Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic.

How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

Over at Popular Mechanics I’ve got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I’d like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened, and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety. Continue reading Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

The Truth About Lies

In the ‘90s, psychologist Paul Ekman leapt to fame with his theory of “microexpressions”—the idea that when we lie brief, subconscious flashes of emotion register on our face to reveal our true feelings. People trained to pick up on these cues, Ekman said, can root out the truth with astonishing accuracy. His idea inspired a $1 billion TSA program and the TV show Lie to Me.

There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that Ekman’s theory has any basis. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles Morgan III. While something like the microexpressions that Ekman described do exist, truth-tellers exhibit them as well as liars. “There is no clue, no behavior, that always means that someone is lying, and never means something else,” says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies lying. “All of these behaviors are just hints.”

So can science help us unmask deception? Yes. But the key is not just to observe a suspected liar but to ask them the right kind of questions. Making up a story and keeping the details straight require more mental horsepower than just telling the truth. Researchers have found that if interrogators can place an extra “cognitive load” on a liar’s intellect they’ll likely push it to breaking point and cause the story to fall apart.

Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij has tested several ways to accomplish this. In one experiment, he asked pairs of subjects to either go eat lunch together in a restaurant or to simply lie and say that they had. Vrij found that when it came to the kinds of questions that they probably expected to face—“what did you do in the restaurant?”—the liars were able to come up with such convincing stories that it was impossible to tell the two groups apart. But when he forced them to respond on the fly to unexpected questions, such as queries about spatial layout (“In relation to where you sat, where were the closest diners?’’), the liars gave up the game 80 percent of the time.

So if you want to get the truth, sit your suspected liar down for a chat and lay some cognitive load on them. Here are four proven techniques based on experiments that Vrij and others have conducted: Continue reading The Truth About Lies

Surviving Fear Under the Ice

I'm still not sure this is a good idea. (Photo by Isabelle Dubois)

You can study the psychology of fear until the cows come home; it’s not going to do much to keep your heebie-jeebies under control when you’re about to jump into a gap in six-foot-thick sea ice.

I shuffle closer to the edge of the five-by-five foot hole that’s been chainsawed into the ice. I have no real reason to be jumping into the frozen-over Hudson Bay. I’ve come up here for a totally different reason—to do a story about igloo building for a men’s magazine. But the trip’s organizers added a couple of extra days onto my itinerary so that I could get a taste for the local Inuit culture—riding on a dogsled, eating raw caribou meat — oh, and going scuba diving under the sea ice. Care to give it a try, Mr. Wise?

I couldn’t say no. Stunts like this are basically what I do for a living. I’m a magazine writer specializing in experiential adventures like skydiving, surfing, and survival training. Along the way, I developed an interest in the psychology of intense pressure and wrote a book on it. So though the idea of scuba diving under ice scares the crap out of me, that’s all the more reason I should do it.

And it does scare the crap out of me. Immersion in 32 degree water sounds bad enough, but to be trapped under six feet of ice as well? There’s a section of my book about how deadly that kind of thing can be. If a diver panics, the instinctive response is to rip away anything that blocks the airway – in this case, the regulator. In an enclosed space far from the surface, there may be no chance to recover from that mistake. Ironically, just knowing that the possibility exists makes it more likely to happen. “Well, let’s see how it goes,” I tell the organizers.

I’m being weasel-y, but with good reason. Continue reading Surviving Fear Under the Ice

Sad News

Stull at the Sun n' Fun airshow this past April.

Sadly, I’ve received news that Mark Stull, a 59-year-old airplane designer and builder who featured prominently in last month’s Popular Mechanics cover story about do-it-yourself aviation, died on Wednesday, November 16, in a crash near his home in Texas. Stull had just taken off on his first test flight of a new design when the accident occurred. According to a witness, he had climbed to about 50 feet when the aircraft stalled, flipped, and fell to the ground. Stull died instantly.

When I interviewed Stull earlier this year for the article, I was astonished by the risks that he described to me. He was constantly tweaking and modifying his aircraft, and would regularly take them apart and start new designs from scratch. This approach was no doubt fascinating to him intellectually, but it meant that he was constantly flying untested designs whose flying characteristics only became clear once he was in the air.

Stull is not the first aviator I’ve interviewed who has subsequently died in a crash. Last year, I wrote about John Graybill, who died while flying with his wife Dolly in Alaska. I’d profiled Graybill a decade before for National Geographic Adventure. Like Stull, Graybill knew that his passion for flying might someday lead to his death; like Stull, he was fatalistic about his chances.

“I have had many near-death experiences in my life. I am a thrill seeker,” Stull told me earlier this year. “I used to be a white-water kayaker, paddling steep, flooded creeks in Oregon. We used to say, if we don’t almost die, we aren’t having fun. I have no fear of death, but I fear being seriously injured.”

Like Stull and Graybill, I love to fly. Like them, I understand that doing so entails a certain amount of risk, but believe that by staying within certain parameters I can reasonably expect to live a long life. When I hear of an accident like Stull’s or Graybill’s, I have to step back and ask myself: am I really being as safe as I think, or am I deluding myself? Am I taking unnecessary risks? The answer may be no, but I have to ask the question again and again and again.

In cases like this, you often hear people say, “He died doing what he loved.” That may be true, but I can guarantee that in the final seconds, he didn’t love it at all.

UPDATE: Go San Angelo, the website of the San Angelo Standard Times newspaper, has put up a nice piece up about Stull by staff writer Laurel L. Scott.

