377 Why Good Pilots Crash with Dr. Tony Kern + GA News
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What if the biggest threat to your safety isn't weather, mechanical failure, or other pilots, but you? Dr. Tony Kern, former B-1 instructor pilot and leading human factors expert, joins us to reveal why even the best trained professionals make deadly mistakes, and how to outsmart the one pilot most likely to betray you, yourself.

We also have new information from a congressional hearing this week on the DC midair collision between a Blackhawk helicopter and a regional airliner. Plus, we have audio from a vision jet that had an in-flight emergency. Hello again, and welcome to Aviation News Talk, where we talk general aviation. My name is Max Trescott. I've been flying for 50 years. I'm the author of several books and the 2008 National Flight Instructor of the Year. And my mission is to help you become the safest possible pilot.

Last week in episode 376, we talked with Adam Brown of PALS Skyhope, a volunteer pilot group that provides free air transportation for medical patients and veterans. So if you didn't hear that episode, you may want to check it out at aviationnewstalk.com slash 376.

And if you're new to the show, welcome. Glad you found us. Now, if you would take a moment and whatever app that you're listening to us, touch either the subscribe key or if you're using Spotify or the Apple podcast app, the follow key so that next week's episode is downloaded for free. And my thanks to these people who signed up in the past week to sport aviation news talk. We have new monthly donors, including Chuck Kelleher and Samuel Ellis, the second and one-time donations from Greg King and Galena Vesnina.

If you'd like to hear your name next week, sign up now to support the show by going out to aviationnews.com slash support. Coming up in the news for the week of March 24th, 2025, airline pilot hiring is down, AOPA is leading a national GA safety campaign, and two United Airlines pilots cost that airline a bundle when they both made the same error. All this and more in the news starts now.

From AOPA.org, airline pilot demand back to pre-pandemic levels. Airlines are hiring far fewer pilots than they did during the first few post-pandemic years, with some carriers taking on just a handful of pilots or none at all during 2024 and the beginning of 2025. Industry analysts say the decline represents more of a settling than a nosedive, though, as hiring levels now are similar to those during 2019 and earlier.

Major airlines added 1,139 pilots to their roles during January and February, marking a 34% drop compared with the same period in 2024. Full-year hiring also declined sharply to 4,834 in 2024 from 12,196 in 2023. And also from AOPA.org, AOPA leads national GA safety campaign.

More than a dozen aviation associations will join AOPA in launching the National Pause for General Aviation Safety on April 1st at Sun and Fun in Lakeland, Florida. This FAA safety team-supported initiative seeks to encourage all general aviation pilots to take 15 to 60 minutes in the next six months to sharpen their focus on flying safety by reviewing carefully curated safety videos, articles, and more.

The organizations, including the EAA, Vertical Aviation International, NBAA, and NATA, are asking their members to go to gasafe.org to review the aviation safety content. From there, you can choose dozens of resources and find those best related to the flying that you do most. The safety resources offered at gasafe.org have been divided into 12 categories, with one or more of these relevant to pilots operating in every facet of GA.

From GlobalAir.com, laser strikes down from record at 2023. The FAA said Wednesday that pilots reported 12,840 laser strikes in 2024. That was a 3% decrease from 2023, but the FAA said these numbers are still too high. Pilots have reported 328 injuries since the FAA began tracking laser strike reports 15 years ago.

People who shine lasers at aircraft can face FAA fines up to $11,000 per violation or up to $30,800 for multiple laser incidents. Violators will also face federal criminal penalties of up to five years in prison and a quarter million dollar fine. The agency is also encouraging people to report any laser strikes to the FAA and local law enforcement.

From caa.co.uk, airline pilot fined after RAF intercepted flight. A pilot operating a commercial flight from Oslo to Manchester has pleaded guilty to not maintaining continuous radio communication with ATC during a flight. On March 20, 2025, Christopher Hollins was fined £4,511, that's about $5,800, following an investigation and prosecution by the UK Civil Aviation Authority.

The regulator's investigations and enforcement team found that on an SAS Connect flight from Oslo to Manchester with 58 passengers aboard, Captain Hollands failed to establish two-way radio communication with the appropriate ATC group in contravention of the law. The incident was reported by Nats after a more than 30-minute loss of radio communication with Mr. Hollands, triggering the declaration of a security incident.

Two RAF Typhoons were launched to intercept the aircraft. The plane was escorted to Manchester, where it landed and went to a remote stand and police boarded the aircraft. This is the first prosecution of this type in the UK. And finally, from gatechecked.com, two United pilots forget passports before international flights just a week apart.

On March 22, 2025, the crew of a United flight headed from LAX to Shanghai was forced to turn around about two hours into the flight because one of the pilots forgot their passport. Flight 198 diverted to San Francisco, touching down almost three hours after leaving LA. According to CNN, passengers were informed that the issue was as a result of, quote, an unexpected crew-related issue.

A passenger on board told the news agency that the pilot informed passengers that he forgot his passport, resulting in them having to divert to their closest base. After another three hours on the ground, the Shanghai-bound passengers were finally on their way six hours after their original departure from L.A.,

He had a statement to the media. United also confirmed the pilot's statement saying, quote, the pilot did not have his passport on board. We arranged for a new crew to take our customers to their destination that evening. Customers were provided with meal vouchers and compensation. According to United, they also gave customers a $15 meal voucher along with compensation for the inconvenience.

Unfortunately, this was not a one-off incident, as just a week before, another United pilot headed to Shanghai also forgot their passport. On March 14th, the United 857 from San Francisco to Shanghai departed more than three hours late after one of the pilots also forgot their passport. Thankfully, the aircraft was still on the ground, but a crew change was required, resulting in the long wait.

Once again, United issued a vague response to affected passengers telling them that a crew change was required, but one Reddit user on that flight said it was a result of one of the pilots also forgetting their passport. How does something like this happen not once but twice? An FAA spokesperson said that there are no official protocols in place to ensure pilots have their passports for international trips, and these checks are carried out according to airline policy.

Human error, no matter how small, will always be a potential problem. United 198's diversion easily racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in added costs. And later in the show, we're going to be talking a whole lot more about human error with Dr. Tony Kern. But first, and now here's a Headset Minute by Lightspeed with Derek Schmidt.

Derek, why are aviation headsets more expensive compared to non-aviation headsets? We get this question quite often, especially with new pilots to the industry. Your basic aviation headset will be able to provide you with some protection, some passive noise reduction, as well as be able to transmit and receive comms. But more premium active noise reducing headsets, they're going to be able to more specifically target their active noise canceling for the cockpit of a plane.

They're going to be made out of more durable materials. So those materials will help make the headset last longer. And that added protection of the active noise reducing is a safety feature. It will help out pilots be less fatigued up in the air. That'll help them hear comms quicker and sooner. And that added computing power as well can create more features available to engineers making the headset. So here at Lightspeed, we do have the Lightspeed Delta Zulu, which does have a CO monitor, for example, built into it.

which also adds to the safety of the headset. And aviation headsets do last a little longer. Why is that? The materials that they're made out of. So at Lightspeed, for example, we do make our premium headsets out of metallic materials, stainless steel in the headband, as well as magnesium in the ear cups.

