of common sense In response to a fact-checking email, Strayer expanded his comments: “With automated systems, we may not focus or concentrate attention on the task—we even mind wander in boring or repetitive settings. It takes effort to concentrate attention and this can lead to high levels of mental workload and we see a ‘vigilance decrement’ where attention lapses (and we make errors and miss critical events). This is often the case with monitoring tasks (keep an eye on the autonomous system) and when things go awry we may not notice or react on autopilot (even if this is not the correct action—we refer to this as slips where autopilot took over).”
gauges and controls Airbus, Airbus A330 Aircraft Recovery Manual Airbus, 2005, http://www.airbus.com/fileadmin/media_gallery/files/tech_data/ARM/ARM_A330_20091101.pdf.
throughout the flight The automatic warning system of this A330 was programmed so that the stall warning would cease when the plane’s stall was most severe. In some situations, when the pitch attitude was too high and the airflow into the pitot tubes too low, the computer assumed the data it was gathering was erroneous. So it sounded no alarms. Thus, a perverse situation arose for Flight 447 after the pitot tubes thawed: At times, when Bonin did something to make the stall worse, the alarm stopped. The computers worked as programmed, but the result was information that might have been confusing to the pilots.
“reactive thinking” Koji Jimura, Maria S. Chushak, and Todd S. Braver, “Impulsivity and Self-Control During Intertemporal Decision Making Linked to the Neural Dynamics of Reward Value Representation,” The Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 1 (2013): 344–57; Ayeley P. Tchangani, “Modeling for Reactive Control and Decision Making in Uncertain Environment,” in Control and Learning in Robotic Systems, ed. John X. Liu (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005), 21–58; Adam R. Aron, “From Reactive to Proactive and Selective Control: Developing a Richer Model for Stopping Inappropriate Responses,” Biological Psychiatry 69, no. 12 (2011): 55–68; Veit Stuphorn and Erik Emeric, “Proactive and Reactive Control by the Medial Frontal Cortex,” Frontiers in Neuroengineering 5 (2012): 9; Todd S. Braver et al., “Flexible Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control Within Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 18 (2009): 7351–56; Todd S. Braver, “The Variable Nature of Cognitive Control: A Dual Mechanisms Framework.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 2 (2012): 106–13; Yosuke Morishima, Jiro Okuda, and Katsuyuki Sakai, “Reactive Mechanism of Cognitive Control System,” Cerebral Cortex 20, no. 11 (2010) 2675–83; Lin Zhiang and Kathleen Carley, “Proactive or Reactive: An Analysis of the Effect of Agent Style on Organizational Decision Making Performance,” Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management 2, no. 4 (1993): 271–87.
the psychologist, in 2009 Joel M. Cooper et al., “Shifting Eyes and Thinking Hard Keep Us in Our Lanes,” Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings 53, no. 23 (2009): 1753–56. For more on this topic, please see Frank A. Drews and David L. Strayer, “Chapter 11: Cellular Phones and Driver Distraction,” in Driver Distraction: Theory, Effects, and Mitigation, ed. Michael A. Regan, John D. Lee, and Kristie L. Young (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2008): 169–90; Frank A. Drews, Monisha Pasupathi, and David L. Strayer, “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 14, no. 4 (2008): 392; Joel M. Cooper, Nathan Medeiros-Ward, and David L. Strayer, “The Impact of Eye Movements and Cognitive Workload on Lateral Position Variability in Driving,” Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 55, no. 5 (2013): 1001–14; David B. Kaber et al., “Driver Performance Effects of Simultaneous Visual and Cognitive Distraction and Adaptation Behavior,” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 15, no. 5 (2012): 491–501; I. J. Faulks et al., “Update on the Road Safety Benefits of Intelligent Vehicle Technologies—Research in 2008–2009,” 2010 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference, August 31–September 3, 2010, Canberra, Australia.
announcement of any kind In a fact-checking conversation, Stephen Casner, a research psychologist at NASA, said that if a plane was falling at ten thousand–plus feet per minute, the g-force would be pretty close to 1, and as a result, it would be unlikely the passengers would have noticed that anything was amiss. However, he added, “Actually, no one knows what that feels like. Everyone who has felt what it’s like to lose 10,000 feet a minute dies pretty soon after feeling it.”
ten thousand feet per minute In response to questions, a spokesman for Air France wrote: “A fundamental aspect is that the STALL alarm stopped when the speed fell below 60 kts, leading the pilots to think they were out of the stall. Especially that every time they pushed on the stick to try and get out of the stall situation, the STALL alarm started to work again, leading them to cancel their pitching action! Also, during the last phase, vertical speed indications were unstable, adding doubt and confusion in the pilots’ minds.”