When Everyone Heard Something Different

Too many aviation accidents begin not with mechanical failure, but with misunderstanding.

Ambiguous ATC instructions, incomplete readbacks, unclear maintenance write‑ups, rushed shift turnovers, and casual ramp communications all degrade shared situational awareness. Using the Tenerife disaster and other case studies, this episode examines how phraseology, confirmation, tone, and timing affect safety across cockpits, control rooms, maintenance shops, and flightlines—and how aviators can communicate more clearly under pressure. For aviation maintenance technicians (AMTs), communication risk often appears in logbook entries, task handoffs, shift turnovers, and informal verbal sign-offs.

This podcast is the audio part of the original live video broadcast available at https://www.onsecondthought.me/4 If you wish, please visit that website to view the archived version of the live event - including audience comments and polling.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:09

Well, good evening, everybody. We are so happy that you are here joining us tonight for our fourth episode of On Second Thought.

Speaker 0:20

And hello to everyone. Good evening. And uh good morning, good afternoon, good night, whenever or from wherever you're watching. I am Harvey Madison, instructional designer. And with me as always, the lovely and talented Jolie Lucas. How are you? I'm doing well. It's almost 80 degrees here at uh beach. Oh my goodness. That's uh I know for uh for the uh uh California beach, that's really, really warm. Um I don't think most folks have air conditioning there uh close to the beach. So uh well, hopefully you're you're hanging in there. Uh it's only getting up into I don't know, the low 90s at this point here in Texas now. So, you know, we're we're fine. We're still waiting for real summer to start. Anyhow, um we want to as always thank our thank our uh uh our sponsor.

Speaker 1 1:18

Yeah, you know, Avemco is a great company, and so we encourage folks that need a quote, whether you're an owner, a CFI, a renter, flying club, etc., to give the Avemco team a call at the number that's listed on your screen. And uh if you tell them on second thought sent you, then you will get a discount.

Speaker 1:44

Absolutely. And not only that, but uh with this episode and every episode, including the ones that we have already recorded, that you can go back into the onsecondthought.me archives and watch. And all future monthly episodes this year, 2026, you are eligible to earn FAA Wings credits uh through the FAA Safety program. And if you are an AMT, you can earn ANP credits, and that includes IA, as a matter of fact, which is really, really cool. And ah, okay. Um speaking of our website, uh, we have uh a menu system uh basically set up when you go to on second thought.me, you'll see a list of all of uh the past, current, and future episodes that we're going to air uh in 2026. And if you click down into one of them, you'll come up at this wonderful screen right here. And u that will u allow you to visit u or give you information about this particular program, find out about Avemco ! Uh, do you want to point out on the course resources button that's the second one from the top? We do have tonight's psychology notes and outline, and we also have our bibliography that is very detailed as far as the research and the sources that we're using. So, with every episode, make sure to check out the course resources because we know we have an hour to give you a lot of information. So we wanted to make sure that you had those supplements. Absolutely, and we want you to participate along with us in each of our programs. So if you go uh on that menu page down to the lower right, you'll see a little icon that looks like a person. Click on the person, and you'll be able to join the conversation. Now, one word of uh caution or maybe a little bit of friendly advice. You want to put your name in first. Uh, log in using guest, enter your name, and then ask your question. Otherwise, your name will be your question. We'll still read it, but it gets a little awkward.

Speaker 1 4:28

Yeah. Yeah, 200 shout-outs with your name are is not so great. And please make sure to sign up for our newsletter using the QR code that's on your screen. We update it every month to include pertinent information. And Harvey, do you want to say just a few seconds about the video that's uh attached to the new newsletter?

Speaker 4:49

Yes, without asking uh uh permission or forgiveness, I on my own just decided to make a video about the five hazardous attitudes. You know, we can all uh stand to review those every once in a while. And if you watch the short video, you uh will see all five of them all at once. And you might even learn about a sixth one.

Speaker 1 5:16

And as as many of you know, with On Second Thought, the reason that we named it on Second Thought is we are 100% focused on human factors. Again, not blaming any mechanic, ATC, uh pilot, or nonpilot companion, but we're here to grow and learn again about the two-pound meatloaf in between your ears. And uh just wanted to welcome everybody who's here tonight. Many times we have hundreds and hundreds that are watching live, and we really appreciate that, whether you're pilot, nonpilot companion, sometimes we call you right seaters, ETC, flight line, uh, instructors, airport managers, mechanics, you are all very welcome.

Speaker 6:02

Absolutely. And so now that we've got the housekeeping out of the way, tonight we are talking about something super, super important. Now, we say that about every one of the topics that we cover, and it's true, but this one has really resulted in some bad days uh for some for some folks in the past. In fact, we're going to talk about the worst day in aviation history, and it has to do with when everyone when everyone heard something different. It's about communication and it's about what you do when you think you heard something, uh, when you didn't hear something, how do you act on that, and a few other things as well.

