How It Goes Off The Rails

According to Dismukes and his researchers in a presentation, The Hidden Complexity of Cockpit Operations, conventional wisdom tells us pilots become accustomed to concurrent task demands, interruptions, distractions and disruptions while the truth is pilots routinely manage multiple, competing, concurrent task demands just fine. At least until theres an interruption. The presentation lists four situations when pilots are vulnerable to omissions when performing routine tasks:

Key Takeaways:

• Pilots generally manage concurrent tasks well, but interruptions significantly increase their vulnerability to omissions in routine operations.
• Errors commonly occur when pilots perform tasks out of their usual sequence or encounter new, unanticipated tasks, often due to expectation biases.
• Interleaving multiple tasks, such as programming while taxiing, raises the risk of mistakes, underscoring the importance of focused, sequential task completion.

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