I learned a lot about flying airplanes while working 60 feet underground. I served as a missile launch control officer in the U.S. Air Force in the waning days of the Cold War. We worked in two-person crews, a commander and a deputy, behind a sealed blast door in a small room filled with old-school electronics that ran hot. A huge, forced air cooling system did its best to control the heat. But the possibility of fire in that confined space was always there, either from the electronics themselves, malfunction of the air conditioning unit that cooled them, or other scenarios. Consequently we learned to recognize overheats and potential overheats very rapidly, and were trained to follow practiced emergency procedures swiftly and correctly while using detailed emergency procedures checklists (“EPs”).
One of the key elements of our monthly training in a Missiles Procedures Trainer simulator, and our so-called “annual” checkride evaluations (because of crew partner changes, crew upgrades and systems changes I had eight “annual” evaluations in my four years on launch crew), was to voice aloud when you detected an “entering argument”—a status change requiring the use of an EP. Once you and your crew partner called it aloud, for example, “Electrical Fire or Overheat,” your job was to make it to the bottom of the applicable checklist as quickly as possible. Stating the nature of the scenario verbally was designed primarily to communicate with your crew partner and get agreement on the status. But I found actually saying “Electrical Fire or Overheat” out loud had a noticeable additional benefit: it put me in the emergency mindset.
