The article “The Human Factor” in Vanity Fair is two years old, but since I can’t believe I missed posting it — here it is! It’s a riveting read with details of the Air France Flight 447 accident and intelligent discussion of the impact automation has on human performance. Dr. Nadine Sarter is interviewed and I learned of a list of flight-specific “laws” developed by Dr. Earl Wiener, a past-president of HFES.
“Wiener’s Laws,” from the article and from Aviation Week:
- Every device creates its own opportunity for human error.
- Exotic devices create exotic problems.
- Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.
- Invention is the mother of necessity.
- Some problems have no solution.
- It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.
- Whenever you solve a problem, you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated.
- You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener).
- Complacency? Don’t worry about it.
- In aviation, there is no problem so great or so complex that it cannot be blamed on the pilot.
- There is no simple solution out there waiting to be discovered, so don’t waste your time searching for it.
- If at first you don’t succeed… try a new system or a different approach.
- In God we trust. Everything else must be brought into your scan.
- It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.
- Any pilot who can be replaced by a computer should be.
- Today’s nifty, voluntary system is tomorrow’s F.A.R.
Kudos to the author, William Langewiesche, for a well researched and well written piece.