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.
This incident led to an interesting debate about airline safety and pilot experience. Some commentators asked whether younger pilots who had grown up flying aircraft with the latest navigation systems would ever develop the feel for an aircraft that older pilots had. By analogy, people asked whether drivers who grew up with Dynamic Stability Control ever acquire the instinct for controlling a skid? In other words, do many non-mechanical technologies, without our noticing it, strip out the many tacit, subliminal cues our senses instinctively use? Charles Moore spotted something missing when reading on his Kindle: the experience of reading is changed when you don’t know how close you are to the end. With a physical book you are always aware of the approaching denouement (unless it’s the Agatha Christie I once borrowed from Monmouth library, which had the last, decisive pages ripped out and ‘Ha Ha!’ written in the margin).
I don’t think Boeing will ever design airliners without windscreens, making pilots fly through instrumentation alone. But you could argue the banking sector did something similar. Overreliance on computers and mathematical models seems to have created a generation of people who know how to program an autopilot but couldn’t fly. Had they spent more time developing their instincts, they might have seen something was wrong much sooner. You didn’t really need a maths PhD; instead you just had to go to Spain and ask, ‘Who is going to buy all these shitty houses?’ Computerisation may give the illusion of perfect information while eliminating the role played by instinct, experience and ‘feel’. It sometimes resembles a conspiracy by the young and smart against the old and wise.
Tellingly, when bankers are grilled on television, it is only those aged over 55 who talk sense. That’s why I favour taxes on pensions and a minimum age of 55 for MPs. We need the world’s Sullenbergers at the controls of a plane, not on a golf course.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.
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