Professional Pilot, February 2019

The Dunning Kruger effect Kruger and Dunning demonstrated that experts and novices often self assess the same level of confidence despite a wide disparity in skill level Difficulties in recognizing ones own incompetence lead to inflated self assessment PROFESSIONAL PILOT February 2019 51 San Francisco CA The aircraft was cleared for a visual approach and according to the NTSB neither the pilot flying the pilot monitoring nor the observer noted the change in A T autothrottle mode to HOLD The reversion to the HOLD mode is relevant because in that condition the thrust setting does not increase or decrease to control the airspeed In the case of Asiana 214 the thrust remained at idle while on final approach With no thrust input the airspeed rapidly decayed yet no one on the flightdeck detected the anomaly or acted to rectify a rapidly deteriorating situation The NTSB went on to point out the flight crews insufficient monitoring of airspeed indications during the approach resulted from expectancy increased workload fatigue and automation reliance The accident report also chided Asianas automation policy the emphasis on using full automation all the time and discouraging manual or hand flying The irony is that from day 1 of flight training pilots are taught the inexorable concept that pitch plus power equals performance One of the unfortunate pitfalls of automated thrust management is overconfidence that the computer will faithfully mirror pilot intentions As history shows thats not always the case Self awareness and poor performance The greatest challenge when measuring proficiency is self awareness or lack thereof Flight instructors that conduct Biennial Flight Reviews BFRs can relate Every now and then a candidate comes along that requires more training before the instructor is willing to endorse the BFR as complete The post flight debrief ends 1 of 2 ways 1 the pilot realizes he needs more work or 2 he argues with the instructor that hes perfectly fine and deserves a sign off The same thing happens albeit to a lesser extent when conducting recurrent training in a simulator Lack of proficiency is a problem but lack of introspection and accurate self assessment regarding said proficiency is a bigger one In 1999 Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger codified this effect in a scientific paper entitled Confidence Unskilled and Unaware How Difficulties in Recognizing Ones Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments Essentially its the phenomenon that people that are truly bad at something dont know how bad they are or more worrisome they spuriously believe themselves to be better than average or even good at a task when they are not The Dunning Kruger effect has been cited frequently in the media as a way of explaining poor performance on everything from driving to office work However outside of scientific literature the reason why people remain unaware of subpar and unskilled behavior is not made clear One reason for low self awareness is the lack of negative feedback from others or from the environment If an instructor conducting a BFR or training event merely checks the box and does not point out deficiencies he does the student a disservice while at the same time reinforcing a specious belief that the airmanship was proficient A pilot that never has an incident accident or violation wont receive situational feedback despite how bad he is Nor will a pilot that uses the automation to keep him out of trouble or save the day Some people avoid misfortune by being lucky Dunning and Kruger point out that attributional ambiguity or the tendency to attribute failure to reasons other than oneself is also responsible for overestimating ones abilities Under this theory an unstable approach might not be attributed to poor airmanship inadequate workload management or automation misuse rather it would be blamed on something like ATC gave me a bad vector or left me high Automation steals airmanship Automation is a wonderful thing especially when it comes to controlling aircraft pneumatic fuel electrical and hydraulic systems Highly automated aircraft have changed the training curriculum from the build the system mentality to one of Green is good red is bad and yellow is sort of bad What this all means is that in technically advanced aircraft deep systems knowledge including a litany of memory items is no longer required and has been replaced by checklist procedures and switchology For example a manufacturer might specify that all the buttons should be dark the switches positioned at 12 oclock and functions set to auto and should remain that way unless something turns yellow or red Then pilots are cautioned to change something only when directed to do so by the checklist The desired outcome is that a pilot can spend more time focused on flying and less on having 100 0 None Experience Expert