Early in our flying careers, we concerned ourselves with acquiring ratings and amassing hours. After landing our final career airline job, our priorities fundamentally changed. For most professional pilots, this transition starts shortly after we get hired with a major airline or at our desired career destination. Settled securely on a seniority list, our priorities shift toward managing our flight schedule, crew base, and seat upgrade. Unlike earlier career factors, all of these considerations are dependent upon forces beyond our control (company growth, the national economy, and senior pilot retirements, to name a few). With little that we can do to further our career, we tend to become less motivated toward advancing our aviation professional knowledge.
Along with relaxing our career advancement goals, performing our job becomes easier. Every day, we fly the same aircraft, use the same procedures, and traverse the same routes. Repetition promotes familiarity, proficiency, and confidence. We quickly become quite competent at our jobs. As part of this process, we become more skillful at combining individual tasks into familiar flows. This achieves quicker job completion, reduced mental effort, and improved relaxation. We find our groove and settle into it. All of these conditions sound beneficial – and in many ways, they are. Unfortunately, they also generate some adverse byproducts which cultivate latent vulnerabilities.
Reduced attention – habit patterns, laxity, and lower vigilance: Performing any repetitive task promotes the development of familiar habit patterns and personalized flows. Blending individual tasks together into smooth flow patterns improves efficiency, expands our situational awareness, and aids in error detection. As part of the process, our understanding of task importance deepens. We learn which indications deserve our attention and which we can ignore. This helps us to focus our attention on the most important conditions and factors. Unfortunately, we sometimes draw inaccurate conclusions. Our understanding may become skewed toward task frequency instead of task importance or error probability. Stated another way, we unintentionally bias our priorities toward the tasks that we perform most often because they produce observable results and away from discretionary tasks that only guard against bad things happening.
Another adverse drift that emerges from repetition is lower levels of task vigilance. Many Human Factors scientists and industry analysts often characterize this as complacency. Consider that this may be an inaccurate label. Complacency connotes a level of uncaring. Surveying accident/incident investigations, I haven’t encountered uncaring attitudes in mishap pilots. A more accurate term may be laxity which identifies an inappropriate level of attention focus for the situation.
Events rarely go astray in everyday line flying. Since bad occurrences almost never happen, paying close attention to reliable, mundane tasks feels unnecessary. Little by little, our attention level can sink as we unconsciously equate the attention needed to complete a task with the level of attention that the task deserves. Simply stated, since a task doesn’t require much attention, we don’t give it much attention. For example, compare the attention level we devote toward an engine start during our recurrent simulator training (where we expect to encounter an engine start malfunction) with a line-flying engine start (where we rarely ever see any malfunctions). Over time, settling into our comfort zone can promote a lowering of attention focus. It becomes the natural path of least resistance – well-worn river bed that the water of our attention naturally follows. It takes a conscious commitment on our part to mindfully monitor repetitive, rarely failing tasks. This is a fundamental perspective of the Master Class pilot mindset.
Task simplification – shortcutting techniques: As we study how our task accomplishment evolves as we gain proficiency, we typically see a drop in attention-to-detail. For example, the flow pattern that we use to complete our flightdeck preparation tends to shorten over time. This is often driven by past time-pressured situations. Trying to make up lost time, we sped up our preparation process. Since we knew which preflight tasks were most important, we skipped the less important tasks. Nothing went wrong during those events, so our shortcutting was rewarded. These shortcuts felt more efficient. Over time, they became our everyday standard. Comfort zone and lack of unfavorable outcomes promoted this drift and solidified the changes. It all works great – until it doesn’t. What we miss through shortcutting is that we unintentionally expose the kind of latent vulnerabilities that only surface under uncommon combinations of conditions. We can’t predict these combinations in advance. Instead, we need to maintain our commitment to completing tasks accurately even when they never produce apparent benefit. It takes discipline and dedication to resist this drift and preserve the quality of our task completion.
Game plan reduction – few “go-to” plans: One of the byproducts of comfort zone is that we whittle our game plans down to a short list of favorites. These become our “go-to” profiles that we apply whenever we can. These favored game plans come with familiar sets of decisions and monitoring priorities – ready-made kits that contain all of the necessary parts. When conditions remain predicable and benign, they work very well. Problems only emerge when unexpected conditions arise and interact in ways that make these favored game plans inappropriate. When the mismatch is small, we either apply more force to push them through or accept the inevitable deviations. Most of the time, this strategy works because deviations fall within established safety margins. When conditions become extreme, unique, or complex, our favored game plans break down. Often, this breakdown occurs under time pressure and increased complexity. Mishap pilots succumb to plan continuation bias and continue forcing their failing profiles. Master Class pilots recognize the warning signs of failing game plans, watch for evidence of deteriorating profiles, and employ trigger points to switch to safer backup game plans.
Reduction of professional challenge: In highly repetitive line-flying environments, we quickly achieve proficiency. With standardization and repetition, our aviation skills reach an acceptable standard. The amount of effort we need to devote while completing our flights steadily drops. We discover that we can lower our levels of preparation, attention, and contingency planning without experiencing adverse consequences. Line flying becomes quite easy. Problems remain small and we become quite adept at solving them as they arise. This lowers our perceived need to plan for contingencies. Soon, we come to rely on our go-to game plans and solve any deviations using in-the-moment problem solving. Again, this works well when problems remain small. As complexity mounts, problems emerge. Lacking contingency preparation and briefing, we feel especially uncomfortable when scenarios exceed our comfort zone. Unpracticed at contingency thinking and unprepared with briefed backup game plans, we push harder to force deteriorating situations back toward our go-to profiles in ill-fated efforts to restore our comfort zone. Master Class pilots, however, maintain disciplined practices of contingency planning, profile monitoring, and game plan switching. Having mentally practiced thinking about and switching to contingency game plans, they easily make the transition.
Effect of the airline’s culture: Unique line cultures form within all professional aviation company environments. If the line culture leans toward lax professional standards, new pilots feel pressure to lower their professionalism to fit. If the line culture leans toward disciplined professional standards, new pilots raise their professionalism to match. Even the most well-intentioned training program and philosophy can fail to alter culture against the daily reinforcement of line-flying norms. Unfortunately, the underlying forces driving line cultures often favor relaxed comfort zones. It is a natural byproduct of our human nature. It takes committed intention and dedicated effort to instill Master Class practices that promote aviation professionalism.
Recap: Human existence encourages us to seek comfort. When we reach a point in our career path where our proficiency can allow us to relax, we are understandably drawn toward it. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. We can still choose to increase our professional wisdom while remaining psychologically relaxed and content. We just need to commit to purposeful practice, life-long learning, embracing excellence, and mindful self-reflection.