So both those materials will last a little bit longer than, say, the durable plastic materials that some other headsets are made out of. Derek, thanks so much for joining us here today. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Max. And anytime you're going to buy a headset from Lightspeed, they will send a check to support this show. But only if you first go to the special link we've set up for you. Go to aviationnewstalk.com slash lightspeed anytime you want to buy a new headset.

Coming up next, a few updates, including audio clips from a congressional hearing on the D.C. midair collision and from a Vision Jet pilot that had an emergency and later went off the end of a runway. All right here on the Aviation News Talk podcast.

And now let's get to the good news. First, congratulations to Patreon mega supporter Eric Himes. These are the supporters that donate $50 a month or more. He says, I want to share the good news. Today I was able to pass my commercial checkride first time pass. Thanks to Parker Torres, my CFI at Dragonfly Aviation at Barrow County Airport in North Georgia.

And he says that episode 149, how to really fly commercial certificate maneuvers, which was our interview with DP Jason Blair really helped. He says the way you both walk through the details helped more and more. Every time I listened to the episode, I would go fly them and listen to the episode on my way home. And of course, thank you, Max, for your unending support for all of us aviators. Should I go for my multi-engine commercial next or go for the CFI? Well, that's

That's a tough question, but I'm sure you can't lose either way. And if you have good news to share, just go to aviationnewstalk.com and click on Contact at the top of the page. And if you'd like to be a supporter like Eric and support the show, go on out to aviationnewstalk.com slash support.

And now here's audio from a VisionJet pilot who experienced an emergency earlier this week, and this comes to us courtesy of LiveATC.net. And by the way, we can only hear the pilot side of the conversation. We can't hear ATC, but you can pretty much figure out what's going on. So I've just developed a new problem for Cisco's Yankee. It appears that I don't have power lever control. It seems to be stuck at a certain point, so I need to work through this problem. So can you just give me delaying vectors for the moment? Okay.

3000 and 330 for 6GY, 6GY I've just lost power, need an immediate turn back to the runway please, need immediate turn back to the runway please, yep I'm going to go try and go inbound for 6GY, will advise for 1GY I might not be able to get to the runway, ok can you get me the winds please at Kissimmee,

OK, I'm going to go for runway 6 please, and I have complete loss of power on 6G. I have runway 6 inside for 6G. And I'll stay with you please for 6G.

Now, to this pilot's credit, he remained extremely calm, probably more calm than I would be. And by the way, if you're IFR and you have an emergency, you don't have to wait to ask for permission to turn toward the airport. Just declare an emergency as you're making your turn. Now, runway 6 is 6,000 feet long, and he went off the end of the runway at 79 knots, which certainly damaged the aircraft.

Looking at the ADS-B data, the pilot was nice and low as he reached the approach end of the runway, but he was at 157 knots, a good 65 to 70 knots fast. So undoubtedly, he floated a long way before he was able to get the aircraft on the ground. Now, here's one tip that can help if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. Most pilots know that you can use a forward slip to lose altitude. But did you know that you can also use a forward slip to reduce airspeed?

Yeah. To lose airspeed with a slip, do what you would normally do, which is to lower one wing and push hard on the opposite rudder. And I say push hard because to get the maximum amount of effect from a slip, you

You want that rudder pushed all the way down to the floor. And when you do that, don't just jam the rudder to the floor. Instead, take two, maybe three seconds to push the rudder all the way to the floor as you lower the opposite wing. Then, to lose airspeed, just raise the nose a little more than you would for a normal slip that you would use to lose altitude.

Now, another point is that some pilots don't think you can slip an aircraft with a V-tail. However, whoever made that up didn't know what they were talking about, as you can definitely slip a vision jet, even though it has a V-tail. When you do it, though, it helps to hold the autopilot disconnect button so that you can disconnect the yaw damper, which operates automatically anytime you're above 200 feet AGL. And now here's some clips from that congressional hearing on Thursday on the DC midair collision.

This first clip is of NTSB Chairman Homity talking about the accident of helicopters ADS-B out, which was either turned off or not working. One thing I can say on ADS-B out, off, that's policy of the Army, but we are still looking at installation programming and potential for equipment malfunction. And the reason I mention this as...

is because the accident helicopter, for this accident helicopter, no ADS-B data had been received from an FAA ground station for 730 days prior to the accident.

And that was abnormal. So we began looking at the fleet for the battalion. The battalion had 25 helicopters that includes this particular helicopter. Nine of them were Mike models and all were transmitting ADS-B out when they were turned on because we have to verify that it's working.

There were 16 Lima's including the accident helicopter which we're still looking at but seven were transmitting when ADS-B out was turned on, eight were not.

and stopped doing so sometime between May and November 2023. We don't know why. Five of those started transmitting since the NTSB identified the issue and began working with the Army to try to isolate the reason. So I just want to let you know that you can have ADS-B out on, but you also have to make sure that it's working.

You indicated working with the Army, but there's other participants in this arena. Were you narrowing it to the Army as if something is necessarily wrong there? Or more broadly, there's a problem in receiving the information? For this, for the ADS-B out on, we wanted to look at the helicopter fleet for the battalion to see if...

whether ADS-B when turned on was actually transmitting data because we did think it was abnormal that for the helicopter involved in the accident wasn't transmitting data for so long. And here's a clip from Senator Cruz, and it explains why some airliners were recently receiving false TCAS alerts, something that we reported here on the show. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

On March 1st, multiple commercial aircraft landing at DCA reported receiving a traffic alert collision avoidance system, a TCAS resolution advisories, as they were preparing to land, advising pilots of an impending threat from above and in some cases directing the crews to take evasive action by descending. I think we were all alarmed that just a few weeks after the tragedy, commercial pilots were being told they were at imminent risk of a deadly mid-air collision.

It's now come to my attention that these warnings were caused by the Secret Service and the U.S. Navy improperly testing counter drone technology at DCA. Apparently the Navy was using the same spectrum band as TCAS, causing the interference and faulty resolution advisories.

even though the FAA had previously warned the Navy and the Secret Service against using that specific spectrum band due to interference risks. Acting Administrator Rochelleau, is that correct? Yes, sir, that's correct.

In this clip, Senator Catwell explains that Army helicopters in the D.C. area have ADS-B out turned off 100% of the time, even though the FAA exemption under which they do this was not intended to allow them to do this routinely.

The Army Black Hawk helicopter was not transmitting a what is known as ADS-B out signal, although we don't know why. What we do know is that the military told our colleagues, House Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton in 2023, that the military operates 100% of its flights in the National Capital Region without this safety technology, 100% of the time.

On March 7th, I wrote Secretary Hegseth about this issue for a response, asking to respond by March 21st. I've still heard nothing back. I do not like this silence. It's deafening. General Brumman, I have questions about these policies, especially given that the FAA's 2019 rule stating that the deactivation of the ADS be out

technology pursuant to an exemption was not to be routine.

