Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert.
The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane's external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand -- something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at that altitude.
The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean.
As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem -- including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times -- they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, "We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything."
Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of "brain freeze," the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.
In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls in a kind of panicked death-grip all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again.
anonymous on 25 Apr 12"Humans are storytelling machines. We don't passively perceive the world - we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We're so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales - the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue - actually happened to my little sister. I'd stolen her trauma. The reason we're such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures. The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner. This time, though, the subjects were given a "lifeline": they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing g
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