71–80 of 317 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of safety value in not having to be retrained, too.
It's sort of key when taking that approach to actually succeed in not requiring the retraining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average does not have the same meaning in the context of this link and yours. We are not talking about physical measurements here.
Why doesn’t the same principle apply? One pilot is very good at one skill, another very good at some other skill. There exists no mean pilot that is fairly good at both, so designing or testing for that is a bad idea. Replace body dimensions with skill sets and it’s the same issue.
Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287 ) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-inv... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889 )
Also, the outcome of the flaw of averages was to make various parts of the plane adjustable. In the case of an air emergency, your response time is not adjustable, you either solve it or you die. The NTSB’s suggestion is to understand how normal people react to ensure both ergonomics and training are adequate.
In any case, recommending that testing be done with people less knowledgeable than the experts, who don’t instantly know the right answers, can likely only result in better outcomes, not worse.
What about below average pilots? If half of them are still going to crash, shouldn't the true idiots in the industry be the test dummies? No pun intended.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average does not have the same meaning in the context of this link and yours. We are not talking about physical measurements here.
Why doesn’t the same principle apply? One pilot is very good at one skill, another very good at some other skill. There exists no mean pilot that is fairly good at both, so designing or testing for that is a bad idea. Replace body dimensions with skill sets and it’s the same issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robert Sheckley has a short story called The Minimum Man, which is about precisely this. An unlucky, clumsy, error-prone schlub who gets hired by basically-NASA for testing purposes. Turns out, when he's placed in a life-or-death situation, he finds some focus and skill, and is no longer the minimum man. So they have some ways to counter that tendency....
That correlates with something interesting I learnt about leadership a while back - evidence shows that it's very hard to predict ahead of time whether someone will be a good leader from one context to another, with predicted good leaders often underperforming, and vice versa (might be a little out of date now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why doesn’t the same principle apply? One pilot is very good at one skill, another very good at some other skill. There exists no mean pilot that is fairly good at both, so designing or testing for that is a bad idea. Replace body dimensions with skill sets and it’s the same issue.
You can train a skill and improve on it. You can't train your head shape or arm length nearly as much. The brain is more malleable than some of the other body parts.
The irony here is that when I wrote "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User" I'd specifically excluded cases such as commercial aviation, where a minimum qualifying standard can be used. By that logic, aircraft certification should be based on the minimum qualifying pilot. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...