Well, the Holmes letter says that not only was it far from routine, 100% of the time operated with this exemption. Acting Administrator Richelieu, your agency gave government airspace users a loophole. What we want to know now is why this was allowed to continue if we had this data and information. And are there any other agencies that are acting with ADS be out that we haven't addressed yet?

The FAA rule needs to change. In this clip, an Army Brigadier General confirms that they don't routinely use ADS-B out. In addition to the Holmes letter, you basically stated that using ADBS out, it's not like it was sometimes, it was not allowed.

80th army policy is adsb out is not to be used for routine use okay and in this final clip the acting faa administrator states a change in adsb requirements in the washington dc class bravo but he's very clear they're never turning it on if they can if they don't have to they're never turning it on so what i don't understand is why the faa didn't understand that why you would allow this air this design this is the wrong design

Whoever said you could fly in this airspace, this close together, without a safety feature that was already being required by the FAA and then giving them an exemption makes no sense.

So why did you allow it to happen? So I can't speak to why the previous administration may have allowed for that amount of agreement, which is why we effective today will require in any DCA Class B airspace ADS-B out to be turned on except in very limited circumstances. What are those other limited circumstances? Other agencies? Is there any other agency that's doing this?

So that we have 46 different helicopter operators within the National Capital Region. But again, DCA Class B airspace will now require ADS-B on to be out. And if you're wondering why it's so important to have ADS-B out turned on, one reason is because it broadcasts position data every second. Whereas approach radar, which you typically find at Class C and Class B airports,

only updates every six seconds. And that difference can make a huge difference when you have two aircraft rapidly converging with each other. One other thing that came out of the hearing was that the regional jet did not have ADS-B in, which would have given them a better picture of traffic around them. While ADS-B out is mandatory in a lot of airspace, ADS-B in is optional, though the NTSB has been recommending that it become mandatory.

Now, fortunately, virtually every aircraft I fly has ADS-B in. And always, always, always, I have that dedicated traffic screen visible in the cockpit whenever I'm flying in busy metro areas. Because while you can often see traffic on the main moving map, it's much harder to quickly determine how far those targets are from you and whether they're on a collision course.

And I just want to let you know that if you haven't already signed up for the free Delta Zulu headset that Lightspeed will be giving away to a lucky Aviation News Talk listener, you're almost out of time to sign up because they'll be doing that drawing on April 2nd.

But if you hear this after April 2nd, don't despair because they are giving away one headset each quarter. So if you miss this drawing, you can sign up for the next one. And to do that, just go on out to aviationnewstalk.com slash giveaway. Coming up next, our conversation with Dr. Tony Kern about human error and how you can reduce your error rate. All right here on the Aviation News Talk podcast.

And now let me tell you a little about Dr. Tony Kern. Tony is a former Air Force instructor pilot who flew the KC-135 and B-1 bomber. After retiring as a lieutenant colonel, he joined the U.S. Forest Service as the assistant director of fire and aviation. Later, he was the founding partner and CEO of Convergent Performance, a veteran-owned think tank located in Colorado Springs.

Convergent was formed in 2003, specifically dedicated to reducing human error and improving performance in high-risk environments such as aviation, but also in military operations, surgical teams, law enforcement, and firefighting. Dr. Kern is one of the world's leading authorities on human performance and error and has lectured on the subject around the globe. And now here's our conversation with Dr. Tony Kern.

Tony, welcome to the show. Great to have you here today. Thanks, Max. It's a pleasure to be here. I've known about the podcast for a long time and eager to be a part of it. Well, I've had a couple of your books and I've planned to contact you for a long time. And as I read through your material, I can see that you and I have a big common interest, which is human error. Was there anything in particular that sparked your interest in learning more about that? If you've read any of the books, you probably know the answer to that question. My life took a dramatic turn

On 28th of November in 1992, when two of my former B-1 bomber students crashed what turned out to be a fully functional aircraft into a mountain in southern Texas at about 600 miles an hour. And after the accident investigation was completed, six, eight months later, the result was pilot error, but even more critically,

the board president said at the most fundamental level, this was simply a failure of airmanship. And I remember thinking about that at the time. And when the briefing was over, I went and asked him, I said, General, if you don't mind, what exactly do you mean by that term? And he looked at my name tag and said, Major Kern, weren't you one of their instructors? General, yes, I was. He goes, well, if you don't know what airmanship is,

Maybe I need to add another causal factor to the investigation report. And so at least he threw the spear in my chest, right? He didn't say it behind my back. And I started to wonder, am I the only guy in the world that doesn't understand this term? Because obviously everybody knows what airmanship is. And so being kind of a social scientist, background guy, as well as a B-1 instructor pilot, I did some research and I found

There were no definitions that were broad and vague. So I conducted a survey. This is back before the internet. So I licked a lot of stamps and envelopes and sent out written surveys to over a thousand pilots from all walks of life, general aviation, air racers, crap dusters, military guys, airline guys, everything. And I got back 480 responses.

And I analyzed those, and I'd ask a simple question. I said, in 35 words or less, define what airmanship means to you. And out of those 480 responses, I had at least 42 different variations on that answer. So...

What I realized is that I wasn't the only one that didn't have a common understanding of this term. And so I started to write down some findings on that, ended up at a University Aviation Association conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I was actually filling in for somebody else. That's a longer story. But I gave the presentation on my results, and a lady from McGraw-Hill came up to me and said, we'd like to publish your book.

I said, well, I don't have a book and I don't know how to write a book. She goes, we'll help with that. And the result of that was Redefining Airmanship, which came out, I think, in 1995. And that really changed my direction, especially when it went to number one on the bestseller list in aviation trade.

And it's still in print 25 years later or 26 years later, whatever it is. So that's the event that got me thinking about airmanship and what it means and human error and how we can develop our skills to avoid it. Yeah. And I'm sure we could spend a whole hour talking about airmanship. And so I'm going to put that one aside probably for a future conversation. But

But let's just talk a little bit more about error. Why do well-trained professionals end up making errors? For example, you said that you got a call from Doug Davis, a major general, who asked you just that question. Why do well-trained professionals with spotless flying records make dumb mistakes and kill themselves? What can you tell us about that?

Well, I remember the moment pretty well. I was working in Washington, D.C. as a director of aviation for the U.S. Forest Service, all wildland firefighting guys and gals. And it was then Colonel Davis, and he bought me lunch over at the Navy Yard, and he asked that question. They had had a particularly bad year and a half. I think there had been something like 18 fatalities, multiple accidents. And in every single case—

The pilot had never busted a checkride, was considered by his or her peers to be one of the best. They were flying good airplanes on a training mission. Weather wasn't involved. And they went out one day and they didn't come home, right? So he asked me that question. And my answer, I'll remember to today, I said, I don't know, Carl, but I'd sure as hell like to help you find out. So that was the start of really looking deep and hard at why good people sometimes make

fatal mistakes. Let's talk about that because we have a lot of excellent pilots listening to the show. And I think that's probably one of the things that those of us who at all are introspective kind of wonder, hey, if we've trained hard, we're really good. We do things the right way all the time. How is it that we might end up in an accident? What are some of the kinds of things that you tell people to watch out for? Well, the first thing is you're only one decision removed from

That is just a given. And that's true not only in airplanes. It's true when we drive cars, when I'm working on electrical stuff, right? You're one bad decision away. But the only decision that ever is your final one is the one that puts you in the grave, right? So what we need to do is look at, look deeply at,

The types of mistakes that we make as individuals, and we need to be able to be objective. We need to be able to decouple our errors from the outcomes of those errors because we make a lot of errors and get away with it. And maybe even they're advantageous errors, right? So think, well, we loaded a little less fuel than we needed, but pretty sure we can get there. We got a little oil content in case we can't.