Speaker 1 6:47

So adjust your seatbacks and trade tables to the most comfortable position, and we will hold you captive for about 50 minutes here, talking about this very important subject, uh, communication, because actually there's an illusion about hearing. We don't hear everything, we hear what we're prepared and expecting to hear. Everyone in that cockpit, everyone on the frequency, they believe that they heard things correctly. And um that's the part that's uncomfortable about many of these accidents, particularly the one we'll be highlighting tonight, is that it wasn't about somebody not paying attention. It's really highlighting how the human brain works. Whoops, there we go. Sorry, I must have clicked the wrong button. Sorry about that. So, again, we will be covering um what expectations are in regard to hearing, what our experience is, excuse me, uh, our mindset and our cognitive load. First, we want to talk about expectation when it comes to um hearing. Uh, it's in it, our expectations really color the way that we hear. So, expectation is incredibly efficient. It allows us to move through our familiar environments, but it does come with a cost. Once the brain starts predicting what's coming next, it starts to fill in the gaps automatically. So instead of listening carefully and confirming what we what we believe is happening, we are guilty of distorting what we've really heard and experienced because of expectation. Excuse me, getting over the yuck. So you might hear me clearing my throat. I apologize for that. Seems like every time I fly commercial, I come home with a little cold. So I guess that is a sign that I need to fly Maggie my mooney a little bit more. So I want you to remember that your expectation filters out reality many times. The other thing that happens, just cognitive science-wise, so this can be whether you're at home with your partner, in the cockpit, in a control tower, or at a mechanics field, that what we do is we make meaning. Remember that the brain is a meaning-making machine. It wants to have a story, it wants complete circles, and we want to manage our input and the information very rapidly. So, what happens a lot is that we interpret information that's coming in before we have conscious awareness. So by the time you think, did I hear that right? Your brain has already decided what it thinks it heard. And now you're not really evaluating the signal that is coming into you, the information that is coming into you. But now you are evaluating your interpretation, which goes through all your biases, all your expectations, and it becomes very powerful. So remember that you are going to interpret before you verify, unchecked. And errors feel like certainty. I don't know if you all remember last episode or perhaps episode two, where we talked about that we want to make decisions very quickly, and we don't like any ambiguity, a circle that's not complete. So, what happens with our brains is um errors feel like certainty. So we swear that we heard climb and maintain 4,000 because we were expecting that when actually they said climb and maintain 5,000. What you might remember from our last episode is that under load, the brain under load and high load, um, when our workload rises, our accuracy falls. That makes a lot of sense when you consider that uh when we have a lot of workload, again, whether at your work, in the cockpit, in your real life at home, under high workload, our um attention seems to compress and we process information more quickly, but it is also less precise. So under load, we rely more on our assumptions, patterns, shortcuts, and we rely less on careful listening and verification. As many of you know, that I'm a clinical social worker, I have a psychotherapy practice, and it seems like all day today we were working on our response, uh reaction that happens that we need to pause. When I pause, I change the pace, I can ask some questions and reflect, and then it's likely to go to the high part of our brain, and we can actually make better decisions and pay better attention when we slow down and have that pause. So, some of what we'll be talking to about tonight, excuse me, is how we change the information that we're receiving so that we can break it down, write it down. For those of you who've you know copied clearances, you definitely understand that, that we write things down. I'm a big writer in the airplane, whether it's a clearance or a frequency or an altitude that I'm supposed to go to, when we teach right seat ready, our companion seminar, we recommend that our non-flying companions, our non-pilot companions, are taking notes. Then the second thing that we do to handle big workload with information is that we need to rebuild it. Also, third, which is very important, is slowing down. When you hear a clearance or a direction or communication, excuse me, then we need to slow down, pause, ask clarifying questions, and then we can move forward. And then fourth, we're gonna be prioritizing what we're doing in the airplane or on the ground, where we're gonna be aviating first and um making sure that we are slowing the pace down. I really appreciate it when we can ask clarifying questions. When we when we don't think, oh, I'm just gonna slow down everybody's flow or this is a stupid question. There's no such thing as a stupid question because I would like the top part of my brain to be taking care of this information instead of the lower part of the brain, which houses fight, flight, and freeze. So we don't want that in the airplane. So in aviation, we rely heavily on shared language, but the language only works if the meaning of the words is shared. Uh, in just a moment, Harvey's gonna take over and talk about an accident that shows us that you can have the same words, same frequency, same moment, and everybody heard something different. And that is because every person is bringing in to the cockpit, to the workplace, to your home, their own workload, what is going on with their ability to regulate their own nervous system and try to stay calm, they're bringing in their assumptions, their filters, and their biases, and they're also bringing in their mental model. And so what we really need to be doing here is slowing the pace down, recognizing that if I use a word that um is an aviation word, and Harvey or somebody that's flying with me doesn't have the same language or the same meaning with that word, it can lead to big problems, like it did on March 27, 1977.

