AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2013 - 22

LICENSE TO LEARN

Ties that bind us

BY ROD MACHADO

Group cohesion gone missing

ROD MACHADO

will present a
seminar on aviation
humor at AOPA
Aviation Summit
October 10 through
12, 2013, in Fort
Worth, Texas.

WE ACTUALLY DO quite well at training people to make
good decisions regarding their safety. People in industries ranging from commercial aviation to the nuclear
industry have made impressive improvements in their
safety record over the years. Not so for general aviation.
Our fatal accident rate hasn’t improved in any significant way for the past 25 years, despite the fact that GA
pilots have been taught aviation decision-making skills
during this time. Were this not the case, we wouldn’t
have the NTSB chairman saying, “We know the general aviation community can do much better.” So why
has the GA fatal accident rate been nearly flat for a quarter of a century?
Ask yourself what the similarity is between commercial aviation, the Coast Guard, and the nuclear
industry. The envelope, please.
In my opinion, organizations such as these benefit
from strong group cohesion, something that’s missing
from general aviation. Group cohesion is a process by
which individual members of a group develop links that
bond them together. It’s this collective sense of unity
that helps sustain the group and inspires its members
to behave in ways that are rewarded and reinforced by
group membership. If the group supports a culture of
safety, then individuals within the group generally strive
to behave safely.
General aviation experiences very little group cohesion because it doesn’t function like a group. At least not
in the sense that the association between its members
is effective at inspiring the safety-oriented behaviors
found in the airline or nuclear industries. We have individuals with similar interests, but group cohesion is
missing. After all, we don’t have to work and/or socialize
with one another. Our personal safety isn’t dependent
on each other, as it is in other industries.
In my opinion, group cohesion acts to reduce accidents because it works as a check and balance on our
human nature.
If you’re a student of history, then you know that
human nature doesn’t bring out the best in man. Among
other things, it causes him to behave impulsively, feel
invulnerable, act macho, abuse his power, and resist
responsible authority (among other things). Do these
look familiar? They should. They’re well-established
hazardous thought patterns that everyone acts upon
at one time or another unless they are overridden by a
good set of personal safety values. These are the same

22 | AOPA PILOT September 2013

safety values that are often inspired, inculcated, and
reinforced by strong group cohesion. These safety values must be learned and reinforced. They’re not part of
our human nature.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that in the absence of
group cohesion, general aviation pilots aren’t capable
of acting responsibly. Nearly all GA pilots do, despite
the NTSB’s and FAA’s lamentations. They operate in
accordance with safety values that counter their human
nature. While there are many ways one might acquire
good safety values, it’s not likely they resulted from
strong GA group cohesion.
Unlike other industries whose individual members
are influenced positively by strong group cohesion, GA
can’t control its outliers. These can be individuals with
reckless personalities or ordinary people who surrender to the temptation of behaving badly in the air. They
might press on in poor weather to avoid an out-of-town
stay, or fail to refuel because it’s inconvenient. These are
just a few of the outliers whose poor decisions sustain
our relatively constant fatal accident rate.
The sobering part of this story is that even individuals with good safety values might become outliers at
one time or another. We’re all human and it’s easy to let
our human nature compel us to behave inappropriately
at times. Big surprise, everyone sins.
In these situations, it’s the influence of the group
that might compel the outlier to think a second time
about his choice of behavior. This is precisely what happens when a nuclear plant manager critiques a fellow
atom specialist, communicating the idea that he hasn’t
been managing his atoms properly and putting a different spin on things. This is how groups can influence us
to behave better.
So when aviation’s leaders say that the general aviation community can do much better at safety, I’m
thinking this is easier said than done without the benefit of group cohesion. It’s seems clear that you can lead
an outlier to the fluid nature of safety theory but you
can’t make him think.
In my opinion, unless we find a way to develop the
group cohesion found in other industries that have enviable safety records, GA’s present fatal accident record
isn’t likely to change all that much—at least not without
overly restricting every pilot’s behavior.
AOPA
WEB

www.rodmachado.com

http://www.rodmachado.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2013

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