And we land with a couple gallons, 15 minutes of fuel in the airplane. And we think, you know what? I saved a little gas. I was lightweight. I was correct in my decision-making when you're one closed runway away from having to find a field to land in somewhere, right? So-

So we have to be able to decouple the decisions that we make from the outcomes. And once we do that, we can look at our what I call a personal fingerprint of error. You'll discover pretty quickly what types of errors you make

and how to flag them in your head so that you can counter them in real time. Yeah, and let me just talk a little bit more about decoupling errors from outcomes. I think what I'm hearing you say is you can make a whole lot of bad decisions and still have a good outcome, and that shouldn't lead you to think that, oh,

that's okay and I'll always be able to get away with it. Or worse, that the bad decision was a good decision, right? Because there are an awful lot of shortcuts that we take for convenience, right? Doing what I do every once in a while, I'll get asked by a company to come in and talk to a pilot about some performance issue. And I'll never forget talking to a Northwest Airlines pilot who had just been fired and

for dragging an engine pod. And it wasn't they fired him for dragging the engine pod. They fired him because he had a history of continuing unstable approaches to landing. And when I asked him in his exit interview how that developed, his answer was fascinating. And I think it happens to a lot of us. He said, the first time I did it, and by it, he meant flew an unstable approach to a landing.

was out of necessity. Because I was low on fuel, there were thunderstorms all around, including behind me. It was going to be far more dangerous to execute a go around back into that weather than it was going to be to land out of this unstable approach. So I did it and I did it successfully. So the first time it was out of necessity. The second time it was out of convenience, right?

I was flying sloppy a little bit, but I'd salvaged much worse than that before. So I continued the approach to landing. And first time out of necessity, second time out of convenience. And then he said, and then it just became a habit, right? I had, my ego had grown to the point where I felt I could pretty much salvage anything. And I made some pretty smooth landings out of those unstable approaches as well, up until this one. And now I don't have a job anymore.

And so I always thought that that was fascinating. It shows that decision process and how our mind works, right? First time out of necessity, second time out of convenience. And then it just became a habit. Now here I am. So that's kind of some of the things that I've learned about how

bad habits creep in to good people. Yeah, I think you hit a particularly important point there, which is that experienced pilots can get really good at saving poor approaches. And it's probably easy to start to think, oh, I can salvage any bad approach. And that's just going to lead you into trouble eventually. Yeah, I call that the disease of sloppiness.

Yeah. So we talked about making lots of errors and getting away with it. Conversely, you can do everything right, every single little thing on the flight and still make one bad decision. Well, or even none. And, you know, this kind of brings us into the modern challenge that we face in aviation. And that is we need to understand that we are operating in uncharted waters right now. There's been this massive generational handoff.

over the past five to seven years, and it's going to continue for the next decade, if you believe the statistics. And during that time, there's also been COVID and layoffs and rehires and now great opportunity in aviation where people are moving around. So it doesn't matter whether you're a professional Part 121 pilot or a GA person out there flying around their Cessna, you're operating inside a system that is

at its breaking point with new people in new places, new supervisors moving into position in far younger ages and less experience than they used to. So right now you can do everything right and still end up in a really tough spot, even though there's tolerances built into every part of the system. I mean, just look at the Ronald Reagan midair a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, somebody is 100 feet off altitude, right?

Tell me a pilot that flies a flight manually for 10 minutes and isn't 100 feet off altitude, but not underneath the approach board or to runway 33 to Reagan, not while wearing night vision goggles. You had an air traffic controller that said, follow the CRJ, right? Perfectly legal call, which they said, yeah, in sight, follow him. They followed a CRJ, but not the CRJ, right? So what does a more precise air traffic control operator

call out sound like? PAT-25, that was a helicopter. You've got a CRJ at 10 o'clock and two miles high. Follow him or follow it. But that call didn't get made. But maybe five years ago, it would have been made with a more experienced controller. So you see what I'm saying? It's that we need to be operating as precisely and error-free as we can. We need to fly clean if we want to be successful.

in this environment we're in today. Yeah, this whole thing about less experienced people coming into the industry, I noted that the people in that particular incident you were talking about, I think the pilot flying had between 400 and 500 hours. The instructor pilot had perhaps 900 hours. And then if you look at the Delta Connection accident in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, in which that aircraft, now we know, came down very hard, unstable, 1,100 feet per minute, slammed into the runway.

That pilot flying actually had fewer than 1,500 hours, which we think is the minimum for an ATP. But there are certain ways that people can get an ATP with fewer than 1,500 hours. So I think it does speak to the issue of new folks coming in and experience things.

You made a point about how new people who are enthusiastic but inexperienced can kind of pick up the wrong message from experienced people. Talk about that. Yeah, I've kind of mentioned the term already, disease of sloppiness. It's when people come into an industry and they get their first job, they're excited, right? We almost laugh sometimes. We always think, gosh, I remember when I was that excited. But sometimes, you know, they're like shiny pennies.

And they come in and they'll see somebody or they'll hear somebody say, I know that's what they taught you in training, but let me show you how it's done out here on the line. And all of those sharp edges on that new hire begin to get dull, right? Black and whites turn into shades of gray. They watch others who they respect and emulate and someday want to be like, right? A senior captain, right?

or whatever, and they watch these people and want to be one of the cool kids, they begin to emulate their behavior. Here's the danger. They're emulating their behavior without the experience to make those snap decisions when they have to, to get themselves out of trouble.

And so that makes a extremely dangerous combination. When you were in the Forest Service, you helped investigate the 30-mile fire. Talk about that particular incident and the difference between how experienced and inexperienced people reacted in that fire. Thanks for bringing that up. I'd forgotten about that. So there was a multiple fatality wildfire incident with ground firefighters.

when I was director of aviation for the U.S. Forest Service. But because of my human factors background, they asked me to serve on the investigation team. And so it was really quite an experience because there were so many human factors going on in that group. There were experienced firefighters, inexperienced firefighters. There were men and women. There was

different racial mixes. And it was so convoluted that I ended up calling in a sociologist to help me try to figure all of this stuff out. But the basic lessons come from what happened, and I'll try to describe it as best I can. There was a group of about a dozen firefighters. They were up in a canyon called the 30-mile canyon. If you're familiar with the Rocky Mountains, I'll describe it to you, and you will have seen a hundred of them.

