Seven deadly shortcuts: cognitive biases and aviation
[credit: Flight Safety Australia, written by By Robert Wilson – Jan 30, 2024] The habits and tricks your brain uses to get you through everyday life become a problem when they run riot in the cockpit. We do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. Mark Twain The Nobel Memorial Prize for economics had an unusual winner in 2002. Daniel Kahneman became the first psychologist to win the world-renowned award, with a version of an idea he had first developed 30 years earlier with Amos Tversky – cognitive bias. If his life’s work can be summed up in a proverb, it would be that we are not as smart as we like to think we are. As well as changing economic thought, Kahneman and Tversky’s insights have unsettling ramifications for aviation safety. In 2 minds A widely quoted but unsourced statistic says the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.…
‘Drone’ – remove it from your lexicon
I really dislike the term ‘drone’. Its use is synonymous with any unmanned aircraft or aerospace system (UAS). Regardless of size or whether the application is military, industry, hobby or other, we tend to dub any and all pilotless systems as a drone. In the last five years, the taxonomy of drones has become overwhelming, yet the volume has not bred a new, more appropriate collective name for these vehicles. The etymology of the term ‘drone’, which is now widely used by the public, was coined in the 1920s in reference to the early remotely-flown target aircraft used for practice firing of a battleship’s guns. The etymology of the term ‘drone’, which is now widely used by the public, was coined in the 1920s in reference to the early remotely-flown target aircraft used for practice firing of a battleship’s guns. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s when the alternate term UAS was partially adopted by…