I’m working on contract at a VC funded startup in Central London, and realise I haven’t posted here for some time. I’m still reading relentlessly on the train journeys in and out, but not found the time to pen comments about things that pique my interest for several weeks.

One comment I can relate to was on Sylvia Spruck Wrigleys’ “Fear of Landing” blog, which describes the events leading up to air accidents, or in the case of this week, to a close call. This related to a 757 diverted from Newcastle to Manchester – and landing with virtually no fuel left.

The piece I relate to is what happens when mixed signals were arriving at a rate where both pilots on the flight deck got insanely busy:

“He had too many tasks at the same time; the human response to this is to limit the amount of processing and over-focus (or fixate) on a single task. He lost all overview of the situation and of his role (as the captain) of pilot monitoring”.

I had that just over a week back, but one late night and working over the weekend got things back on course. Until then, I did find myself ignoring lots of signals while I obsessed over finding one root cause. Now I understand why.

Cited post at http://fearoflanding.com/accidents/overloaded-overspeed-and-out-of-fuel/