Water trickles down out of the mountains. It forms a creek that forms a canyon bordered on both sides. And the Forest Service or the State Park Service or the National Park Service decides it's beautiful. And they build one little road up the side of the creek all the way to the end. And usually there's campground at the end. So that's what it was. And this group was back in there fighting a fire that had been started by lightning. And the fire got a little bit

bigger than those that type two incident team could handle. So they decided to pull out. So they got in their trucks, packed up all their gear, and they started to drive out. In fact, they drove out past the fire and stopped at an area to have a lunch break. As they're having their lunch break, one of the local fire trucks races past them back up the canyon.

And they wave them down and they say, hey, no, we just pulled out of there because that fire is getting out of control. They said, you're not from here. This is our local forest. We're going in and fighting fire while you guys are eating lunch. Shaming them. So what do they do? They finish their sandwich, drain their Coca-Cola, Red Bull, whatever it was back then. They hop in their trucks and they drive back in.

On their way back in, they see this truck that they were following in spin around and head back out, right? Because the fire is bigger than they thought it was. And so they've got bigger trucks. They have to drive a little further. By the time they get turned around, the fire is burned over the road and they are trapped in this canyon. But they're experienced. At least they have experienced leadership. A couple of guys actually that were highly experienced leaders. And they said, we're fine.

We're going to drive back up this road, we're going to extend out in front of the fire, and we're going to find a place where we can ride this out safely. And maybe even air attack and stuff like that will knock the fire down before it gets to us. So don't worry, we got this under control. So they drive up the road and they find not only a place, they find what most firefighters I talk to would say the perfect place to ride it out. They get to this area where there's not a lot of vegetation,

Pretty much scree fields up both sides of the canyon. The creek gets wider and shallower. And there's a little island of sand right in the middle and a place to park. So you know, this is that, right? So they park their trucks. He goes, I want everybody to get their fire shelter, which is a little...

aluminum foil bag you put over you in case of a burn over. I want to talk about what we're going to do. The fire is still a mile or two away. It's coming at us slow. We've got some time. I want everybody to be ready and we're all going to be out on that island. The water is going to be around us. The fire will move over us if it gets here at all and we're all going to be fine. Does everybody understand? Yes, we understand.

So after a few minutes, three or four of the experienced firefighters decide to walk up on the side of that scree field and smoke cigarette. You say, why would they do that? The high fire, there was nothing to catch fire and rocks here. And so that wasn't the problem. The problem is, is they walked up there about 75 yards.

And as they're up there, there's a couple of the young rookie firefighters down along the road that's just kind of wandering around. What are we doing? And the guys, hey, girls, come on up. Come on up and chat with us. So they go up there. And interesting, one of the ladies that went up there was, I don't recall her name, doesn't matter. But she was brand new. This was her first year fighting fighters. She'd only been out of training for a few weeks.

And she gets up there and she later she's going to survive. And I'm going to interview her to know this. She goes, I immediately felt uncomfortable because they were like yucking it up and laughing. And I was looking back down in the canyon to see, you know, what's up with the fire. And down on the road, the real boss is calling them down saying, hey, you guys got to get down off there. You got to get down off there. And the guys up on the hill are saying, you're too much of a worrywart. You know, we know what we're doing. Leave us alone.

At some point, the young lady I'm speaking of, which had some, she had some real leadership skills. She had been a college basketball player, maybe even captain of her team, if I remember right. But she decided, yeah, I'm getting nervous about this. This isn't for me. And she talks a couple of the people to coming down with her. And she leaves, I think, three of them back up.

there and she leaves them with a warning saying, you know, you guys should really come down. First of all, we're being told to. And second of all, that fire is getting closer and closer. So you get back down to the road and the fire is just crawling at them two and a half, three miles an hour, and they can see it coming around the corner. But it still looks like there's a lot of time, right?

Well, then they experienced something that wildland firefighters call a flashover. And it's where the sun has superheated the fuels that are on the ground. And instead of burning slowly like a campfire, it lights all at once. And when it does, hardly anyone was on that island in the water. And hardly anyone was able to move more than a few feet from where they were at. So the three people on the hill died.

Two of them were killed. One was severely, severely injured. Down on the road, there were also burn injuries. I'll call her Elizabeth because that might be her name. Can I read the report yesterday? And I think it's Rebecca Welch. Rebecca, yeah, there we go. Rebecca, she managed not only to get into her shelter, but...

But just about that time, there's a couple of civilians coming down from the campground. It was at the end. And they said, oh, my gosh, we're saved. You're a professional firefighter. We'll let them know how dysfunctional this team had become. And Rebecca grabbed them, pulled them out into the water, and helped shield them with her fire shelter. So she was truly, truly a hero. So long story short, what this tells me is that when we're young, when we're inexperienced,

Everything that we're afraid of, we're afraid of for a reason. And as we grow more and more experienced, we become jaded.

to the risks that are actually involved in what we do. Because we've gotten away with things so many times and we have so much experience, right? Quote, unquote. And so there's something we can learn from what frightens new people, because it's what used to frighten us before our egos took over our judgment. So I think the 30-mile story is a really good one.

And I don't know whatever happened to Rebecca. I don't think she came back to firefighting. And I'm not sure that anybody that was part of that event came back into firefighting because of the trauma. I'm sure some of them still suffer from PTSD. I wake up sometimes seeing the aftermath of that incident and still recalling the horror of it all. So, yeah, things happen in strange ways, especially in teams. Yeah, it sounds like a cautionary tale.

that experienced people can get complacent and that, you know, sometimes the inexperienced people recognize the dangers. It kind of reminds me of some of the low probability, high consequence events that pilots can encounter. For example, propeller safety. I think we hang around propellers all the time. And after a while, it's easy to get complacent. Oh, it's super easy. And, you know, every summer we get one of those stories, right? That somebody, you

usually taking a selfie or, you know, in a hurry to get somewhere, walks into a spinning prop. What a way to go. Complacency to me is like thumbing your nose at Mother Nature. I mean, I, to this day, I live on a ranch in southern Texas. In my mind, under every rock is a rattlesnake. And on the back of every board is a brown bark scorpion, right? I have ultimate respect for the things that can hurt me. I have horses.

And I love them and I trust them. But there are places around them I don't go. I do not go back and get weeds out of their tail. The same thing with my donkeys, right? One kick from a mule is all it will take to end this old man's life. So I have ultimate respect for things that can hurt me, even though they haven't and are highly unlikely to.

But it keeps that level of vigilance high enough to where hopefully I won't get complacent. Because like I said, I have nothing but respect for things that can hurt me, especially in the wild. Now, flashover events, are those low probability? Is that the kind of thing where an experienced crew would say, that's not going to happen? I'm not a career firefighter, so it's hard to put any wisdom on that question. But I think not. I think those guys...

Know that when the fuels are superheated like the sun's been on them all day that they are far more likely to burn Quickly than anything that's not superheated at ground speed zero. That's easy. They know it and

in the heat of the moment, especially when they're tired, probably fatigued, dehydrated, you know, your brain doesn't work the same way, right? And so they get comfortable inside of an extreme high-risk, low-frequency event. Yeah, and I remember now that in the Human Factors appendix to that report, it did talk about fatigue, and they actually characterized how much sleep some of these people had. And my recollection is some of them had had an hour of sleep in 30 hours. How does that affect our judgment?

