“There’s a reacting side of the brain and a thinking side of the brain,” insists Clinton Anderson in his training DVDs. Anderson is a “horse whisperer” who demonstrates his Downunder Horsemanship on the RFD cable channel and in his series of DVDs. I’ve been using Anderson’s training techniques to work with Miss Biscuit, my three-year-old quarter horse, and it’s obvious she behaves better – and I’m safer – when she’s thinking rather than reacting.
But I hadn’t made the connection to how it applies to pilots until I was reading an article in the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety World (since renamed AeroSafety World ). The article, “Pressing the Approach,” written by Benjamin A. Berman, a senior research associate at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a pilot with a major carrier, and R. Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors in the Human Factors Research and Technology Division at NASA Ames, details their investigation into 19 accidents. The researchers found that two of the most common themes in the 19 accidents were what they called “snowballing workload” and “plan continuation bias.”
