packbat | commercial aviation industry advice (Weirder Earth repost)

Caveat: we are not pilots, we have never been pilots, we have other priorities. This whole thread was us being fans of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot".

I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"

I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.

Other fun commercial aviation safety facts:

An additional factor with fatigue is time of day. In particular, operating during the window of circadian low - which is 3-5 a.m. for most people, but again, medical history - will also increase the risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.
Checklists are great, because they ensure that you don't forget steps under stress.
On a related note: stress, startle, sudden increase of workload, perceived time pressure ... all of these can cause severe tunnel vision, degraded judgment, or even partial incapacitation. Preparation can help with this - for example, pilots will touch-drill what they need to do in the case of an engine failure after takeoff, so that if this very rare event happens, their hands know exactly where to go.
Speaking of time pressure: if you can, ask yourself how much time you have. You might feel like you have to act immediately, when in fact you have ten seconds, thirty seconds, five minutes, two days ... you have some time to think, consult others, et cetera.
Alarm fatigue is a real thing. Our ADHD likes alerts, but our ADHD also likes to say, "okay, having two alerts all the time is normal now", so they're very much a double-edged sword. We're still navigating how to deal with that - it's a challenging problem.
Situational awareness is super useful. For our desktop, updates are all manual - in part because we're on Linux, but also in part because if something breaks right after an update, we know it broke right after an update because we just ran the update ourselves.
Having defined roles is a great way to ensure that stuff doesn't get missed or forgotten. This is obviously important when, for example, you need somebody to be actually flying the plane, but it also applies to things like "okay, who's sending this DM?"

We're missing so many lessons, y'all, but like ... yeah. There's a lot of interesting stuff to apply outside aviation, from aviation.

Three last aviation-inspired thoughts:

Mistakes will always happen. Pretty much every pilot in any of these incidents has thousands, sometimes many thousands, of hours of flying experience. When you make a mistake, you are in quite august company. You should never be one mistake from disaster.
An accident is never caused by one thing. Mentour Pilot talks a lot about Dr. Reason's Swiss Cheese Model, and that's because multiple problems need to line up - a target altitude in a wind escape procedure, high gusty and variable winds, an unusually narrow distance between runways, a failure to account for every scenario in a safety analysis - for a serious incident to happen.
And because of this, notice when something bad almost happened. In the example with the parallel runways, there was no collision - both aircraft warned the pilots that they were getting close together and the pilots steered apart - but the industry gave it a deep analysis anyway. You can learn from an almost the same as from an actual.

Anyway, now we're going to fix the "it's totally normal to have two to-do list alerts all the time" problem. The dentist one we can do on Thursday, so we'll hide it until Thursday, and the cmus one we can do now.

*opens the man page*