AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - 92

P&E

92 |

PROFICIENCY

reel. But people in the street are hesitant to
listen to advice or to learn from the experiences of others.
Pilots know that our ability to remember
to do things can be intermittent, so we use
reminders such as checklists. Meanwhile,
studies tell us that patients forget to take
their medications 25 percent of the time and
125,000 die each year from medication nonadherence. Even doctors still rely on their
memory for complex procedures.
Outside of flying machines, people
scurry up ladders and fire up new power
tools after doing astonishingly little thinking ahead. Yet the value of thinking a few
steps ahead is baked into pilots' language.
We "stay ahead of the airplane" because, if
we don't, we'll be "clinging to the tail" or
"sitting back in row 12."
Sure, we're trained safety pros. But does
a person in the street really need this pilotgrade level of safety? The statistics tell us
they now do. Quotidian life is becoming
more complex and loaded with subtle risks.
Look at the typical urban intersection. We

have fast cars driven by people who are not
only distracted but also in more of a hurry.
Meanwhile, the surging popularity of
cycling and walking are putting more vulnerable targets in front of the cars.
At home, a DIY craze is putting tools
back in our hands-just after we eliminated
shop class from our school curricula. And
remember when we used to go visit the doctor? At a health care facility today we meet
a series of strangers who track our history
using complex medical information systems. A recent report by a surgeon at Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine
names medical error, often the simplest of
slips, as the third leading cause of death in
the United States.
At play, people are now into mixed martial arts, jumping between rooftops, and,
increasingly, out the back of perfectly serviceable airplanes. We just saw a spike in
rock climbing injuries-among people aged
0 through 4.
It seems like everyday life has become
as demanding as flying a Cessna 152 on a

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sunny day. The problem is that no one is
checked out on it but us.
There are a few takeaways here. One
is to understand that our knowledge
about our own human strengths and limitations is the greatest safety resource
we possess. Nurture and grow this valuable area of your expertise. The human
mind remains the most misunderstood
piece of equipment on board any aircraft.
Learning more about it can be a lot of fun.
You already know that we often forget to
do things without some sort of reminder.
But did you know that the average person can glance at 10,000 photographs and
then recall, even days later, which ones
they saw, with an accuracy of more than
90 percent? Yes, sometimes our memories
are unreliable and sometimes they are like
a steel trap.
A recent study found that people estimate the slope of a hill in front of them to
be less when they were standing beside
a friend. Yes, even the simple things we
see "with our own two eyes" are subject

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018