Do You Regret Silence or Speech?

Today I am looking for an inspirational poster to give to someone so he can see it while he works out. I know he doesn't want to be a bulgingly muscled bodybuilder, and he's not into any particular sports, so I was looking for something generally inspirational, depicting the healthy human form. I liked this one with the Olympic rings over a muscled golden man wearing a crown of laurels and the chariot. Then I looked closer and realized that it was for the Berlin Olympics in 1936, and decided that Aryan eugenics wasn't what he wanted to have in mind while striving for the ideal.

It's almost impossible to take typical motivational posters  non-ironically after seeing the parodies, but I looked at that category anyway. Then I saw this one. If you can't see the image at right, the quotation is: I often regret that I have spoken; Never that I have been silent. It made me do a double take. Just how chatty was this Publilus Syrus?

I take his point. Sure there are times that it is better to be silent than to speak. By talking too much you might cause others to think/realize that you don't know what you are talking about. You might interrupt someone who would otherwise have given you wisdom. You might embarrass someone by telling them something they could otherwise have been happily oblivious to. You could let slip confidential personal, competitive or military information. You might be talking about your cabin when you should be focusing on maintaining airspeed in icing while intercepting the localizer.

But if Publilius Syrus (Wikipedia and Internet consensus favour that spelling) regrets nothing he has neglected to say, then does he never think of what he could have done? I'm thinking of the first officer who didn't say, "Go around!" in Little Rock, or at least didn't say it in a voice loud enough to be picked up by the cockpit voice recorder, and of all the pilots who ever died because they saw something that wasn't quite right but assumed that the flying pilot had it under control, or that it would be safer for them and the cockpit atmosphere to remain silent than to nitpick a small discrepancy. I guess Publilus Syrus never knew anyone who committed suicide because he thought no one cared about him. Maybe Syrus was so irritating that he didn't have any friends, so none of them ever died leaving him wishing he had told them something. And if he followed his own wisdom, he never spoke out against injustice against others, even though he himself was a former slave.

Ironically it was Syrus' smart mouth that got him out of slavery. Had he remained a silent slave, his master wouldn't have been so impressed by his wisdom and entertainment value as to free him. It appears that Syrus became a professional maxim writer. I guess that's the equivalent of someone who makes a living from a cafepress store today. He was pretty good at his job, considering the number of sayings attributed to him that are still in use today, such as "a rolling stone gathers no moss."

I have no quarrel with "It is a bad plan that admits of no modification," (although if that plan is a published instrument approach, ad hoc modification is a very bad plan indeed).  "If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest," is true, but I prefer the way Lau-Tzu put it. Syrus strikes both sides of the coin with the complementary, "Nothing can be done at once hastily and prudently," and "While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity." That way whatever you choose to do, you have a quotation to back you up. One of his sayings, "It is a good thing to learn caution from the misfortunes of others," is part of the slogan of the Aviation Safety Newsletter, from which I keep highlighting things I mean to blog about and then not doing so.

According to Wikipedia, he also worked as a mime. I must admit that as a reflection on a performance as a mime, those words are spot on. But I doubt he was so bad a mime that he kept forgetting not to talk.   Another of his sayings, "Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage," I think is a clearer expression of the same sentiment, but I still say speak out. If you are a sage, then someone can learn something from you. And if you aren't, someone else will likely speak out and help ameliorate your foolishness. And I suppose there are a dozen readers out there who silently think I'm a fool and should regard Syrus' advice.

And in other news, apparently some Indian pilots don't know how to fly. Indian reporters are having trouble reporting, too. Raw data flying is several steps removed from just turning off the autopilot, and if the pilots can't fly raw data in cruise, the chief pilot should be doing a lot more than sending circulars.

When Check Pilots Get Bored

Some weird aviation stories have been coming out of India lately. Six years ago if you had a commercial licence and the right to work in India, you had a jet job. Airlines were expanding so quickly that just maybe not everyone got the training or screening they might have in other times.

The first story I see is of a check pilot surreptitiously disabling the aircraft in which he was riding, in order to see what the pilot would do. The check pilot is an observer, a passenger in the aircraft. He shouldn't be so much as turning on a light switch, let alone pulling important circuit breakers, literally behind the pilot's back.

So the first officer is flying the airplane when all of a sudden the autopilot cuts out--I assume Boeing is clever enough to have designed the autopilot such that the disconnect warble is on a different circuit breaker and is still audible, but that I don't know for sure. At the same time, the flight director disappears, so the pilots has to control the airplane himself and decide where it should go. The pilots do notice the problem and the commander takes control, but with an excessive sink rate. The aircraft was recovered and landed without damage.

Oddly to me, the analysis in the newspaper piece appears to claim that the lacl of an EGPWS put the airplane in this situation. I've watched numerous people land 737s by hand, and the only time I heard the GPWS alert was when the runway was in a steep valley and the airplane had to pass over a cliff to remain on the approach path. The pilots didn't react to the warning except to silence it, because they were in control of the airplane and were expecting that warning on that approach. Perhaps in the Jet Airways case a functional EGPWS would have pointed out the problem with the approach a little sooner, but according to the article they were on the ILS. Surely the fly up indication on the integrated HSI would have been given that information.

It's true that ICAO standards call for such aircraft to have a functioning EGPWS, and that they probably would have prevented some accidents, but when the ILS is working properly, staying on slope will cover that territory for you.

I suppose stupid check pilot stunts follow from flight instructor practices in much simpler aircraft. An instructor, in visual conditions, might turn off the master, pull the mixture or shut off the fuel to one engine, or remove a light bulb from a gear position indicator. It's good to verify that a student's reaction is the same as that rehearsed when the failure is simulated or simply described. I remember an instructor of mine who shut off the fuel to one engine in cruise while I was learning. When the engine faltered I ran a quick cause check, and discovered the fuel valve position. I immediately corrected it, and the engine restarted--I'm not sure it had entirely stopped--so I returned to normal flight. The flight instructor was going "but ... no... wait ..."

"What?" I asked, wondering what I had missed. "The fuel valve was switched off." It honestly didn't occur to me until that moment that I was supposed to leave it off and feather the propeller as if I didn't know what had caused it. (I've done that sort of thing more than once. If an instructor fakes a failure by a means other than briefed, I treat the fake, not the failure).

I've also been with an instructor in an airplane with electrically operated landing gear who routinely pulled the circuit breaker after the gear was confirmed down, to guard against accidental retraction. I didn't really like it, but I can see the argument for it. I know of a case in that same type where there was a n accident because a student raised the gear on the runway. And I know of another where there was a problem getting the gear down because the gear CB had been routinely pulled and wouldn't stay set. Circuit breakers are not switches.

Here's a digest article describing other Indian airline mishaps lately. I hope it is just a combination of statistical anomaly and sudden focus of the national news media on everything aviation related, rather than a real symptom of problems. Right after I wrote my next sentence as "the same goes for the number of times American Airlines has been in the news lately," I read Captain Dave's blog on the Jamaica runway overrun. There's so much that can go wrong in that moment in the dark, there is not room for stupid pilot tricks. As Dave says, Fate is out hunting you. No need to go looking for it.