Yeah, right. I mean, the other thing you got to understand about firefighters is they want to fight fires, especially in the summer. They call it getting their stock full of money. So if they can put in extra overtime or work double shifts and that sort of stuff, they do it. And the adrenaline kind of drives it, right? It's not like you're going and working on a software program or something. You're out there in the wild, fire's burning, you're

You're back burning things, you're digging line, you're calling in air support. And so it's exciting, it's fun, and they want to be out there doing it. So it's not unusual to see people that are sleep deprived out there in the front lines firefighting. Yeah, certainly a cautionary tale for all pilots that fatigue does affect our judgment. If we're flying at the end of the day, at the end of a very long day, boy, you got to watch out. Any day can be a long day. That's the other thing we got to remember.

You go in and you say, I got a quick two-hour flight down to Santa Fe or something. And then there's a maintenance problem. And then somebody calls and you wait. The weather changes. And all of a sudden, you're at the end of a day where you thought it was going to be easy to fly it with four hours of sleep. But now you're 16 hours into the day and operating in a completely marginalized physical condition. Yeah, and I think a lot of pilots are mission-oriented, which is, man, we're going to get the job done. And I think that gets people in trouble.

Yeah, there's no question about that. We are, I mean, pilots by their very nature, think of all the hoops we got to jump through to even get a license. And so I see some arrogance is probably not the friendliest term, but I see some arrogance in pilots, especially pilots that are highly successful in other fields, right? I'm a doctor, I'm a dentist, I'm a retired professional athlete. I can handle this. It's not near as hard as the thing I really do.

And it may not be as harsh, but it's entirely different. And it's far more unforgiving for, like the poster says, any carelessness or neglect. Yeah, that kind of brings up the Bud Holland B-52 crash. Tell us about that, because I think that fits in with what you're talking about. Yeah, this goes way back to even before my two colleagues died, the B-1 crash. Bud Holland was an interesting guy. He flew...

Back in the 1980s, he was described by many people as the best B-52 pilot that ever lived. And I actually knew him as a younger man. I was a KC-135 co-pilot. At the same time, he was a B-52 co-pilot. We were at different bases, but both in Michigan. I was a KSR. He was a wordsmith.

And we served together on what was called the numbered Air Force Stana Val team to where we got together and met. We compared trends and all of that other stuff. And Bud was, when I knew him, was a by-the-book guy. I mean, he was the kind of guy that you could, someone would say, what's the reg say about that? And I would pull open the book and Bud would quote the book, page and paragraph, right? I mean, that's how well he knew everything.

He knew the regs and procedures. Well, fast forward about, I don't know, a decade from there, maybe a little more. And I read about this crazy B-52 pilot that dies doing some completely unauthorized maneuvers in an air show practice. And I read his name and I go, well, there's got to be something wrong with that. And so I started looking into it. And the more I looked into it, the more I saw...

a man that something had gotten a hold of and he'd become progressively less disciplined and less risk averse. And it got to the point where his ego had taken over how he flew airplanes. And eventually it ended like a lot of those stories do. The reason it was so famous is it was caught on video and

And it was played over and over and over again on the national news. So yeah, Czar52 was the call sign, C-Z-A-R. Arthur Bud Holland, a good man. He took two other people with him. But it started to make me wonder how, once again, really good aviators can go bad. And this one, I don't think I've ever answered that to satisfy my own curiosity because there was a time when he was

disciplined professional pilot and somewhere in between he wasn't anymore. I think that's a real trap for highly experienced pilots to just kind of start to feel that they're so good that, hey, now they can get away with stuff that other pilots do, but they don't have to do or so on. I,

I always remind myself, man, if Scott Crossfield, you guys don't know who he is, is an astronaut, a test pilot. If he can fly into a class five thunderstorm and die, I can do something just as stupid, right? Because I don't have near the experience, wisdom or judgment. And he was not a high risk taker, right?

He was praying exceedingly well, and it still happened. Yeah, that was a Cessna 210. My recollection is that I read somewhere that he was flying home because it was an anniversary, as I recall, with his wife. So he had a strong motivation to fly, even though all the common sense in the world would say you shouldn't do it.

Yep. So one of your books, which I don't have yet, is titled Blue Threat, Why to Error is Human, How to Wage and Win the Battle Within. Tell us about Blue Threat. What's that all about? So first of all, you got the title wrong, so I'm going to correct you there, Max. Oh, good. It's really important. It's Blue Threat, Why to Error is Inhuman. The point there is that we're all familiar with the quote, to err is human. And if I asked that to most people and I said,

What's the second line of that phrase? Almost everybody will say, well, to forgive is divine. That's not the original quote. The original quote is from Cicero. And he says, to err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool. So I anchored to the original quote. And I said, you know what? People are going to make mistakes. But to leave that out there and say, therefore,

We're not going to try to make less mistakes or less consequential mistakes or after all, to err is human. There's nothing we can do about that. Man, that's leaving so much money and lives on the table. It's ridiculous. So the Blue Thread book actually started

from the project that began with Dog Davis's question, why do good people make dumb mistakes and kill themselves? In over a five-year period of time working with some of the best aviators in the world, what I discovered is, in my humble opinion, the nub of fixing the human error problem. And I'm going to get at this sort of circuitously, so bear with me for a second.

We study human error like crazy. If you Google up human error studies, you'll get 500 or more doctoral dissertations on some new model, on pilot error or cyber error or doctor error or medical error. And they'll go through all of these different things and tell you this is what the kind of errors pilots usually make or doctors usually make. What we discovered was something

far more interesting and far more powerful than within any group. Let's take pilots. The individual variance between you and I is going to be dramatic. We don't make pilot errors. We make max errors and tony errors. Now, here's the second point. We make the same ones in the airplane and out of the airplane. We make it on our hobbies.

at dinner with friends, we make those errors driving cars and on telephone calls. And magically, when we drive inside the fence to the airports, those errors come with us. So the blue threat is the internal threat that we pose to ourselves. And it is very, your personal fingerprint of error is very discoverable. And I'll wait for the next question if you want to ask it, but it's very simple to

But it's not easy and it takes some work. And that's why a lot of people, most everybody that I teach this technique to never follow through on.

Yeah, I'm impressed. I've read that even to this day that you log and track errors in your own work. And I'm guessing that's kind of at the heart of the fingerprint. Tell us about that and what have you found in your own life over the years? Yeah, sure. So yes, I have over 10,000, maybe more. I've got two full file cabinets full of my own personal errors. And I'll get to how I do that in just a second. But the key to understanding what kind of errors you make

begins with understanding error in general. And there's a little work to that. Now, there's all sorts of different kinds of errors, right? But I've narrowed it down into about six clusters. And when you add them all together, there's about 50. That's 50 new things you probably have to learn.

And right there, people go, yeah, that's too much. I'm past my schooling days and I'm in an era that killed me yet. So apparently what I'm doing is good enough. Right. So Graves Jones, by the way, should be etched with that that phrase. I have made his mistake. Kill me yet.