Speaker 15:18

One of the things that I want to point out before we move on is uh, Sholie, it was occurring to me when you were talking about the pause, that's how you came up with the name for this entire show, on second thought. Taking that pause, waiting a beep to let the higher functioning part of our brains kick in and really look logically uh and rationally at things is uh is everything. It solves so many problems. Uh just going to that second-order thinking, which is the second thought.

Speaker 1 15:57

So well, and you think about it, we there's you know two strips up here in your frontal part of your brain, and we're, you know, we need to get the information up there. Uh, I did mention this when I was presenting uh on Mentor Live, but I think it's a good thing to mention that we all bring our histories, our mental health histories, and any sort of trauma history that we might have, we bring that into the cockpit. So what I mean by that is many times I'm working with folks in session who've had a major trauma history and pre-cognition, pre-thought, they interpret things as risky and keep it down in fight, flight, or freeze. And so if you're thinking that your student, your co-pilot, um, whatever it might be, they are bringing in how they were raised, what they experience. There are gender differences, which we'll be covering in another episode. But I just want folks to recognize that we are not a blank slate. We come in with our biases, and and then natively, that ability that the low part of our brain does wants is just to have things done rack rapidly, and it doesn't really matter if it's accurate.

Speaker 17:17

That's absolutely true. And for a long, long time in our evolution, that was beneficial, and in this day and age, it's less so.

Speaker 1 17:27

Yeah, there aren't really saber-toothed tigers out chasing us anymore.

Speaker 17:32

There is an 800-pound gorilla following all of aviation around, and it has been for gosh, 45 years now, I want to say. Um, we're gonna go over a story that most of you have probably heard. If you haven't, you're about to. Um and even though it's really well known, it is worth getting into the front of our minds again as we move forward and start talking about some of the specifics uh with regards to communications, errors that uh both both in hearing, in uh processing, and in judgment that we can make due to uh uh within the realm of communication. Um, and then ultimately, as we always do in every episode, say, here's something you can do about it.

Speaker 1 18:25

Right.

