Tali Sharot - The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain

Tali Sharot has a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. She is currently a research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. Her research on optimism, memory, and emotion has been featured in leading scholarly journals and media outlets, including Newsweek, the BBC, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time, New Scientist, Nature, Science, and many others.

January 3, 2004, Sharm el-Sheikh. One hundred and forty-eight passengers and crew board Flash Airlines Flight 604 bound for Paris via Cairo. The Boeing 737-300 takes off at exactly 4:44 a.m. Two minutes later, it disappears from the radar.

Sharm el-Sheikh is located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It is a tourist destination because of its year-round warm weather, beautiful beaches, and marvelous snorkeling and diving. The majority of passengers on Flight 604 are French tourists escaping the European winter to spend their Christmas vacation near the Red Sea. Entire families are on board Flight 604, on their way back home.

The crew is largely Egyptian. The pilot, Khadr Abdullah, is a decorated war hero, because of his performance flying the MiG-21 in the Egyptian air force during the Yom Kippur War. He has 7,444 flying hours under his belt, although only 474 of those are on the Boeing 737 he is piloting on this day.

According to its designated route, the aircraft should have ascended for a short while after takeoff and then turned left, heading toward Cairo. Instead, less than a minute into the flight, the plane turns right and quickly assumes a dangerous angle. Flying completely on its side, the jet begins spiraling downward Flight 604 crashes into the water moments after takeoff. There are no survivors.

At first, the authorities suspect a bomb had been planted on the plane by terrorists. This hypothesis arises because no distress signal was sent from the aircraft. However, when the sun comes up and pieces of the jet are discovered, it becomes apparent this theory is wrong. The pieces of the plane are detected close together, and there are not many of them. This suggests that when the plane hit the water, it was intact, rather than having exploded in midair, which would have resulted in many fragments scattering across the sea. What, then, caused Flight 604 to drop violently from the sky?

For the mystery to be solved, it is essential that the planes black box be found. The area of the sea where the plane crashed is one thousand meters deep, which makes it difficult to detect the signals emitted from the box. Furthermore, the black boxs battery will last for only thirty days; after that, the probability of finding it will be, realistically, nil. Egyptian, French, and U.S. search teams participate in the effort. Luckily, two weeks into the search, the black box is detected by a French ship.

The information from both the data recorder and the voice cockpit log contain clues that guide the investigators in a number of different directions. No less than fifty different scenarios are identified, then ruled out one by one, on the basis of the available data. No evidence of any airplane-related malfunction or failure can be found.

During spatial disorientation, also known as vertigo, a pilot is unable to detect the position of the aircraft relative to the ground. This usually happens when no visual cues are available, such as when the plane is flying in a dense cloud or in pitch-darkness over the ocean. The pilot may be convinced that he is flying straight when, in fact, the plane is in a banked turn, or when coming out of a level turn, he may feel he is diving. Trying to correct the (false) position of the aircraft only makes matters worse. During a rapid deceleration, a pilot sometimes feels the plane is facing downward. To rectify this illusion, the pilot may then pull up the nose of the plane, which often leads the aircraft to fall into a catastrophic spin known, for obvious reasons, as the graveyard spin. The graveyard spin is what seems to have happened to the Piper plane piloted by John F. Kennedy, Jr. It crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on July 16, 1999, after Kennedy suffered spatial disorientation while flying at night in bad weather en route to Marthas Vineyard.