Christopher J. Ferguson - Catastrophe!

CATASTROPHE!

HOW PSYCHOLOGY EXPLAINS WHY GOOD PEOPLE MAKE BAD SITUATIONS WORSE

Christopher J. Ferguson

Essex, Connecticut

An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2022 by Christopher J. Ferguson

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ferguson, Christopher J., author.

Title: Catastrophe! : how psychology explains why good people make bad situations worse / Christopher J. Ferguson. Description: Lanham, MD : Prometheus, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This highly original book examines the personal and collective psychology behind the breakdown of rational decision-making during times of crisis and offers solutions to how we can be better prepared Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022013304 (print) | LCCN 2022013305 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633887954 (cloth) | ISBN 9781633887961 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Decision making. | CrisesPsychological aspects. | Emergency managementPsychological aspects. Classification: LCC BF448 .F47 2022 (print) | LCC BF448 (ebook) | DDC 153.8/3dc23/eng/20220321 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013304 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013305

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my wife, Diana:

Our marriage is at least one thing in this world that hasnt been a catastrophe.

CONTENTS

Guide

O n May 31, 2009, Air France flight 447 rolled onto the tarmac in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On board were 12 crew members and 216 passengers, most of them French, Brazilians, or Germans. These included eight children, one of whom was an infant. Perhaps some were French citizens returning from vacation in Brazil or, conversely, Brazilian citizens enjoying a trip to Paris to see the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. Others were traveling on business or attending conferences. One was a Turkish harpist, returning from playing at a festival.

The plane had an experienced crew of three: Captain Marc Dubois, copilot David Robert, and copilot Pierre-Cdric Bonin. The extra copilot allowed each of the flyers a chance to rest during the grueling thirteen-hour flight. The plane hugged the coast of Brazil, traveling north, then broke out across the Atlantic.

Here, about four hours into the flight, several fateful decisions were made. First, the flight path took the plane directly through a thunderstorm, even though other planes had flown around it. Second, the captain left the cockpit to take his scheduled nap.

Modern commercial jets are designed to fly largely by themselves. Using external data fed into computer systems, modern planes can handle much of their own flying. However, they sometimes fail or become confused, and human pilots must take control. Flying through the thunderstormexposure to the elementscaused the autopilot to fail.

Based on the investigation report, the thunderstorm caused ice to accumulate on one of the planes external sensors, called a pitot tube. This confused the planes computers, which disengaged the autopilot, shifting control back to the pilots.

Here control reverted to humans, humans who have to make decisions as a crisis begins to develop. Airline pilots are trained to handle crises, but they are still humans. And despite all the training in the world, crises are often like snowflakes: each one unique in its way.

Pitched about in the thunderstorm, the plane began to roll and copilot Bonin, who was at the controls, attempted to control the plane in the turbulence. According to reports, despite thousands of hours of experience, he had not been through a situation like this one before. Perhaps perceiving that the plane had lost altitude, he pitched the planes nose up. This was a critical mistake.

We all like to think of ourselves as rational people. Our perceptions of the world, and the decisions we make based on them, are objective and based in data. We think we are open to change if our behavior fails to initially produce the outcome we want. Surely it is others who are irrational, emotional, prone to perseverative errors in the face of calamity. Yet too often we are wrong. Our responses to crisespersonal, environmental, and occupationalare often catastrophically bad. Its easy to see in others precisely because we are not emotionally invested. But emotionfear, anger, despondencycan be a critical intrusion in good decision making.

By pulling the nose up, copilot Bonin put the airplane into a stall, a condition in which the angle of the wings is too high to retain lift and gravity pulls the plane back to earth. When a stall occurs, the best response is to put the nose down, so the wings can reacquire lift. However, it may be instinctual to point the nose up, away from the ground, when a plane is losing altitude. Surely, the engines should propel it higher. Combined with faulty or confusing information from the planes sensors, pilots may struggle to comprehend the crisis unfolding.

Copilot Bonin and copilot Robert now became thoroughly confused, a situation the official report notes may have been compounded by their inability to see what the other was doing with the stick controls, each potentially undoing the others efforts. The report notes that they did not engage in the expected maneuvers to fix the stall, possibly due to their confusion. Worse, Bonin continued to pull back on the stick, nosing the plane upward, which was entirely the wrong thing to do.

As the plane continued to plummet, copilot Bonin exclaimed, I dont have control of the plane at all! Copilot Robert gave the call to take over control, Controls to the left (referring to his position). However, copilot Bonin continued to pull up on the stick, undoing copilot Roberts efforts to resume control of the plane. Apparently, copilot Robert was unaware of Bonins actions, confusing Robert as well. Overall, voice recordings suggest that by this point, the copilots were panicking and not communicating well with one another.

At this juncture Captain Dubois returned to the cabin and found the copilots in a state of discombobulation. Confused and terrified, they were unable to tell him what had gone wrong, only that We tried everything. What ensues is a distressing exchange of incomprehension and indecision among the three crew. Dubois struggles to diagnose the problem, but he is confronted with poor information from the airplane systems and two terrified copilots.

Finally, Bonin informs Captain Dubois that he has been keeping the airplanes nose pitched up for most of this descent. Only then does Dubois realize the error, commanding the copilots to pitch the nose down to avert the stall. By then, however, the realization comes too late. The plane is critically out of control and spiraling toward the sea below.

Bonin exclaimed, Fuck, we are going to crash.... [I]t cant be true!

To which Robert responded, We are dead!

Seconds later the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in a belly-flop position, traveling at 200 kilometers per hour. All passengers and crew on board were killed instantly.

My intent in detailing this tragedy is not to place undue criticism on the pilots in this situation nor to stoke peoples fear of airplanes (more on this in a bit). Indeed, quite the contrarythe pilots in this case were well-trained and competent individuals. However, when presented with incomplete data in a crisis environment, emotion overtook them, creating confusion and causing them to engage in unhelpful behaviors that ultimately led to the planes demise. There were other failures, such as the icing of the pitot tubes and the cockpit design such that the pilots couldnt see what the other was doing. But human error compounded by emotion was not a trivial element of what went wrong with Flight 447.

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