So what are they? There's things called error-producing conditions. You mentioned one earlier, high-risk, low-frequency event, low signal-to-noise ratio. These are things that sound familiar, but maybe we don't fully understand them and what they look like in our lives. There's hazardous attitudes.

And although the FAA lists like five of them, there's really closer to a dozen, right? There's violation producing conditions, things that lure us across that line into acts of noncompliance. There's group dynamics type errors and there's situational factor errors. So like I say, these are learnable. In a month, if you were to study a little bit every night, you'd know them all. So now that you know them, that's step one.

Step two is you look at your own performance objectively and honestly. The second key is you decouple the error from the outcome. I make probably five to seven errors per day, typically zero negative outcomes. I would say I logged in to this podcast about 15 minutes early, even though I know Riverside and I knew this link worked.

Because I wanted to be here early in case you were on here early. That was a mistake. That 15 minutes I could have used doing something different. So I'm going to log that, right? And that error-producing condition is probably something to do with time control. I mismanaged my time.

So you say, well, what's the big deal on that? Nothing, right? There's not a big deal, no bad outcome. But if I look at that over the next two or three weeks and I see that I'm mismanaging my time more and more, I'm going to pay closer attention to that. So basically, I've got a little form. I fill out, hey, what was going on? What did I do? What was the consequence? And then over on the right-hand side, there's these 48 different types of errors. And when I look at it, I'm not looking for what caused

My mistake, I'm just looking at what was present. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Every Sunday, I sit on my back porch with a cigar and I count the numbers of errors and the types and I put them on a little log, right? I'm still a stubby pencil and paper kind of guy. And within 30 days of beginning this, which I started back in 2003, I saw what my personal fingerprint of error was.

It's changed a little bit over time. Some of them are familiar. Fatigue is one. I sleep about five and a half or six hours a night max. I do a lot of stuff and I work and go until dusk and then a lot on weekends. So time is my second one, time management, which I'll narrow down even further and say time compression, where I'll try to do an hour's worth of work in 30 minutes. Right.

I strive for efficiency to the point of being inefficient because I got to do things over. Competition is a big one for me. When I'm in competition with anything, someone else, myself, trying to beat a deadline for my publisher, that often gets the better of me. And then the other one is more personal. I have a personality that

an attitude that tends to get, um,

let my emotions, especially depressive emotions, come over me. I have suffered from depression since I've been 17 years old. And when it hits you, anybody that's out there that knows about it, it hits you hard. It can be debilitating. Well, I've learned to recognize some of the triggers that put me into that mode, and I try to push back as quickly and as aggressively as I can. So I have to manage that pressure.

that moment, whether it's anger or remorse or whatever it is, begins to manifest itself, I can take steps. Same thing with all of them. Once you learn what your personal fingerprint of error is, and it'll only be, I've never met anybody that had more than five, mostly it's three, maybe four things that really get you, then you learn to recognize them and you learn to counter them. So probably the biggest resource we have

to improve not only our safety but our lives is right there in front of us but because it's a little bit difficult to put into play and that all thing i just told you everybody's going that's what a nerd right i'm telling you it changed my life it made me more productive it made me happier it gave me a new friend in the mirror every morning and yet when i'll show this to a group of 100 people and i'll check back

30 days later, maybe three of them are doing it. And those are the people that will take any opportunity to get better, man. I call them judgment junkies.

It's really hard to convince people that they need to do something they've never done and no one else is doing. So you've talked about this, I think, mostly in terms of your personal life. Do you also apply this to aviation and to flying? Or are there ways that you would suggest that pilots apply this to the aviation environment? Sure. Air control is not a vocational skill or a hobby skill. It's a life skill. So you bring it with you. Just like you bring the errors with you, you bring the countermeasures with you.

So there are certain things that we're told from our youngest days of flying airplanes that we need to do before we step in the cockpit, right? Compartmentalize any issues that are going on. Don't think about them during the flight and all that stuff. And I'm not pushing back against any of those things. What I am saying is that when you understand the errors you make in your daily life,

Things like if you leave late and you end up rolling through stop signs and speeding and you still don't get a speeding ticket and you get somewhere on time. What is that teaching you about how you fly that you can rush there too? So yes, absolutely. It applies to flying. It applies to anything you do, but it's a life skill first and a job skill second or a hobby skill second.

And if you approach it that way, it will work. If you say, well, I'll do this in my flight operations, that's good. It's just going to identify for you what you're also doing in other places in your life. And when you can do it and study yourself out of the cockpit as well as in the cockpit, you're going to learn faster because you got more data points.

I'm curious, what you've just talked about, is this related at all to some of the services that you provide through Convergent Performance? Oh, gosh. Thanks for mentioning the company, by the way. I founded the company back right after that Marine Corps. Actually, the Marine Corps ended up being our first contract back in 2004. But, yeah, we offer air control stuff in just about every company.

program that we put out there because it's so fundamental. If you can't get out of your own way, it's very difficult to be a better leader. So our leadership training contains this. It's very difficult to be a better team member. So our team training contains a lot of this.

Really difficult to be a good follower when your mistakes are getting in the way of following instructions. So, yeah, the Blue Threat Program is definitely something that we offer, as well as a host of other types of human reliability stuff.

Got it. And your clients are typically aviation companies and some other industries as well? Oh, yeah. We, gosh, I've provided this to investment bankers. We talk about high-risk events. They would rather die in an airplane crash than screw up a stock trade. So investment bankers, surgical teams, firefighters, cops, light infantry forces, just about anybody in a high-risk career field we touch.

companies, their loss control people, very, very interested in this stuff. And I would guess probably about 60, maybe 65% of our historical client base has come from aviation now. Okay. I want to talk about instructing. You and I both spent a lot of time giving flight instruction. What is the instructor's creed? How would you describe that to people? Yeah.

Yeah, so I didn't give it that label. But a long time ago, right after that B-1 accident we began with, I wrote an article originally for the Air Force Flying Safety Magazine called Losing a Student. And it was my pathetic little way of saying what it felt like when someone you have had an opportunity to shape and touch dies in a human error accident.

And in that article, I wrote a paragraph or two about how it changed me as an airman and primarily as a Czech airman who gave Czech rides and as an instructor. And I can't remember all of it, but I can remember the sentiment. And I'll try as best I can. It says, the point I was trying to make is when you're coming up on an instructional flight or an evaluation flight,

Everyone seems to think that preparation should ride on the shoulders of the student. And I was trying to explain that the instructor needs to prepare as much as or more than the student. You need to know the standards. You need to arrive physically ready, even though you're not going to be doing any flying.