Speaker 18:28

So, not to sound too dramatic, but this was the most dramatic bad day in aviation history. March 27th, 1977. Uh, it's 5.06 in the afternoon. And uh in the Canary Islands, there uh it's a Spanish archipelago uh off the northwest coast of Africa. And uh there's one of the little islands in the Canary Islands, it's called Tenerife. And just saying that word probably sends chills down the spines of of uh several of you just listening to it. So there's an airport there called Los Rodeos, and it's a it's a mid-size airport. Uh it was built for regional traffic, really. But on this particular day, March 27th, 1977, uh, it was handling some really, really large airplanes. Um, and unfortunately, um almost 600 people uh were going to perish that day. And it wasn't because the pilot was incapacitated, it wasn't because of weather. Um it wasn't because of a storm, I'll say. Um, it it was from something that's a lot harder to diagnose and much, much harder to fix. And that's communication. So earlier that afternoon, a bomb had detonated, uh, a terrorist bomb at the terminal in Gran Canaria Airport. That's the main airport that is used to handling the heavy metal on the larger island nearby in the Canaries. And so flights were diverted. Um, dozens of aircraft that had no business being at Los Rodeos, but they did have a runway that technically could handle them, um, were suddenly parked there and they were filling every available space, including taxiway. Um, and um the tower there, it's a little airport, mid-size airport. They didn't have ground radar. Uh, so uh everyone was working from radio calls alone. There was essentially zero visibility. There were two aircraft in particular um that were waiting for Grand Canaria to to reopen. Both of them were 747s. One was uh KLM and uh the other was Pan American. Um the Clipp is the uh uh call sign that they that they go by. Um they're both full to the brim with passengers. Um both of them have crews that are very experienced, they're professional by every measure. These are competent pilots. The captain of the KLM flight, um he wasn't just any captain, he was KLM's chief training pilot. Uh his photograph was on the airline safety advertising. Uh, if you wanted to name the most respected uh captain uh at KLM, and one of the most respected captains in all of uh airline uh aviation, you would name him. Um but he was subject to impatience. And his crew was approaching. Their duty time limits. So he's starting to feel some pressure. He's starting to feel some, I wouldn't say get their itis, but get out of their itis. Um, if they didn't leave soon, the flight has to be canceled. He he wanted to go. Now, eventually, uh, in this fog, the tower clears both aircraft to taxi. But remember, the taxiways are blocked with parked aircraft. So everybody has to back taxi uh if they're on the wrong end of the runway in order to depart. So the KLM is instructed to back taxi to the end of the runway, turn around, and hold for their departure clearance. And the Pan Am is to follow and exit at that third taxiway. At this point, both 737s were on the same runway, and there's thick fog. And the Spanish-speaking control tower that's working in its second language of English, has no way to visually confirm where either aircraft actually is. KLM reaches the far end of the runway, they turn around, the crew completes their before takeoff checklist, the captain advances the throttles without clearance. Uh, the first officer, his co-pilot, transmits words that are to this day subject of a lot of controversy. The co-pilot says, uh, we are now at takeoff. Not we are cleared for takeoff. We are cleared for departure. Nothing like that, though takeoff and technically would be the right term these days. Um, he says, we are now at takeoff. The KLM is accelerating down the runway. Pan Am is still on the runway, taxiing in the fog. The Pan Am crew can't see more than a few hundred meters in front of them. The Pan Am yanks the aircraft hard left onto the taxiway and advances the throttles to full power to get out of the way. And it didn't work. So the contributing factors were non-standard phraseology, expectation bias, uh, simultaneous transmission, so somebody stepped on somebody else, authority gradient, as they call it, uh, meaning the old school relationship of hierarchy between uh pilot and copilot and the language barrier. And 583 people died as a result. We've been looking at two research papers regarding this, as a matter of fact. Uh there's one from uh New South Wales and Western Sydney University, and uh respectively, actually, that's that's both of them. They're both Australian, which is interesting. Um and they designed some simulator studies um and they wanted to figure out what conditions can degrade radio communications. So let's talk about accuracy. Uh, if you're a native English speaker, uh your readback is typically 63% accurate. If you're a non-native English speaker, your readback is typically 51% accurate. Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, my readbacks are almost always accurate. This was in this study, so they were kind of throwing them a little bit of uh uh a curveball in in this particular study. What they found is there are four factors, or what they studied were four factors that potentially degrade accuracy. Information density. So, I mean, think wow, a lot of stuff all at once into your head. Workload, prosity, that's a fun term. We'll talk about that in a second, and uh congestion, uh, just radio congestion, a whole bunch of people on the radio. And they wanted to know um uh what role uh any, if any of those played a role uh in um uh in miscommunication. So it turns out information density is the number one killer. So if ATC transmissions contained three or fewer items, then pilots got the readbacks right quite a bit. Uh 59, we'll call it 60, okay, in this particular study where they were really being being thrown uh uh a lot of stuff. Um when a transmission had four or more items, suddenly uh it dropped by about 20. And that's quite a bit. So that's not a poor pilot problem, that's a human being problem. Uh low workload, 60% accurate, high workload, 50% accurate. Okay, it was a little bit of drop-off, but nothing like the information density issue that we were just talking about. And now my favorite vocabulary word, prosody. Um, if uh you're not familiar, prosody means the pauses that you put into communication, into your speech, the musicality, the rhythm of your speech. Uh, I love prosody and I use it quite a lot. As a matter of fact, William Shatner playing Captain Kirk is a perfect example of prosody, right? Um he uses uh uh that quite a bit in in his acting. Well, it it's pretty important in uh air-to-ground and air-to-air communications as well between ATC and pilots. Oh, incidentally, it's super important with AMTs as well. A conversation happening on the ground between two uh AMPs can go too fast. There can be misunderstandings as well. In fact, little secret, it can be between anybody talking about anything. Yeah, and that gets into the tunnel brain issue, which Jalee, I I think you were better at talking about this than I am. In fact, I think you have some things to to say that I I can I can learn from.

Speaker 1 28:41

Well, we did cover tunnel brain a couple of episodes ago, but happy to talk a little bit about it as well. So, what ends up happening is we have these expectations, we have times where we are not slowing the pace, we are not taking um our pauses and getting clarification. And so, what we want to do is make a decision very quickly if it if we're unchecked. And in a few um a few slides down the road, we'll be talking a little bit more about tunnel vision. But what we want to know is, you know, what are people filtering out? And I think it's important that we know that we do tend to get into that tunnel brain. Uh an example that I use sometimes is how when we're driving a really familiar route, or we are flying a familiar route, maybe into our home airport, and we don't really aren't really paying attention to our surroundings that much, not taking in any information. We might just be looking at you know our estimated time of arrival or what the GPS says, how long until our freeway exit. So want to make sure that we are addressing tunnel vision, and that will be the hours myth.

