(and the Misery of Trying to Go It Alone)

Early in my FAA career, I was scheduled for an “initial CRM” training course at the Mike Monroney Aero-nautical Center in Oklahoma City. I love learning new things and, as friends and relatives have wryly observed, connecting anything to aviation will always get my attention and usually sustain my interest. Even so, I confess I wasn’t expecting a lot from the course; formal training in organizational settings can sometimes be … dry.

That three-day course turned out to be anything but dull. On the contrary, it was an eye-opening session that still ranks high on my list of most interesting/effective courses. Right from the start, we found that the excellent instructors had designed a nice mix of guided discussion and hands-on sessions in the facility’s flight training device (FTD). Most of us were anxious to get to the FTD part of the course. Having endured way too many courses with way too many of those contrived “table team” exercises, my group was also groaning (almost, but not quite, out loud) when we were herded into teams for one of “those” activities.

The. Best. Exercise. Ever.

As it happens, that event was probably the thing I remember most vividly, and I often recount it even now as among the best of the best. Here’s how it unfolded.

The instructors gave each person a sheet of paper with a story about some event. We each got a second piece of paper with some questions about what we had just read. On the surface, the task seemed like second-grade stuff and, since everybody’s narrative was the same, why did we have to do the table-team thing? Being a speed reader, I zipped through part one and dove into the questions in part two. The first three were a snap. The fourth … hmm. I guess I need to reread the narrative. But — and you see what’s coming, right? — nothing in the paper I held offered anything that would let me answer that question. I got question five, but questions six through eight were like the fourth … I didn’t have that information.

By this time, the table was populated by puzzled people restlessly fidgeting with those sheets of paper. Given our ages, it was clear that all of us had been thoroughly schooled in the fading (I hope) “do-your-own-work/asking-others-is-cheating” exhortation we constantly heard from our primary school teachers. We all suffered in silence until one of our group tentatively asked whether anyone else had found the name of the city. The floodgates opened. We realized that while the narratives all looked identical at first glance, each one contained subtle differences — nuggets of information not given to any other person in the group. No single individual had the full story, so it was impossible to complete this simple assignment without contributions from each and every person on the team.

There wasn’t any need for an extensive debriefing on this exercise, because the lessons were so obvious. It emphatically and unforgettably brought one of the fundamental concepts of CRM to life: no single human being has the full picture, and every single person has something useful to contribute to developing it. Working with other people to assemble a complete picture is not cheating; on the contrary, you cheat yourself if you fail to take advantage of all available information needed for safe operation.

Rising from the Ashes

The necessity of good CRM for pilots and mechanics also seems perfectly obvious, but it wasn’t always so. Books (e.g., Robert Gandt’s Skygods; Arthur Hailey’s Airport) and movies (e.g., The High and the Mighty) set in the so-called golden age of commercial aviation are replete with vignettes about the all-powerful “skygod” captains of the day. The role of the first officer — then more commonly called the co-pilot — was to obey the captain’s “gear up and shut up” commands without question. The role of the cabin crew was to bring coffee and meals to the flight deck. No one dared contravene the captain’s dictates, even to provide essential safety information. The predictable result: lots of smoldering wreckage and far too many lost lives.

The phoenix of CRM first began rising from those ashes in the 1950s, when British RAF and BOAC pilot David Beaty wrote a book called The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s — and yet another tragic accident — when the principles Beaty espoused found their way into an NTSB recommendation. In that same timeframe, NASA psychologist John Lauber, an expert in cockpit communication processes, first used the term “cockpit resource management.” The essence of the initial CRM approach was to encourage first officers to question their captains if they had concerns about some aspect of the flight.

Sadly, it took one of history’s most fiery crashes, the 1977 Tenerife disaster, to raise CRM from a mostly unpracticed principle to a full-fledged program. United Airlines became the first air carrier to provide CRM to its flight deck crews in 1981, a concept expanded to flight attendants a few years later. CRM — by then known as “crew resource management” — had become the global standard by the 1990s, not just for pilots and flight attendants but also for air traffic control and maintenance. Recognizing that the core concepts and practices of CRM are applicable and beneficial well beyond aviation, other sectors (e.g., maritime, fire-fighting, medicine) have also adopted forms of CRM.

Making It Fly for You 

Descriptions vary, but most formal definitions of CRM include the following:

• CRM is a system that uses all available resources to promote safety.
• CRM is concerned with the cognitive and interpersonal skills needed to manage resources within an organized system, not with technical knowledge and skills.
• CRM aims to foster a climate or culture where authority may be respectfully questioned.
• CRM training thus emphasizes communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and effective teamwork.

It can be challenging to master these skills, which may require significant changes in personal habits, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational culture. This challenge is especially acute in hierarchical sectors such as aviation. Both tradition and regulation give full authority to the pilot in command, who must be trained to understand and accept that questions and observations are not a threat to his or her final authority.

This necessity is no less true when two GA pilots are flying together. Regular readers might recall a Postflight department article called “Pilot²” in the March/April 2018 issue of this magazine. I recounted the story of flying with a pilot friend who had a dismaying habit of “helping” me by, for example, changing trim or flap settings without even telling — much less asking — me first. A presentation by John and Martha King helped greatly by offering tips on how two GA pilots can peacefully co-exist and, as appropriate, share duties in the confined space of the cockpit. The fundamental idea is that the pilot in the right seat always addresses the pilot in the left seat as captain and provides objective information with no personal pronouns. For example, “you’re getting too slow!” is forbidden. Instead, the right seat occupant might say, “Captain, airspeed is decreasing.” The captain similarly avoids personal pro-nouns with a response such as, “Noted; correcting.” If the situation isn’t resolved, the next transmission might be something like, “No correction noted.”

While developing the initial version of the Civil Air Patrol’s National Check Pilot Standardization Course a few years ago, I came across another CRM technique that can work well in a GA setting. A CRM expert named Todd Bishop developed a five-step process that uses assertive statements encompassing both inquiry and advocacy:

1. Get attention — Address the individual by name or title.
2. State your concern — State what you see in a direct manner while owning your emotions about it. “I’m concerned that we are low on fuel.”
3. State the problem as you see it — “I don’t think we have enough fuel to fly around this storm.”
4. Suggest a solution — “Let’s divert to another airport and refuel.”
5. Obtain agreement (or buy-in) — “Does that sound good to you?”

Perhaps the single most important CRM step you can take in GA is the first one: a thorough pre-flight discussion that clearly establishes roles (e.g., who is PIC), responsibilities, and expectations. Knowing who has that role is very important if something goes wrong, but the more fundamental reason is safety. So, if you are the PIC, state that before you go to the airplane. Tell your pilot companion what kind of assistance you do (and do not) want. If you are the guest of the PIC, make no assumptions. Ask whether and how you can assist. Stick to terms you establish but make it clear to the PIC that you will use one (or both) of the techniques presented here to communicate any concerns and help ensure a safe flight.  (FAA Safety Briefing – NovDec 2019)