculator, consulting instruments, calculating the rate of descent and working out his range, he simply looked out of the window.

I think the instinctive process (or ‘heuristic’) works like this. 1) Put the aircraft into as shallow a glideslope as possible. 2) Look forwards out of the window. 3) Everywhere where the ground appears to be moving upwards in your field of vision is a place you can’t reach. 4) Everywhere else is somewhere you could land. In cricket, fielders use a related process to catch high balls. It’s not a conscious thing. We can’t describe how we do it — we just do. And we learn it not through teaching, but through practice.