Speaker 30:09

So it turns out, and this actually goes back to episode one, um, which uh is is something that's very interesting to me. We're we're starting to uncover some things, uh, more than one thing, uh, that indicates that having a whole bunch of hours in your logbook might lead to some benefits, but in some cases might not. Uh, it there's not necessarily a relationship. Uh, if a high hours uh pilot or mechanic or controller happens to exhibit some really good second-order thinking behavior, it's not necessarily because they've been doing it forever, it's because they got the right training or they figured it out on their own uh very well. So hours flown doesn't predict accuracy. The formal training level does predict accuracy. And here's what I mean by that: not just training, but formal training. So when you move up through uh getting your various certificates and endorsements and ratings and things like that, you're going through formalized training. There is a bar, a very clearly defined bar that you have to hit. That kind of training is very rich in uh all the stuff that you're that that informs your your brain um uh about how to conduct a safe flight. Um, one of the great things about the WINGS program, in my humble opinion, and I'm not just saying this because you can get WINGS credit or uh AMT credit for this, um, is that it is somewhat formalized training that uh you are pursuing when you uh consume the information from a WINGS credit course. So that's a good way to do it as well.

Speaker 1 32:09

And from a psychological standpoint, this all makes a bunch of sense that skills that are not explicitly trained tend to develop sort of idiosyncrasy. You say that five times fast after the end of the day. So we build habits, some which are good and some which are not so good. And um, without deliberate practice and feedback, then we tend to have the same well-worn neural pathway. Um, it's interesting because when I was uh learning to fly, I was taught a specific technique for shutting down. And since I was in a school airplane, part of it was putting the keys, you know, right up on the glare shield so that people could see that the keys were out. And it's interesting that some 20 plus years later, when I shut down my airplane the same way and my keys go right up there, that's because I have a really well-worn neural pathway for that procedure, which happens to be built on safety. And in my case, want to make sure everything's off keys out and such. So remember that we do have some neuroplasticity. We have the ability to make new neural pathways. It's not the brain's preference. We would like to stay thinking about things the way that we've always thought about things. Please remember that practice never makes perfect, practice makes practice, and by practicing we gain mastery.

Speaker 33:31

Absolutely. So um another study. Uh, we talked about the hidden killers. Um a study from uh Australia and New Zealand Societies of Air Safety Investigators. Uh, this was presented at a seminar. Uh, Paul Krivonos, I believe is how you pronounce his name, is a professor of communication studies uh at California State University. Uh so apparently he had to go to the other side of the Pacific to present this paper anyway. He didn't really do a study so much as he took a whole bunch of information from a bunch of other studies and synthesized them together. And what he synthesized uh was the information from a program that is near and dear to the hearts of just about every pilot, and that is the NASA reporting uh system. One of the great things I love about the NASA reporting system is a lot of people see it as that that's your sort of get out of jail free uh card. Uh if your boo-boo wasn't too terribly bad and it it hasn't yet you haven't had another one recently. But the purpose that that wasn't the the the main driving purpose behind having the NASA report. The purpose behind having NASA reporting, as most of you probably already know, is to get the real unfiltered truth, not the dodgy answers that you give to the FISDO about when things happen, when there are uh close calls, uh, when uh a pilot is does something that gets them read a phone number or something like that. So he gives us the mechanisms underlying the cognitive processes that explain why those four different uh items um in a transmission drops your accuracy to 41%, and why intelligent and experienced professional pilots and mechanics and controllers can hear the wrong thing.

Speaker 1 35:57

I think it's kind of a gold line, isn't it, for the work that we're doing? Um I know that I filed a report when I was coming out of Whiteman, which is in the Los Angeles basin, and I was a VFR-only pilot at that point, and the Burbank, the controller around Burbank gave me a um a direction that was not clear to me as far as, you know, I was VFR only, and and the direction that he was giving me, you know, was an instrument um fix. And so I, you know, I did the best I could. I should have, in that busy space, gotten clarification, I did not. And so I decided when I got home that I would write down exactly what was said to me and and to make sure that not only you know you want to cover your own basis, but if the if it helps people to understand that if you're using phraseology or terms that uh a you know a VFR pilot might not be familiar with, that that can cause a big safety issue on the uh rivals corridor into Burbank.

Speaker 37:10

Absolutely. One point uh that uh we should probably talk about um uh is that on Mentor Live next Wednesday. So everybody pull up your calendars real quick. Uh it's hosting, um, they are hosting JJ Madison, love the last name. Uh um, and they're talking about uh yikes and NASA reporting uh get out of jail free. So uh that that was just coincidence that uh you know we didn't call each other ahead of time to see if we were both wearing red that day, but uh uh that's coming up, and that's uh that's uh uh gonna be excellent information. So be sure to tune in to Mentor Live next Wednesday to learn more about this and different stuff about this. Uh the NASA reporting uh system is is super important. So, expectation bias, how it works. We've all heard expectation bias. Most of you are probably thinking, I know exactly what that is. That's when uh you you're expecting to hear the same clearance that you filed, or you're expecting to say hear uh the same vectors that you always get when you're coming in uh uh to a well-known uh airspace uh or something like that. And the problem with expectation bias is that it can be very subtle. You can actually hear the right thing, climb to climb to 3,000 feet, and then you're used to hearing climb to 4,000 feet. You read back the correct thing that they told you, climb to 3,000 feet, but your brain still climbs to 4,000 feet because you're in the habit of doing it. It's expectation bias. And as a matter of fact, there there it is.

