It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight 173, for aviation experts to pay attention to something called Crew Resource Management. This is a set of procedures first conceived by Nasa with the aim of minimising human error in flight.
UA173 — where the pilots had spent so long fixated with a dodgy landing wheel that they failed to notice they’d run out of fuel — was one of a growing number of incidents in which disaster arose from failures in crew interaction. As with the Tenerife airport disaster and the Air Florida crash in 1982, there was no shortage of experience on the flight deck. The root cause lay not in the behaviour of the individuals but in the interplay between them.
Cockpit voice recorders revealed that, before some catastrophic decision had been made, a junior member of the crew had often voiced sensible reservations but did so diffidently in deference to his superior.
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