Have you ever cut a corner, perhaps not using a checklist, or skipping a preflight, and then caught yourself doing it again? Nothing bad happened the first time, but that was the beginning of the normalization of deviance.
The normalization of deviance is a phenomenon in which individuals deviate from what is known to be an acceptable performance standard—basically, accepting less than the acceptable in terms of performance or cutting corners—until the deviant behavior becomes the adopted practice. It’s often defended with phrases like “it wasn’t too bad” or “almost” or “close enough” or “we’ve never had a problem before,” and at the flight school level, “my CFI said I didn’t need to know that.”