Speaker 1 39:12

Yes, um but how do you combat it then, Harvey? What's what's the fix?

Speaker 39:19

Well, the fix is um I can help you with it if you need it. Uh actually, yeah, uh that that would be good because suddenly my notes are not scrolling.

Speaker 1 39:36

Well, you know, what we've really been talking about um and the whole way that our our 12 episodes in the year are built, we started with how how do you pay attention, period. How and the next was how do we make decisions? Then we had automation and now we're having communication. So what's important is that we that we are extremely mindful when we're flying that we do have expectation bias. Um, and I remember that um that um my brother, one of my brothers passed away in 1998, and I was out at an event, and a dear friend of mine said, you know, how are you doing? And I said, I've been better. And he said, Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. So he was assuming that I was saying, I'm better when I said, I've been better. So again, it's making these assumptions based on the fact that you know, when you hear better, you think I'm better. Me again, I have a gravelly throat today.

Speaker 40:48

So um but but really the the I I I think to sum up what you were saying, listen to on second thought because we'll fix everything.

Speaker 1 40:59

I know and have a great time doing it. That's right. Uh last time we talked a bit about automation paradox and that um we tend to trust automation too much, and when we do rely on it so much and it's correct, let's say you know, the last nine out of ten times my automation's been perfect, then we're gonna assume the 10 out of 10 is perfect when it's not. Excuse me for um having a gravelly throat today. So, with the automation paradox, just want you to remember that you do need to stay vigilant because our performance does go up with automation because we have an extra set you know of eyes, so to speak. But we have to be very, very aware that our vigilance tends to go down, just like if you're on cruise control in the car or if you're on a very familiar route that you've flown a lot.

Speaker 42:00

Actually, son, that that uh uh uh uh kind of makes me think of of something uh that I think that we should probably address at some point. We've got all of the episodes and all the topics that we're going to cover for the year. We've we're covering number four right now, but we've got eight more after this. Um perhaps at some point, okay. I I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, quick planning meeting between just me and Jolie. Okay, here's what we're gonna do. Okay, we're gonna figure out which of these connect to which of the other ones. I think it's gonna end up everything connects to everything else, but I keep hearing attention, attention, attention.

Speaker 1 42:39

And remember, attention is state dependent. Attention is state dependent. So if I'm wound up, my ability to pay attention goes way down. If I'm calm, relaxed, slow the pace of my speaking down, slow my thinking down, then I'm much more likely to be able to pay attention. And Harvey, I want you to explain what this word on the screen is.

Speaker 43:05

Koik. Come on, it's koik. You know what coik is, right? No, I didn't either until I read the read this uh study. So koik is clear only if known, uh, which is kind of an obfuscated way of saying if you don't understand what you heard, um either the word or the meaning, uh, don't let it go. Ask for clarification. It's as simple as that. And this and Jolie, this made me think of right seeders, uh, frankly. Um, pilots are so guilty of sliding into jargon. I mean, uh, it's like I was saying during our rehearsal a couple nights ago. Yes, we rehearse. No, I know it doesn't look like it, but yes, we rehearse. So um we say ATC like it's a word, it's not even an acronym in our in our head. Anymore, ATC, everybody knows what that is, and I'm as guilty as anybody of doing it. And I shouldn't be because I'm the one here preaching, hey, you know, coik and pro does C and all you know, all that stuff. So just something to be aware of.

Speaker 1 44:16

Yeah, especially for your nonpilot companions, your partners, your grandkids, your kids. It's just important that we really say what we're talking about so that they understand. Because remember, it is not going to be in someone's um native response to say, what the heck is that?

Speaker 44:39

Absolutely. So um squawk your altitude. Um squawking 7500, ATC confirmed, landed three police cars, drawn weapons. Why did this happen? Squawk altitude. Huh? Squawk altitude. This is funny if you think about it too hard. The uh the report describes a pilot who is assigned a transponder code by uh approach uh to squawk your altitude. Well, the pilot's altitude is 7500, and uh the pilot replies logically, uh, squawking 7500 doesn't think. Hang on. Squawking 7500, and I've been high. Just that first digit, just don't ever, you know, get rid of seven if you can, you know, just make it where your knob or your button, just it's not there, you know. But this is this, I mean, attention, it comes back to attention. It really, really does.