You need to analyze all of the environmental factors that this kid's going to be flying in and what you sitting next to them with a clipboard and an evaluation pen is going to mean to them. And so I said, you know, every instructor needs to come ready to instruct. And further, that during that instruction,

You don't pass over or gloss over any safety of flight issue that you see. You debrief them all thoroughly, sternly if necessary. The third thing was if you're an evaluator, but even as an instructor, you don't pass along a defected product. If that kid didn't meet the standards, no matter how much it's going to hurt you, them, you apply the standards because that's your job. When you pass along somebody into the system for someone else to deal with,

They're just as likely not to have the courage, the ethical grounding to be able to weed out the people that frankly need to be weeded out for their own safety, not just everyone else's. So that went out in an article and somebody out there captured that paragraph and put it on a poster and put instructor's creed on it. And I think the bottom line was, I think in that article, I said, for I and only I am responsible for the product.

that I place into the system. And I think I wrapped it up by saying I will never second guess myself again like I have since these two guys are no longer coming home. And I wish I had an opportunity to...

ask them, was there something that I, as your instructor, didn't train you on or trained you wrong on or something? And I guess I'll have to wait till a happy hour in the sky to ask that question. Yeah, that's certainly a challenge. I've had one client that unfortunately ended up in a fatal accident. I think we all end up asking ourselves those questions. And I guess ultimately, it's probably impossible to answer, right? I'm guessing that you didn't find anything where you could say, yep, this is what could have been different.

You know, no, I did. I think now that I know what the cause of the accident was, so basically they got slow when they were in the low level route. Then they pushed the power up to catch back up to what was called minimum Mach, which gives them enough G available to have a system generated fly up away from the ground. But they got too fast and they came up against Mach 1 and the plane shuttered and they thought it was stalling. And we think they

We know they disconnected the autopilot, rolled over and pushed. They rolled wings level and pushed into the mountain. And the only thing I could ascertain was they mistook a high-speed buffet for a low-speed stall or a high-speed stall. But going back, I wish I had been able to demonstrate what that high-speed buffet felt like. It wasn't a required training event.

It was very hard on the airplane. There were actually only a few instructors that were authorized to do it, but I was one of them. So going back, do I wish I had spent some time doing that? Yeah. And might have made the difference, might have made no difference. I don't know. But yeah, I...

I second guess myself for that. Yeah, I think you raise an interesting point, which is that when people pass a checkride, they have passed the FAA's minimum standard for being a pilot. And certainly when we look at all the syllabi that we may use, there are lots of required things.

And yet there's opportunities for us as instructors to kind of push beyond that and kind of show people additional things that might not be on the syllabus. I think the other thing that you said that really struck me was not passing anyone for whatever reason, if they don't meet the standard. I mean, being an instructor or check airman examiner, it's really, in my mind, a solemn responsibility because if we don't do the hard thing, which is sometimes to fail people, then

well, they may end up killing themselves. Yeah, and everybody has a bad day. I've busted a checkride or two in my life. Back when that was possible, nowadays everybody threatens lawsuits and so your checkride gets turned into a

training sortie that they're going to put you back in and I don't care how they do it. But back when I was growing up, one day I forgot to turn on the pitot heat. I accidentally eye dented, which was right next to the pitot heat, same type switch and everything. And the pitot tubes froze up on the way down through some ice and looked over, turned it on, admitted my mistake. I wasn't even the one getting the checkride. My aircraft commander was getting the checkride. I was just lowly co-pilot with the evaluator in the seat.

Pinch me, give me an unsat for the ride. And I caught the mistake and I fixed it. But hey, man, you missed a checklist item. You didn't throw the switch unsat. Right. Guess what? I never, ever, ever forgot to do after that. Look down, make sure I had the right damn switch. So was that effective? Yes. Did it put a black mark on my flying record? Yes. Did I recover from it? Yes.

So I think a lot of people take it as a personal affront. When someone says you didn't meet a standard, it's not.

It's their job. So, yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Yeah, I think we all come away better for that. I'm kind of reminded of someone locally who misfueled an aircraft of the wrong type of fuel on that plane crashed. Fortunately, everyone survived. And the owner of the FBO had brought it up to me, just said, you know that one of our guys misfueled them. And I said, oh, well, I kind of guessed that. But no, I didn't know that. He said, yeah, yeah.

And he's still working for me. People said, you should have fired him. And I said, no, he'll never make that mistake again. Amen. I knew a guy, I won't tell you his name because he's probably still flying, but George was his first name. And just that same time after the B-1 accident there, this is probably a year later, and he comes down and almost ladens gear up. Tower tells him to go around. He goes around.

He was a marginal aircraft commander. He was the kind of guy they weren't ready to upgrade to instructor, even though he had the hours. And he wasn't one of the golden boys, but he was safe. I said, well, that's it. That's it for George, man. We had our meeting and

We're pulling him out. We're going to have to give him a job doing something else, but we can't have him flying these airplanes anymore. And I remember saying, I don't know who's going to land gear up next, but I know who's not. George is going to be the guy that has his dead man's check down so tight. And maybe my argument carried the day, but for whatever reason, he kept flying. So we live in a, what can be an unforgiving hobby or industry, but

in terms of it being lethal if we make mistakes. But when we survive them, the best thing we can do is own it and talk to other people about it and explain to them how it happened. Be interested to know why that kid put the wrong fuel in that airplane. Was it marked like the right fuel? Was he not trained well enough? Did somebody tell him

to put a different kind of fuel in. I mean, we can learn so much from looking at those near messes. You made a really interesting assumption, which I have to tell you the real story. This actually was an old person who'd been doing it for many years. It wasn't a kid. So this kind of goes back to what we talked about, you know, experience. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so this has been an amazing conversation on air. I think people have learned a lot from it. Where do people, Tony, go to find more about you and your work?

So there's a lot of places. And thanks again for asking. What I think is my favorite series of newsletters on LinkedIn, it's called Professionalism and Workmanship. You can find it on LinkedIn, either through me or just look for Professionalism and Workmanship. It'll come up.

Gosh, there's 10 or 15 really deep thought pieces there. I have a podcast too. It's called Only Human with Dr. Tony Kern. We're on episode 75 today. You can find it on any of your podcast platforms. We typically are talking about how to get better where you are with the resources at hand.

A lot of aviation stories, but it's for more than just aviators. It's for humans who want to get better. Obviously, all my books, you can jump online. My most recent one, nonfiction book, is called Armored Knight. And it's really a book about bringing mental health into focus with regards to high-risk activities, resolve resiliency, overcoming life's challenges. That's only been out for a couple of months and is doing pretty well.

And then for those of you that want to know how a funny mind works when he's not flying anymore, I write fiction novels under the pseudonym Buck Miles, M-Y-L-E-S. And I've got a couple of thrillers out there.

under that. And I've just recently gone under contract to write a series of children's books with human factors, backgrounds, and lessons in them. So that's kind of how I stay busy when I'm not feeding the horses or riding them. Well, have so much fun on the horses and all the other things you do. Thanks so much for joining us here today. Max, thank you. I appreciate it. And maybe someday we can have you over on Only Human, talk a little bit more. Yep. Love to do that. All

And my thanks to Dr. Tony Kern for joining us here today. You can reach him through his company's website at convergentperformance.com.

And just a reminder that I love hearing from you and I read many of your emails on the show. If you'd like to send me a message, just go out to aviationnewstalk.com, click on contact at the top of the page. That's absolutely the best way to send me a message. And of course, I also want to thank everyone who supports the show in one of the following ways. We love it when you join the club and sign up at aviationnewstalk.com support.

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