Forging a Soul of Iron

Gerry Duffy, a rangy, chiseled 43-year-old from Ireland, ranks as one of the most remarkable endurance athletes in the world. Last year, he took first place in an insanely grueling event called the UK Deca Ironman Challenge that required its participants to complete, every day for ten days, a full triathlon: a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run. He has also completed a number of other punishing long-distance events, including one perversely torturous undertaking of his own devising in which he raced a marathon in each of Ireland’s 32 counties over the course of 32 consecutive days. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Duffy, though, is that he used to be just like the rest of us.

At the age of 26 he was a chubby, chain-smoking traveling insurance salesman, 60 pounds overweight, unambitious and comfortable with life. Then one day he saw a photograph of himself taken as he met his hero, golf champion Seve Ballasteros. The sight of the chubby man next to the legendary duffer shocked him. “I said, ‘Mother of…!’” he recalls. “I just felt that I was better than that. I said to myself, ‘I have to do something about this.’” And so he did. Starting with small, easy steps, he began a long journey that ultimately shaved off 30 percent of his body weight and transformed every aspect of his life. From an ordinary schlub, he turned himself by force of will into a man of unparalleled resilience.

Duffy’s story offers a perfect example of a profound but often overlooked truth about human toughness: even the most physically punishing feats of endurance are less about the body than they are about the mind. Sure, Duffy is an incomprehensively fit individual. But it’s how he’s trained his mind that’s allowed him to keep going while his competitors are dropping like flies.

It’s a lesson we all can learn. Though we may not need to run multiple triathlons, we all could benefit by being more determined, more resilient, more resolute in achieving the things that really matter to us. Duffy’s journey serves as an example we all can follow, if to a lesser degree. On his own initiative, he launched himself on a course of self-improvement that bolstered the inner quality that positive psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness.” Continue reading Forging a Soul of Iron

How Congress is Like a Crack Addict’s Brain

We seem to be having a hard time keeping it together lately. Americans are more overweight, more addicted, and more indebted than ever. Congress, meanwhile, is becoming ever more dysfunctional, seemingly unable to come to grips with spiraling deficits.

These two levels of dysfunction – personal and collective – surely must be a coincidence, right? After all, the give-and-take of representative democracy is a completely different process from the infinitely complex tangle of neurons and synapses that underlie individual decision making. But if one addiction researcher’s groundbreaking ideas are correct, then governments’ plans tend to fall apart for the very same reason that our individual attempts at self-control do.

Basically, Congress operates a lot like an addict’s brain. Continue reading How Congress is Like a Crack Addict’s Brain

What Didn’t Cause the Reno Air Race Crash

Lately there’s been an email circulating that purports to be from someone on the Wildfire Air Racing team who had a long talk with race pilot Matt Jackson about Jimmy Leeward’s crash last month at the Reno Air Races. The email says that Jackson was racing at the time in his own Unlimited-category plane and witnessed firsthand the trouble that Jimmy Leeward was having as he rounded the course. According to the email,

There is a video of the entire last lap of the Ghost before the crash which Matt showed me. As Leeward was coming around pylon #8 at about 480 mph after passing Rare Bear, he hit turbulence which pitched his left wing down, Leeward corrected with hard right rudder and aileron. Just as the aircraft was straightening out, he hit a second mountain of turbulence which caused the tail to ‘dig in’ resulting in a 10+ G climb rendering Leeward unconscious instantly and resulted in the tail wheel falling out. (broken tail wheel support structure was found on the course). As the Ghost shot upward the LH aileron trim tab broke loose. This can be heard on the tape, so the trim tab did not cause the accident.

This is conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion that I (and many others) reached, based on the information available—namely, that the failure of the trim tab caused the steep climb, not vice versa. As the email was forwarded to me by a trusted and experienced member of the aircraft community, I was surprised and concerned by its assertions. Continue reading What Didn’t Cause the Reno Air Race Crash

How GPS Makes Clueless Drivers

We were driving somewhere in central New York State, along a two-lane blacktop that wound a spectacular course through farm-dotted valleys, past placid lakes and along forested hillsides.  My brother’s attention, though, was on the unwavering purple line on the dashboard-mounted GPS unit. At last we reached the interstate on-ramp – and he drove right past it. “Turn left in 50 feet,” the GPS said. My brother obeyed, hanging a left onto the access road. According to the machine we were smack on the highway, yet here we were, stuck behind a tractor pulling a load of hay. “Time to destination, 30 minutes,” the GPS announced.

As we idled along behind the cloud-belching agriculture machinery, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Not for this exact moment of farm-machinery-induced frustration, but for that hot moment of clarity when you realize that you’ve been suckered by the self-assurance of modern technology.

It’s something I find happening more and more often. In the 25 years I’ve been a travel writer, the information revolution has changed everything. Once, we visited travel agents, bought paper maps, consulted destination guides. Now, all of those needs can be taken care of by a few flicks of a finger across a phone’s touch screen. Because information is so cheap, we don’t need to pay much attention to it. We can browse around the world the way we browse around the web.

Apps and gadgets of every kind allow us to summon instant expertise that otherwise would have required years of study. But they also remove the need to learn, to engage, and to be curious. We can ignore context. And so even when we know exactly where we’re located, we have no idea where we are.

Pilots have a word for the state of presence in the world around you; they call it situational awareness. “Keep your eyes out of the cockpit,” my flight instructor always used to tell me. Meaning: look at the world around you. Don’t get fixated on what your instruments are telling you. Understand the context of what you’re seeing. Situational awareness means understanding where things are in relation to one another.  It means knowing what’s going on, and what you can do when your plans start to unravel.

Electronic gadgets, in contrast, urge us to forget all that tiring mental work and just follow the purple line. They’re the mental equivalent of the electric scooters that obese people ride around at amusement parks to save themselves the effort of walking. Continue reading How GPS Makes Clueless Drivers