Speaker 1 45:48

Yes, that's for sure. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that tunnel brain and how to break it. Again, widen your scan. What we know when we're when we're dysregulated and we're not able to pay good attention and make good decisions, then um our attention just narrows. And you might think, well, that's good that my attention is narrowed, but that's not good because it's narrowed into this tunnel. Think about looking, you know, horses with the blinders on, looking through a knothole of a fence, you're not seeing the whole scene. So we need to widen our scan. We also need to question things that are normal. Um, and so we we got to question the signal that's coming in and make sure that it is verified by other equipment. Again, whether it's in our mechanics bay or in the airplane or control tower. The other thing is to invite a second brain. Two brains are better than one. That's why we co-host is because we've got between the both of us, we've got a pretty good brain, right, Harvey?

Speaker 46:58

Uh I try not to drag us down too much, but I know, I know.

Speaker 1 47:02

I I tried to make a joke, but that didn't really I won't let you, sorry. I know it's like what a womb, right? Right.

Speaker 47:11

Exactly.

Speaker 1 47:12

Excuse me. So what we know about attention is that when we are overloaded or we have a lot of things coming in that we're not really um able to pay attention and get the full sequence of what we're supposed to be listening to or communicating. Uh, we've got our cognition, uh, which gets misinterpreted, the way that we think gets misinterpreted. And then we want, you know, we just remember that the low part of the brain has two jobs. One is to predict based on the past and to predict the future and ignore reality. And the other one is to protect you. So predict and protect, and that means that we can make a lot of assumptions that uh might end up costing us uh lives, uh whether in the air or on the ground.

Speaker 48:06

We're trying to we're we're we're trying to stuff our our cave person, I'm gonna say caveman and cave woman brains into the these modern marvels that that we've made. And and so you know, with with great power comes great responsibility, and that is to pay attention, to be mindful of these communication issues. Absolutely. So failures enter the sequence of safety. If you get corrupted input, whether the input that was given to you was wrong or you translated it wrong, you end up acting on false data. Period. There's not much more to that slide. Your decision is based on some sort of bad information, uh uh, regardless of where that the the error happened, and then you take action based on bad information.

Speaker 1 49:02

Let's talk a little bit about beyond the cockpit, because um our audience does include uh mechanics, uh ATC tower folks, etc. So how does, you know, Harvey, how does this, you know, how does it make sense to folks that uh are on the ground taking care of us?

Speaker 49:22

Well, let's talk about AMTs. Uh I I'm not sure I I'm starting to second guess have a second thought. Hey, I gotta make that joke at least once every episode. I don't know why, it's just who I am. Anyway, um, same killers, different channel. Uh uh the same problems, uh different uh uh you know, you're talking through the uh standing there rather than over the radio doing doing something different, right? Logbook entries. You write for a stranger. Task handoffs, same risk as high workload in flight. Oh boy, there, you know, oops, I forgot to say something. Uh when when I handed this problem off to whoever was down the line who's who's taking this aircraft uh for the next phase of repair or service or something like that. Shift turnovers. Uh I think that ATC is probably going, wait, is that me? No, this is this is for this is for mechanics as well. And verbal sign-offs. Oh, yeah, looks fine. Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no. Be a little nerdy, it's okay. Say the whole sentence back to them. Do read back what you heard and what you understand, just the way ATC and pilots do. I'm sorry, air traffic control, huh? Except I know you guys know what ATC is, so it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1 51:01

Yeah, I said let's talk about some takeaways because we like to give folks some ideas absolutely.

Speaker 51:10

So we want me to. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1 51:13

You can do you can do this one. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 51:16

All right, okay, thanks. I appreciate it. Yes, we rehearse, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, uh, break it up is ATC giving you four items at once. Ask them to chunk it up. Fun fact chunking is actually a legitimate, real psychological term, and it means exactly what you think it means. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, oh man, uh, you know, there I IFR clearances, are you serious? Yeah. Ask them, hang on, hang on, give me four, you know, give me my my my departure, a few fixes, they give me the next read those back, give them the next one, whatever. It it that is a good, that's a best practice for safety. Active readback, numbers, headings, runways. In other words, do your readbacks, do your readbacks correctly, and do them in a way that can be heard. Don't don't don't do that. And trust your gut. I know that's like, man, that's not very scientific. Actually, it is. Maybe we didn't talk about that in another episode, but trust your gut.

