Moments after take-off on January 13, 1982, an Air Florida plane smashed into Washington DC’s 14th Street bridge, killing 78 passengers, motorists and crew members.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, one of the factors that likely contributed to this crash was ice covering critical engine probes, giving the pilots a false reading of the thrust needed for takeoff. The recording from the cockpit reveals that when the copilot read “anti-ice” on the preflight checklist, the pilot answered “off.” Neither seemed to notice that in the 20 degree snowy weather of Washington DC that day, the anti-ice mechanism that prevents the icing of critical gauges in the engine needed to be on.

Both pilot and co-pilot were apparently on “automatic pilot” themselves when they went through that checklist. Rather than really thinking about the checklist items, they checked them off by rote.

One of the Big Insights of neuroscience today is just how much of our “thinking” does, in fact, become rote. We think hard when we are first learning to drive a car. But years later we may drive home from work with almost no memory of doing so because during the trip we thought about the presentation we needed to give the next day or the new project we had been assigned. What once required our conscious attention has become automatic. As neuroscientist Timothy Wilson writes in his book, Strangers to Ourselves, “The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jumbo jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot,” (p. 6).

So should we try to eliminate this automatic neural processing whenever possible? The problem with this solution is not only that it’s impossible to do (we couldn’t function at all if we had to consciously think about every action we perform, like walking across the room or brushing our teeth), but that it’s not even always desirable – because sometimes our autopilot does a better and faster job of analyzing a situation than our conscious minds can do.

One of the most dramatic examples of this is recounted in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink. Gladwell describes an incident in which Cleveland fire fighters entered the front door of a house to shoot water into the kitchen where they believed the fire to be. They continued to try to douse the flames but the fire didn’t abate. Suddenly their lieutenant yelled “There’s something wrong. Get out, now!” (p. 122). The firefighters retreated, and seconds later the living room floor they had been standing on collapsed.

The lieutenant initially attributed his premonition that they were in danger to ESP. But when he was urged to try to remember what might have alerted him to a problem, the lieutenant recalled that he was surprised at how hot the fire was, how quiet it was. In retrospect, he realized that the living room was so hot and the fire was so quiet because the fire was in the basement, just below the living room floor. But at the time the lieutenant was not consciously thinking about these factors and weighing them. It appears rather than his brain, below the level of his conscious awareness, noticed these anomalies and then alerted him of danger.

It seems to me that the Big Challenge of the Big Insight about how much of our thinking is relegated to autopilot is figuring out what would tell us to move out of automatic pilot and back into conscious awareness when that’s needed. It’s clear that autopilot is not necessarily bad. In both the Florida Airline crash and the Cleveland fire the decision-makers were on autopilot. In one situation it saved lives; in the other it was fatal.

It turns out that there was another crucial factor in the crash of the Air Florida plane. The pilot ignored a critical warning sign. Though it’s not clear exactly what he was referring to, the cockpit tape shows that his co-pilot said “God, look at that thing,” apparently noticing something off in the engine instrument readings or throttle position. But even as the co-pilot added, “That doesn’t seem right, does it?” and repeated this comment, the pilot ignored him and the plane continued down that slushy runway.

The lesson of this incident is that often we do notice small anomalies, things that don’t quite fit, that could alert us when it’s important to shift out of autopilot and instead stop and think, but we choose to ignore them. As critical thinking researchers Patricia King and Karen Kitchener note, it’s as if we glimpse something out of the corner of our eye. We notice something but we don’t really take it in. Instead, like the pilot who ignored his co-pilot’s comment, we dismiss it.

What we need, it seems, is to develop the habit of slowing down and paying attention to those little red flags flying in our peripheral vision. What would happen if we were aware of that fleeting sense of uneasiness — and had trained ourselves to pay more attention to it, to think about it a little more? Imagine that you are the CEO of a company, and you notice just the barest hesitancy when you ask one of your staff what they think of the new proposed product line. Or you hear a rumor that others in your industry are becoming concerned about a new source of competition. What would happen if, instead of dismissing these signals as inconsequential, you slowed down and paid some attention to them?

The same idea applies to our personal lives. What would happen if we didn’t automatically shut our minds to an observation a friend makes about our child? Or if we didn’t distract ourselves when a disconcerting possibility about our new romance occurs to us? What if we took a little time to consider these red flags before deciding whether to dismiss them or investigate further?

The disasters that we avert will probably never be as consequential as the loss of 78 lives. But if we developed our sensitivity to those nuances and feelings that might warn us that something is amiss, we might avoid some of the blind spots that can wreak havoc in our professional and personal lives.

Source: A Crash’s Improbable Impact

’82 Air Florida Tragedy Led To Broad Safety Reforms

By Del Quentin Wilber

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, January 12, 2007; Page A01