Speaker 1 52:25

We talked about it a little bit that that pre-cognition, we can get a feeling that something is off. And so I I think that we need to trust our guts because again, we are energy and we are we are getting energy and emitting it. And so it's important to slow down, trust your gut. If you have a question, you need to ask it. If somebody needs to slow down, then you need to say, you know, I can't listen as fast as you can talk. Um, and I do go over this a lot with my right seaters that uh, if you don't understand something, just ask a question. I would rather ask, you know, I've learned this a hard way. I talked a little bit about it last time where I was departing from San Carlos and I acted like I knew a departure procedure that I didn't. And luckily, you know, I woke up and thought, why don't you just ask for help? And and the guy was so dang happy because he said most people fake it and then they end up having a problem, especially with San Carlos being 10 miles from um SFO. So let's talk about uh for our mechanics here again. Write your notes like you're writing for a stranger and we're not using shorthand, we're writing out so that somebody can read it because unfortunately we all know as pilots and perhaps mechanics as well, that if there becomes a problem, someone else is gonna be reading your notes anyway, and they're one of going to want to be able to make sure that um you are accurate and um and explicit in what you're writing down.

Speaker 54:08

Make sure to put your cell phone number in there. Say call me or text me with questions.

Speaker 1 54:13

Yes, and again, you're gonna be briefing any handoffs and no informal sign-offs. Um excuse me. And so, you know, we talked about a lot of things tonight, and again, we really enjoy that our episodes are archived so you can go back and watch again. Uh, and then we do have the resources in our uh content where you can read the studies that we're using, and as well with the psychology part, you're able to read a guide that I wrote for you all so that you can understand the psychological concepts that we're talking about. I know it's different than some of the shows that are out there. That's fantastic, but we are 100% human factors. So coming up May 13th, the Habit Did and Choose, how aviation culture teaches us to fly and maintain.

Speaker 55:14

I've been looking forward to this since January. I'm really looking forward to that particular episode. And we'll have something up on the website soon, kind of giving a description uh about what we're gonna dive into. You will not want to miss it.

Speaker 1 55:30

But next week, I'm trading 77 degrees with no humidity. Uh, and uh Harvey and I will be at Sun and Fun, very excited to head to and so you can see on your screen some of the meet and greets that we have scheduled, as well as an interview with the Florida Aviation Network. And on Friday, the 17th, I will be presenting on Second Thought, the one-hour presentation series at 11:30 in the morning at the AOPA pavilion. And if you come, you might win one of our fantastic prizes from Light Speed, Lift Aviation, King Schools, Flying Eyes Optics, METAR Maps of Vemco, and Aviation Legend, Barry Schiff. If you want to know more about um what I'm doing and Harvey as well in Pilot Plus One, we have two conferences coming up, one May 29th and 30th at Oshkosh at the Pilot Proficiency Center. And June 12th and 13th, we are going to be in the St. Louis, Missouri area. And um, Pilot Plus One, Harvey, how would you put that in uh 30 seconds? What is Pilot Plus One?

Speaker 56:51

I can't put anything in 30 seconds, but I'll try. Pilot Plus One is a parallel conference that runs during right seat ready, and it's intended for left seaters, and everything is uh wings eligible. And we don't just talk about the usual safety stuff. Obviously, we need to talk about enough to make it uh wings eligible. Uh, and we absolutely do, but we talk about some really cool stuff like hey, in this particular region, where are the coolest hundred dollar, okay, these days with the surcharge, $150 hamburgers. Uh, how do I take great iPhone pictures out of um uh my cockpit window? Uh we talk about a little history, we might talk a little bit about radios. I've got a uh uh a presentation that that sounds really, really dull on the surface, and but it's it's a it's a lot of fun as we follow uh an Australian through a horrible nightmare of a radio.

Speaker 1 57:54

Uh and don't forget that everybody gets customized red bird simulator training. So if you're attending Pilot Plus One as a left seater, right seater, or as a couple, then you are also gonna get your pretty little self in a uh Redbird simulator and get to work on what you need to work on. Again, we want to say a big thank you to a Vemco for sponsoring on Second Thought. And um, don't forget to earn your Wings credits and your A and P credits. You have to take the quiz, but you're welcome to take it as many times as you like until you get it right. Because remember, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes practice, and then eventually you're gonna get 10 out of 10, right?

Speaker 58:41

Absolutely right. And that's the screen where you go to uh uh find the quiz, uh earn wings credit, take the quiz, take it again if you need to, uh, and uh you'll get that you'll get that wings credit. I and I I I would be remiss if I didn't say if you visit us at Sun and Fun, if you visit us at Oshkosh later uh this year, if you attend right seat ready or pilot plus one, these cool things are free. So come find us or we'll find you one or the other. But I've got a bunch of these and I don't want to go home with any of them.

Speaker 1 59:18

And that what he's showing you is our our keychains that are made in my favorite color, which is the teal blue, and it's think before flight. So thank you for your participation. We are so thrilled that you're here, and uh, we look forward to seeing folks in Lakeland next week, and otherwise, we'll see them uh the second Wednesday of May right here.